When in despair over your social media platform, take comfort because digital domination is built on sand.

It just takes one good competitor like TikTok or one big scandal like a live stream mass shooting or one big privacy debacle like Cambridge Analytica and it can tip.

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

This week, the life cycle of internet platforms from electrifying birth to spiraling decrepitude or as you'll hear bleep in poopification.

I think the example that everyone can relate to here is Twitter. Twitter has gone from indispensable to completely dispensable for larger and larger groups of people very quickly.

And so when that happens, when the platform tips over and becomes a useless pilot, which is the end of notification, then it starts to thrash.

And in thrashing, there's people power. It's all coming up after this.

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

We have spent hours dissecting the anatomy of the internet, chronicling concerns about privacy, the appeal of connection, our willful, woeful walled gardens, and the fungal attempts to regulate any of it at all.

But we hadn't been clued into the systemic nature of the increasing crappiness of being on. Let's call it big digital. Until now.

The competition watchdog has opened a formal probe into Amazon and Google over concerns that they have not been doing enough to combat fake reviews on their sites.

Two San Diego women are suing Amazon in a proposed class action lawsuit claiming Amazon Prime members who pay $139 a year for membership have been misled for years regarding shipping times.

This morning, right out of the EU and our trust regulators as expected, charging Alphabet's Google of abusive practices in its digital advertising business, the regular saying that Google favors its own online display advertising technology services against those of its rival.

The tech industry, changing the world as it does in mysterious ways, is bound to spark editorial tongue-clucking and laments about how it's just not the way it used to be.

This is different. Those clockers are right.

And Corey Doctoro, journalist, activist and the author of many books, most recently read Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller, has tracked this phenomenon for a long while and knows why.

He'll be our guide exploring and explaining the process whereby going online grows ever less rewarding and ever more repellent.

But to start things off, this trend should have a name. Luckily, Doctoro has one. He calls it in notification. Yeah, it's absolutely accurate and totally not allowed on broadcast radio.

In notification is the death cycle of platforms and platforms are the native form of the internet.

It means you have these companies that are really neither disciplined by regulation nor by competition and who can kind of change the rules as they go.

Now get into the nitty gritty of the process, which you manage to compress into three distinct steps.

Step one, first the company is good to its users. So think about Amazon. When Amazon started, it had a lot of shareholder capital and was able to operate a loss.

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