Comment by andrewmutz
6 hours ago
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment expressed in this post. Our attention is extremely valuable (both to us and to advertisers), and consumers today broadly squander it.
For consumer digital products, the only business model that seems to work is advertising, because consumers are cheap and refuse to pay money for software. But the result is that they instead trade something far more valuable for the software, which is their attention.
The products that get built, as a result, are supremely well-engineered to attract and retain attention, to the detriment of their users. Most of the "news" that reaches us these days is not at all an attempt to actually educate us about the state of the world. Instead its just a collection of inflammatory and enraging facts that are chosen to optimize for engagement (to hold your attention)
In theory, someone could rebuild an ecosystem where people stopped squandering their attention and monetized it with money, but this would require consumers to stop chronically undervaluing their time and overvaluing their money.
Addiction is an extreme form of attention grabbing. We've moved from chemical addicticants to informational ones.
I think the funny (and somewhat scary) thing about ad-supported platforms is that both the creators of the platform and the customers implicitly agree that the content just isn't that valuable. They know that if they paywalled the platform and forced people to make that value judgement then barely anyone would pay.
Which is kind of scary where you realise people spend hours and hours each day watching youtube slop, tiktok, instagram reels, while also subconsciously feeling "this content is worthless and I wouldn't pay $10 a month to keep watching it".