> I think OPs point is valid if the algorithm is really just giving humans more of what they want.
What makes people engaged and what people want are not the same thing by definition. If you want to state they are, you should say why you think it.
What makes people engaged and what people want are not the same thing by definition. If you want to state they are, you should say why you think it.
I agree that it's not, but long-term desires are not all that people have.
> many would argue
Maybe, maybe not, but I would disagree.
> that they're not freely choosing to succumb to addiction either.
"freely" is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence. And a discussion about that is philosophical. They're as free to make that decision as they are to make any other.
Personally I try to go out of my way to purchase books directly from the author, publisher, a book store with a local presence, and online retailers in that order.
I’ve mostly cut Barnes and Nobel out of my vendor list for this exact reason, their book shelves are full of products I have no interest in - walking into their store has such a high noise to signal ratio that, unless I place my order in advance for a specific product, I don’t bother walking in anymore. The books of value are buried on shelves drown out by heavily marketed pop culture noise; and that’s if I’m lucky, often I have to have it ordered and shipped to store to pick it up locally. They don’t meet my needs for content discovery so I don’t do business with them very often.
Those things are literally the result of human and automated research on how to make people read/share content. I wonder what is your definition of "forced".
They aren't forcing you to keep your eyes open and see the content on their sites
Your computer can open another web page. You can get off the seat.
Tired of seeing garbage clickbait articles? Block the sites which post that stuff.
Tired of conspiracy theories and gossipy articles? Block the sites and mute/unfollow those people.
Tired of experiencing the world in 140 character chunks? Get off Twitter.