landmark 1998 paper, "Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," in which they wrote, "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers
we knew this would be a problem before it actual became a problem. Is there anything anyone could have done to actually prevent this?, did we need more people to speak up in the early days. Was it really unprecedented and unforeseeable?
Searching Amazon doesn't produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon's "Most Favored Nation" requirement sellers means that they can't sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.
This reminds me of the airline that created a search site to compare all flights and prices, but got caught pushing their own flights even if they weren't the better deal
This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.
This is so annoying recently. The death of brick and mortar is real and they will be missed. This also gets me thinking of 'influencers' ranging from those with 100 followers to millions having amazon storefronts.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves
Right off the bat I think of vine being shut down because the platform did not want to/ didn't have the means to pay their top creators, and just a general lack of profitability due to the nature of the platform. They needed a way to profit (more), as well as having problems with their parent company.