You Are the Product (2017)

I know I've found myself much happier going social media/online dating free.

Social media is very good at making us angry. A debate on starter pokemon can quickly turn into slurs being thrown around. I have a few social circles I remain engaged in via zoom, and pre Covid I was meeting people at alumni events, etc , left and right.

It's not particularly easy to re engage with the real world if your way deep in the rabbit whole of social media. Another way to look at it. Online you become the worst thing you've ever posted , once you identify with that negativity it feeds upon itself. You end up in a death spiral of your own self-hatred.

Why give others the right to rip you apart. Why rip yourself a part on a daily basis. I don't think I've ever convinced anyone to my point of view on social media.

I have been left feeling distraught over some of the toxic things said to me though. I'll even say people are outright meaner online. In real life your friends will just distance themselves if you aren't adding to them.

Online it's not uncommon to see users creating various accounts just to attack each other.

The only way to win is not to play.

I also suggest reading Lost Connections, it goes more into detail on the need for real community.

Anything that moves us from away from the over-used "you are the product" metaphor. Especially good to back-up from the idea that just paying for media means you'll less likely to be manipulated.

That said, once we start to talk about "manipulation", things get very relative. Human beings are social animals. I want to have contact with other people and so be influenced by them? At some point we can call some influence manipulation but there's a lot of gray areas. "Make my feed better" is a key grey area. Filtering crap from the Internet is one of the biggest jobs of both Facebook and Google. At some points that filtering becomes self-serving censorship but there are lots of gray areas. The biggest thing is that isn't a static problem - creators of viral manipulation products and ideologies get more and more sophisticated as methods evolve (articles on QAnon as gamification are worth reading). Not that Facebook and Google are blameless but it seems a ultra-networked worked, there's going to be multiple powerful forces and filters competing for influence and which one is "evil" is a difficult call.

I dont believe this, but I am open to it. Is there any hard data/proof of this on me specifically? Sure, I agree with the concern with teens/young adults in the social dilemma, but I do not think everyone is at risk. Again, very curious to see examples/data to back this up.

> ads drive innovation because they make expensive services possible for the masses.

The flaw is the assumption that this is not possible without them. Consider what happens in the alternative.

The services would still exist, but they would charge a ridiculous amount of money, even more so because charging money means most people won't pay, but if only a minority of people are paying the prices have to be even higher.

So then a hobbyist starts their own free one, and it's terrible, because it's the effort of one person on a weekend instead of a full-time staff. But free-as-in-beer. So everyone who can't afford the pay service uses that one instead.

It ends up with many users, because it's free. And the users want it to be better, so they make improvements and submit patches, or donate money etc. You end up with Linux, BitTorrent, OpenStreetMap. Somebody tell me why you couldn't build a YouTube based on BitTorrent.

You could, over time, if you could get people to use it while it's still terrible and therefore improve it. Which you could do if it was the free one when all the others cost money, but you can't do when the existing YouTube is better funded and proprietary yet still doesn't require the user to pay money to use.

And then the dominant platforms become controlled by individual companies instead of being federated open standards, which suppresses innovation by creating a monoculture that only one entity has the ability to modify.

I like your thoughts on this. This would be an interesting experiment to document what you are and are not successful at. And try to push it further...