> by your username I assume you are yourself one of the droids you're looking for lol.

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.

> This is not just "these companies are evil and should be stopped". It is: there is a market pressure to do these things.

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.

Yeah, this doesn't get brought up often enough. Honestly, while I don't necessarily disagree with it, I think a lot of the "social media is evil because it was engineered by psychologists to be addictive!" narrative is complete cope.

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.