Strawman, no one said anything about shutting down the company.

Even without the government telling them, they shouldn't be damaging children.

The market is telling them they need to make number go up.

Once all the growth and new ideas were consumed, the only ways to make number go up, is to extract more profits.

This means doing everything within the law, and as safely as they can within the grey area, to ensure they hit those numbers.

They had an existential risk when TikTok showed up, and the design idea behind TikTok was even more addictive and less community oriented than Meta.

Do note: I am not giving Meta a pass. Just ensuring the system of incentives that got us here is interrogated and a better way forward is thought of.

▲

nyxtom a day ago | parent [-]

Precisely, this is the point. There is systemic misalignment that encourages companies to behave this way.

▲

vrganj a day ago | parent [-]

I know this is not a popular viewpoint around here, but as a socialist, let me ask you this question: have we considered that the market itself might be the problem? That maybe the incentives it creates are toxic for humanity?

▲

nyxtom a day ago | parent | next [-]

As a moderate, I tend to think things even out eventually - though it is usually what appears to be generational shifts in behavior that causes markets to adapt. It's costly (whole generations get f'd physically/mentally/financially), but the next generation (maybe?) pushes for something different idk

▲

vrganj a day ago | parent [-]

I appreciate the perspective and I can see the logic, thank you for explaining your position.

That being said, the timescale of change in that proposed mechanism seems too slow to me given the extreme urgency I see in the climate crisis. Do you see a way out of it without systemic change? Do you not share the same assessment of urgency?

	▲	nyxtom a day ago \| parent [-]
		I'd rather not entire generations get the brunt of a entire class of problems (generations prior had significant health consequences). The best thing a society can do it seems is educate ourselves on what is damaging. When social media first came out no one was talking about what's happening now. Hard to see that very early on before it became a significant problem then aligned with corporate incentives.

▲

intended 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The lay understanding of markets is wrong.

The zeroth law of economics is that wants are infinite and resources limited. Economics is the study of how subjective wants can be best fulfilled given the constraints of reality.

Meaning that markets are always designed to achieve certain outcomes, and the idea of unregulated markets that work magically is fiction.

This is why you have (had) people like Lina Khan who identified how Amazon could be anticompetitive, even if kept prices low for customers. All markets have to be tuned, policed, kept clean and rules refreshed to achieve the outcomes we want as a society.

We design markets, and have the knowledge to do it well.