> We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → [ Surveillance → Psychological Manipulation/Addiction → "Personalized" ] ads everywhere.

The incentives will be:

1. Get people psychologically dependent in any way possible.

2. Incentivize any "creators" that help with #1. Pose as "content neutral", while actually funding and pumping any content that creates "engagement" regardless of harm.

3. Collate as much information from external sources on each user as possible.

4. User every interaction with a user to improve information leverage being accumulated by #3.

5. Feed ads to users based on surveillance-informed predicted vulnerabilities, in order to maximize ad valuations. Special shout out to scams that work, because they work, they pay.

6. Once the user experience is thoroughly enshittified, start enshittifying the ad customer market by raising prices, minimizing the margins left for product and service advertisers.

7. Present company as evidence of US strength in tech, as apposed to a scaled up, centralized, multi-directed economic parasite.

TLDR: Surveillance leveraged ads are many times worse than just ads. With AI magnifying surveillance intake and leverage to unprecedented highs.

Privacy needs to start being treated like every other security risk. Because every vulnerability will be increasingly exploited, and exploited increasingly well.

As long as it is legal to scale up conflicts of interest, such as surveillance informed manipulation, paying for and pumping up harmful "creator" content, selling ads to scammers, harms will keep scaling up.

Sites should not have any safe harbor for content they pay for, and for content they are paid to deliver.

Sad but true.

You also forgot to elaborate on the later company life cycle where the MBAs take over and only serve themselves and the Wall Street.

Product and product development is a cost center that is cut away to bare minimum skeleton crew. Customers are an inconvenience and only exist for the company to extract maximum benefit from while offering the minimum.

Actual product support is killed, and instead user supported forums are promoted. Useful idiots do the work unpaid for a mere digital badge.

Any new product feature that actually gets developed is not for the users but for the company. Features that make it through are either more data extraction, ads, surveillance or a dark pattern to try to trick the user for more money.

You forget the step where the company and investors try their best to kill any competition that eats into the margins.

After they have their niche by the balls, they enshittify the product as much as the users are willing to tolerate and then some more.