Comment by hvsc6 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hvsc6 | Hacker News Reader

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Social media/ad tech architecture has to change.

Dont tell people to change. Its a red flag of intellectual bankruptcy.

Its a get out of jail free card for mindless corporate robots. The clergy used to provide these cards to feudal lords once upon a time. Today the media and edu system provide it to corporations.

More content = more ad real estate.

If you have a magic machine that produces more and more rent collecting real estate what happens to the value of real estate?

Meanwhile the total pool of available human Attention doesnt grow.

If you further filter that pool by global avg disposable income you find its a very small pool. And its being over fished massively. (Check the UN report on the Attention Economy)

This is a bizarre abnormal system that produces accumulating consequences.

Revenue of ad tech keeps growing. Content keeps growing. It keeps getting more addictive. Outrage is the natural output of such an enviroment that has been imposed on everyone. Politicians have to spend mpre and more on Ads to get elected. Becoming more and more on dependent on money to win. So they are struggling to counter balance these forces.

We have to treat Attention the same way we treat Land, Air, Water or Natural Resources. Companies cant pollute or exploit things without limit. Ads cant be injected in every 2 mm of space available and every 2 ms of time.

> Dont tell people to change. Its a red flag of intellectual bankruptcy.

But people do have to change. The core problem is a transition from:

- sources being few and somewhat reliable (traditional media), and had reputations to uphold - normal people faced significant barriers to sharing information widely

to a world in which neither of those constraints still holds. And there's no going back, no putting the genie back in the bottle. It turns out that when you give everyone unlimited communication, it exposes weaknesses in how people and societies consume and manage information that were present before but didn't have the environment they needed to materialize. Well, they have that environment now.

There's no going back really unless you want to clamp down on free sharing of information and the "peer to peer internet" in general. People will just have to change their relationship to information. It will take time, but I'm sure we can manage.

Social media and ad tech certainly aren't helping but the root cause is basically technological change and unless you want to roll that back, targeting the companies won't fix it.

We had free sharing of information on the internet before algorithms supercharged ragebait to farm engagement.

> sources being few and somewhat reliable (traditional media)

How do we actually know they were reliable, and not just the only game in town?

It doesnt make sense how this is sustainable. Just because it has existed for the last 20-25 years doesnt mean anything.

TikTok and Twitter are evidence such systems are not as stable as people think.

The paradigm shift where everyone is allowed broadcast is only possible due to Ad Tech injecting Ads everwhere and at all points in time. And then convincing everyone all this ever expanding Ad inventry has value no matter how much this inventry grows.

This facade is holding for a couple of reasons that have nothing to do with the value of the Ads, or for the need for all to have broadcast capability.

They tell Kamala Harris just outspend Trump on Ads and you have a shot and she does. She looses and no one complains about the billions in Ad spend. Why? The answer is exactly the same as asking why did everyone get into sub prime mortgages?

Another reason facade is holding is there are only 2 options for huge reach Alphabet and Meta. If Pepsi increases spend, ad execs immediately call up Coke and tell them to match it. Whole bunch of corps are trapped in this hamster wheel.

Then there is the great strategy of AT&T, Comcast, Amazon, Apple etc who all got into running their own content factories to "bundle" "cross sell". This creates all kinds illusions about the real value of content.

Meanwhile Netflix, Disney etc representing people who can actually pay for content have topped out at a few hundred million globally.

So people who say we cant go back dont fully know where we have reached.

> Dont tell people to change. Its a red flag of intellectual bankruptcy.

Are you telling people to change?

The problem persists because nobody has managed to put together the incentive and the ability to fix it.

People won’t fix it, because people is a big amorphous blob that doesn’t have an ability to really focus on anything at all.

Ad and social media companies won’t fix it because fixing it would mean removing themselves from existence.

The best chance we have is OS companies—Apple has managed to built this reputation (however flawed) of being a more thoughtful and privacy preserving company. Unfortunately Microsoft forgot how to make operating systems.

These are all banal platitudes built on the same basic rage that you purport to dislike; the solution you imply requires centralization and censors.

The only solution is also the easiest; switch it off.

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