But also I think people forget: this is not cut and dried. This is not simple. This is not just "these companies are evil and should be stopped". It is: there is a market pressure to do these things. "I enjoy the product and use it a lot" and "I am addicted" is blurry and market pressure is not going to recognize that limit because it does not care about human suffering unless that suffering meaningfully impacts the bottom line.
If these companies hit regulations that effectively cap their advertising revenue per user (i.e. the "addictiveness"), they are dead. That may be totally fine, and I'm sure majority of people would rejoice hearing this. But remember: advertising dollars are earned, especially at tech company scale, by the effectiveness of the targeting to get get more $ / DAU since DAU cannot grow beyond the Earth's population and that is the scale that these companies have already achieved.
If you cap advertising dollars, you cap advertising effectiveness. You cap the ability for small companies to connect quickly with prospective customers without being locked out because they have to spend too much to find them. Yes you also cap scammers and other nefarious actors too, but thats arguably a different issue. The impact of reducing advertising effectiveness is disproportionately concentrated on small business where cheap and effective advertising is so important.
My hope is that there is a way to do both and I don't have to be constantly horrified when I look at my screen time hours.
Aside from a 6 month contracting stint, I’ve never worked on data related to humans, only machines. No payment data, no behavioral data, no website data. The closest I’ve come is human-provided labels.
I’ve probably made only 50% of my total earning potential compared to Data Scientists / ML Engineers who work in the advertising and retail spaces (Google, Meta, Amazon), but at least I can look my children in the eyes and tell them that I didn’t sell my soul for a dollar.
> My hope is that there is a way to do both and I don't have to be constantly horrified when I look at my screen time hours.
Same, but without regulations there exists no incentive for any corporation to care about whether you’re addicted to your screen. And engagement, positive or negative, only makes them richer.
They are evil tho, on top of there being market pressure. Their executives are incredibly comfortable with causing large scale harm, even when they are NOT forced at all.
> If you cap advertising dollars, you cap advertising effectiveness.
And that is OK. Not just ok, but actually good. Their effectivity and their evilness are closely related. Their effectivity and harm they cause are essentially the same thing.
> The impact of reducing advertising effectiveness is disproportionately concentrated on small business where cheap and effective advertising is so important.
Nice try, but no. Who benefited the most were the bad actors, conspiracy theories, weight loss programs specifically marketted to teens who posted about being insecured about their issues.
Marketing is just an arms race. It is ok to limit how manipulative and harmful it is and force companies to compete on something else.
I agree with this, and I think you are right about a lot of this being really just not market-relevant factors that are driving a lot of the downsides here. All of these should be regulated, and even the ones where regulating will have impact to markets and consumers.
And I agree -- effective advertising targeting necessitates "reward hacking" in that I can get you to buy something if I prey on your insecurities or otherwise manipulate you in a way that goes beyond "oh I know what watwut would love as a birthday gift".
But you really should be aware that effective advertising really does disproportionately benefit smaller businesses and this is generally a Good Thing. Really my only point here is that there is a baby in this bathwater and we should be careful.
Cope, specifically, because we don't want to accept the fact that this kind of stuff is addictive on its own, that we are our own worst enemy; bot armies, evil corpos, and engagement algorithms don't help but they're not required. (That is, between your two theories, I think both contribute but it's more so the latter.)
I'm a pretty easily distracted person. I don't use social media at all. Yet I've been "addicted" on some level to this site, to news sites, to browsing Wikipedia, to traditional forums. So have plenty of others.
People don't want to face the fact that humans just really like having a giant source of stuff to entertain ourselves with, and are easily drawn into online arguments. Getting rid of the corporations and such would probably make a better Internet, sure, but it's not going to cure everyone's addiction.
In principle they're comparable. In the real world, no high school kids are going to harm themselves over an argument about Mint versus Ubuntu on a 100,000 subscriber ATmosphere site. It's like comparing the Dominican cigar shop selling hand rolled cigars with Philip Morris. Unedifying.
Teenagers have been bullying each other for literal millennia. Kids got bullied on IRC and chatrooms; they get bullied today on Roblox, on SMS group chats. None of these have engagement algorithms.
Again, the corporations sure aren't helping, but we need to confront the fact that a large chunk of this is human nature. I'd like a better Internet landscape but switching from Facebook to Mastodon or whatever, while a good step, isn't going to cure all ills. A lot of people in these threads act like every Internet toxicity symptom ever arose because of evil corporations.
Facebook targetted teens who posted self deprecating comments for beauty and weight loss products ads.
It was no random that facebook became a hotbed for conspiracy theories, misinformation and lies. That part is result of their own conscious choices. They made it that way, because they wanted it to be that way.
Facebook moderation favored pro-genocide side of the politics in maynmar. Its own decisions made it instrumental to the events. The issues were solvable and visible, Facebook was the primary gatekeeper there due to contracts it had, but Facebook refused to do anything even after it was crear what went on.