I bet if we didn't tolerate advertising and were instead optimising for what the user wanted we'd come up with something much more palatable.

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rkomorn 2 days ago | parent [-]

A lot of this is driven by the user's behavior, not just advertising, though.

"The algorithm" is going to give you more of what you engage with, and when it comes to sponsored content, it's going to give you the sponsored content you're most likely to engage with too.

I'd argue that, while advertising has probably increased the number of people posting stuff online explicitly designed to try and generate revenue for themselves, that type of content's been around since much earlier.

Heck, look at Reddit or 4chan: they're not sharing revenue with users and I'd say they're at least not without their own content problems.

I'm not sure there's a convincing gap between what users "want" and what they actually engage with organically.

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__MatrixMan__ 2 days ago | parent [-]

Reddit and 4chan both get their money from advertisers though, so they have an incentive to try to boost engagement above whatever level might be natural for their userbase.

Social interaction is integrated with our brain chemistry at a very fundamental level. It's a situation we've been adapting to for a million years. We have evolved systems for telling us when its time to disengage, and anybody who gets their revenue from advertising has an incentive to interfere with those systems.

The downsides of social media: the radicalization, the disinformation, the echo chambers... These problems are ancient and humans are equipped to deal with them to a certain degree. What's insidious about ad-based social media is that the profit motive has driven the platforms to find ways to anesthetize the parts of us that would interfere with their business model, and it just so happens that those are the same parts that we've been relying on to address these evils back when "social media" was shouting into an intersection from a soap box.

	▲	rkomorn 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		But neither Reddit nor 4chan really have the feed optimization that you'd find on Meta properties, YouTube, or TikTok. I'm certainly not going to disagree with the notion that ad-based revenue adds a negative tilt to all this, but I think any platforms that tries to give users what they want will end up in a similar place regardless of the revenue model. The "best" compromise is to give people what they ask for (eg: you manually select interests and nothing suggests you other content), but to me, that's only the same system on a slower path: better but still broken. But anyway, I think we broadly are in agreement.