The trick is to cut away at the user-hostile foundations of the product. In theory, a product like Facebook or Instagram would have no need to be regulated, but the sale of user data, the engineered addictiveness (looking at you “Data Scientists”), etc. are all worthy of being regulated.
by your username I assume you are yourself one of the droids you're looking for lol.
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.
What's funny is that I don't find fediverse apps like Mastodon to be less addictive. It could be because they (and the ActivityPub protocol) was modelled after commercial counterparts or that information foraging in an endless forest of data in itself is attractive to the human psyche.
The trick is to cut away at the user-hostile foundations of the product. In theory, a product like Facebook or Instagram would have no need to be regulated, but the sale of user data, the engineered addictiveness (looking at you “Data Scientists”), etc. are all worthy of being regulated.
by your username I assume you are yourself one of the droids you're looking for lol.
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.
What's funny is that I don't find fediverse apps like Mastodon to be less addictive. It could be because they (and the ActivityPub protocol) was modelled after commercial counterparts or that information foraging in an endless forest of data in itself is attractive to the human psyche.