Twitter used to represent the best of the internet. Under Elon Musk, it has become the home of AI-generated pornography and pay-to-play engagement farming, Cory Doctorow writes.

This is an extract from Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It by Cory Doctorow.

When Twitter started, its most obvious characteristic was its brevity. Users were limited to sending messages no longer than 140 characters, brief enough to fit into the short message service (SMS) system, the standard text-messaging system used by mobile phones around the world.

But for business customers — developers looking to integrate with Twitter — the length constraint for messages was secondary. The most interesting thing about Twitter was its API (or rather, that Twitter was an API).

Th

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