How to reform the attention economy business model of Big Tech | Hacker News Reader

How to reform the attention economy business model of Big Tech

technologyreview.com

42 pointsshrikant18 comments

It should be punitively taxed like any other societally harmful, addictive products: alcohol, cigarettes along with strict regulation regarding access to children.

Seriously what's up with boomers and moaaar taxes and regulation! Taxes and regulation just increase the entry barrier for competitors. Established businesses/monopolies love regulation...

Isn’t regulation just a response to what the market accepts but communities do not?

> If those individuals got together and agreed that maximizing shareholder profit was no longer the common aim, the digital infrastructure could be different.

The article refers to "those individuals" as FAANG CEO's.

This article's stance that we just need big tech to forgo profits for the good of the people seems outrageous to me. Yes I would love to see it happen but I know it would never happen. Even if twitter, for example, made their algorithmic feed less addictive then that would just leave an opening for a competitor to come take market share.

Even if our government somehow mandated that big tech cannot tune their algorithms to consume the max amount of attention (<- BTW I have no idea how that could be done) then how would it be regulated? Open source code? Government issued devices? Also what happens with non-US companies, like tik-tok, that dont have to follow this "be good" principle?

This is just another vice created by technology that must be resisted by people in order to have a happy and balanced life. Another good example is food. Today's food is so addictive processed that we must resist in order to be happy. These vices did not previously exist.

Not least because those executives are only in charge of those organisations because their shareholders appointed them, in the expectation that the CEO's would act in the shareholders' best interests [0]. Legally the CEO's cannot suddenly decide to go off and do something else [1].

So the article is a bit off-base. It's not the CEOs that we need to persuade to change tactic, but the shareholders. However, for a lot of institutional shareholders, they're tied to financial returns because they're managing funds full of other people's money with a legal obligation to maximise returns.

There are "ethical" funds that could do this. Maybe we should be talking about this instead? An ethical fund with the specific aim of being an activist shareholder in Big Tech organisations?

[0]You could make the case that this is in the shareholders' best interests, but I doubt a court would agree.

[1]I have a feeling Zuckerberg is still a majority shareholder in FB, so maybe he can.

In my mind the issue is payments. There is no reasonable way for me to pay a website a fraction of a cent for content, besides by viewing an ad. I'm hoping FedNow will help a bit with this in the US.

maybe when your favorite hyperinflation currency has a “stable” coin. Until then there is doge.

With Metamask browser extension, stablecoins and layer 2, not only do you not need to give away emails/passwords/credit cards / personal info, but you're also able to do micropayents.

Not sure how well it will work, we want things that grab our attention, that is why companies do that. If they don't, someone else will.

Grabbing more of our attention means more ads, more ads mean selling more goods, selling more goods means more carbon emissions, more carbon emissions mean continued climate change.

I think if we want to fight climate change we have to rethink our economies and also the business models in the technology sector.

You just described the goal of capitalism. This is nothing specific to tech companies.

The goal of capitalism is not to create more carbon emissions.

> selling more goods means more carbon emissions, more carbon emissions mean continued climate change.

Does it? There are other energy sources.

It does mean increasing entropy, which would be more efficient without without carbon based fuels, but that is the nature of the universe and what life does, so not sure we should be opposed to it: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoaVOjvkzQtyZF-2VpJrx...

> I think if we want to fight climate change we have to rethink our economies and also the business models in the technology sector.

Or rethink our energy sources.

Upvoted because it contains some interesting commentary, althought the "how to" part of the title is left vague, almost formless.

We shall up our game in ad blocking. Whenever I installed Firefox + ublock to some friends' laptops they were always so happy. I believe the person behind the browser shall have a choice or at least a more active role in determining what ads they are exposed to (if any). I find the advertisement industry so intrusive (both online and brick&mortar style) that I would e.g. vote for an outright ban of billboards and physical mail ads.

Local anecdote: the new-ish mayor here in my city in France was in the news today after announcing a plan to ban much outdoor advertising and reduce the rest to far smaller panels. [0] It’s a controversial idea for a couple of reasons including that some apartment buildings have long used advertising ‘wrap arounds’ to hide major building-wide renovation projects and, in doing so, subsidise the cost of those renovations. As well, the city has a wonderful bike share scheme that has been paid for by giving away the rights to the external advertising panels that the city controls to a billboard/outdoor ad company. The bikes are used by thousands every day and it is affordable only because of the payment in kind that the outdoor ads represent; I’m not sure what happens to that scheme when the outdoor ad space is reduced and the bike scheme operator cries contract law.

On the other side of the coin, there is an active group of activists in the city that will paper over outdoor billboards and electronic signs with their slogan ’Stop Pub’ (stop advertising) and they seem to have some support, too. The mayor certainly seems sympathetic to their cause, if not all of their methods.

0: https://www.lyonmag.com/article/112603/ce-que-les-ecologiste...

i agree with large swaths of the initial diatribe, but lost interest when i was 30% through the article (based on scrollbar position) with nary a solution yet proposed. Somewhat ironically, this article would benefit from extensive editing to be a 5 minute read.

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