#twiddle — Public Fediverse posts

But tech is different, because digital is *flexible* in a way analog can't be. Tech companies can "#twiddle" the back-ends of their #clouds to change the rules of the business from moment to moment, in a high-speed shell-game that can make it impossible to know what kind of deal you're getting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

To make things worse, *users* are *banned* from twiddling. The thicket of rules we call #IP ensure that twiddling is only done against users, never *for* them.

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Digital enshittifiers have lots of sliders and knobs they can endlessly #twiddle, changing the rules of the platform so fast that neither end-users nor business customers can develop stable strategies for wrestling value back to themselves. As with any shell game, it's the quickness of the hand that deceives the eye:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

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And centralized platforms are more nimble. The operators of centralized systems can add hundreds of knobs and sliders to their back end and #twiddle them at will. They act unilaterally, without having to convince other members of a federation to back their changes.

Centralized platforms claim that their most powerful benefit to users is extensive content moderation.

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