The author hits on exactly what’s happening with the comparison to carcinisation: crustacean evolution converges to a crab like form because that’s the optimization for the environmental stresses.
As tiramichu said in their comment, digital platforms are converging to the same form because they’re optimizing for the same metric. But the reason they’re all optimizing that metric is because their monetization is advertising.
In the golden days of digital platforms, i.e. the 2010s, everything was venture capital funded. A quality product was the first goal, and monetization would come “eventually.” All of the platforms operated this way. Advertising was discussed as one potential monetization, but others were on the table, too, like the “freemium” model that seemed to work well for Google: provide a basic tier for free that was great in its own right, and then have premium features that power users had to pay for. No one had detailed data for what worked and what didn’t, and how well each model works for a given market, because everything was so new. There were a few one-off success stories, many wild failures from the dotcom crash, but no clear paths to reliable, successful revenue streams.
Lots of products now do operate with the freemium model, but more and more platforms had moved and are still moving to advertising ultimately because of the venture capital firms that initially funded them have strong control over them and have more long term interest in money than a good product. The data is now out there that the advertising model makes so, so much more money than a freemium model ever could in basically any market. So VCs want advertising, so everything is TikTok.
The thing is it’s been like that forever. Good products made by small- to medium-sized businesses have always attracted buyouts where the new owner basically converts the good reputation of the original into money through cutting corners, laying off critical workers, and other strategies that slowly (or quickly) make the product worse. Eventually the formerly good product gets bad enough there’s space in the market for an entrepreneur to introduce a new good product, and the cycle repeats.
I think what’s different now is, since this has gone on unabated for 70+ years, economic inequality means the people with good ideas for products can’t afford to become entrepreneurs anymore. The market openings are there, but the people that made everything so bad now have all the money. So the cycle is broken not by good products staying good, but by bad products having no replacements.