So much of what we rely on today for Internet applications and infrastructure has at its core a fallacious advertising revenue model. As companies who spend money on advertising realize the low returns they are getting, they will turn off that ad spend, which will turn those platforms into increasingly needy and demanding in your face advertisers, being more intrusive with your data. Since the average "user" is the product and not the customer, users will continue to see fewer and fewer features that don't help with advertising revenue and the quality of the overall service to the user (not the customer, the advertiser) will decline.
We're already seeing that. The quality of Google products continue to decay. Facebook and LinkedIn are increasingly both becoming shallower advertising hustles (LinkedIn just this week turned off post notification for events to force people to buy LinkedIn ads). As other apps and websites get snapped up by these FAANGs, we'll start to pine for the Internet that was 2008. The decay is already well under way.
What is truly sad is that some of the smartest computing minds of our day are spending their efforts at these FAANGs not advancing society but rather helping keep people more addicted to social networks, optimize for clicks on video and web streams, pushing products in all your channels, and optimizing for the wrong things. How have we gone so astray?
> What is truly sad is that some of the smartest computing minds of our day are spending their efforts at these FAANGs not advancing society but rather helping keep people more addicted to social networks, optimize for clicks on video and web streams, pushing products in all your channels, and optimizing for the wrong things. How have we gone so astray?
I think this sounds deeper than it actually is.
What you're describing is just capitalism. A consequence of capitalism is that sometimes people figure out how to make addicting products and then capitalize on it (cigarettes, drugs, social media). Eventually we figure out the harm and work hard to stop the damage as much as we can. Cigarette usage is down to historic lows in the US, for example. Sometimes it takes a while and takes a lot of fighting.
Another consequence is massive incentives to advance society. You can't deny that the vast majority of technology advances over the last 20 (or 40 or 60 or 80) years have been incredibly beneficial to society. And the advances wouldn't have happened if we didn't also risk the occasional bad actor coming up.
We're still figuring it all out as a society. We've weathered worse and will come out of it stronger.
Considering technology, capitalism, are causing a mass extinction on our planet and pushing us to collapse I'm not sure that I can't deny our technological advances have been beneficial.
When something is killing you and all life on the planet, it doesn't matter if it's killing you softly.
Can you be more specific about what you're implying? Are you saying that society would be better off if we didn't progress past the industrial revolution?
We get the society we deserve; Facebook et al give people what they pay for. If they're optimizing for the wrong thing then maybe we need to get better at paying for the right thing.
We're already seeing that. The quality of Google products continue to decay. Facebook and LinkedIn are increasingly both becoming shallower advertising hustles (LinkedIn just this week turned off post notification for events to force people to buy LinkedIn ads). As other apps and websites get snapped up by these FAANGs, we'll start to pine for the Internet that was 2008. The decay is already well under way.
What is truly sad is that some of the smartest computing minds of our day are spending their efforts at these FAANGs not advancing society but rather helping keep people more addicted to social networks, optimize for clicks on video and web streams, pushing products in all your channels, and optimizing for the wrong things. How have we gone so astray?