Comment by corobo

I'm 100% with you on the idea that it's time to start paying for services on the internet instead of the ad-funded model we have today. The problem is that the people who decide when and how to monetize things seem to be moving toward a model where they charge you for the service, sell your data and feed you ads.

In light of competition being the missing ingredient, the question becomes how does one maintain ongoing competition in a system where the bigger of two competitors tends to win and the winner of two competitors tends to get bigger? That's exactly what happened here: Facebook was bigger than WhatsApp, and FB+WA is bigger than Insta, so FB+WA+Insta is a lot bigger than anyone else.

Back in the day when Microsoft was the one in the DoJ's sights someone compared it to a dog race. Dogs don't have jockeys, so you have to figure out some other way to induce them to run. The way most tracks (probably all, idk much about dog racing but it's a useful metaphor here) do that is by having a mechanical bunny that runs out ahead of the dogs and activates their prey drive. The bunny has to be ahead of the dogs, but not so far ahead that they don't think they can catch it and give up. That means that every once in a while a dog will get the timing just right, go extra hard, and actually catch the bunny. At that point, the race is over for everyone until someone steps in to shake the dog loose from the bunny and give everyone a reason to run again. Our system is like that: we have to encourage everyone to do everything they can to catch the bunny but also ensure that they never actually do. Bill Gates was the first person in my memory to catch the bunny, and needed to be shaken loose. Now it's Zuckerberg, and probably Google, that need to be pried off of their respective bunnies so that everyone else has something to chase.

The missing ingredient here is that there is a gulf between what people really need, and what they do. Capitalism/market forces/etc. optimize on that "what people really do" and not what they need, and especially not what they say they want. See also, for instance, the layout of your grocery store.

The good news is that capitalism is in fact really good at serving exactly the preferences you reveal through your actions, and there are ways in which that is good. The bad news is that the farther away we get from our "native environment" the farther our needs and revealed preferences are diverging. I can think of no equivalent threat in our ancestral environment to "scrolling away your day on Facebook". Sloth and laziness aren't new, but that enticement to it is very new.

The discipline to sit, think with your brain, and realize with your system 2 brain [1] that you need to harness and control your system 1 urges is moving from "a recipe to live a good life" (e.g., wisdom literature, Marcus Aurelius, Proverbs, Confucious, many many other examples dating back thousands of years), but one a lot of people lived reasonably happily without, to a necessity to thrive in the modern environment. Unfortunately, humans have never, ever been collectively good at that.

And the level of brutality that system 2 must use on system 1 is going up, too. Resisting an indulgent dinner is one thing; carrying around the entire internet in your pocket and resisting darned near every vice simultaneously, continuously, is quite another. In my lifetime this problem has sharpened profoundly from minor issue to major problem everyone faces every hour.

For a much older example, see "drugs". Which is also a new example as the frontier expands there, too.

I have no idea what a solution to this at scale looks like. But I am quite optimistic we will ultimately find one, because we will have to. The systems can't just keep getting better and better at enticement to the short-term with no other social reaction.

[1]: https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/system...

Or, hear me out, what about "competition exists but I also get to vote and be represented." Where I live, there are two ISPs, the local cable conglomerate, and a telecom coop.

The cable company, as you might expect, is completely and utterly awful. They go for all of cable's greatest hits, from low introductory payments that explode after the first year, to service that is constantly down, to sending you to collections for equipment you returned. They do it all. The speeds are slow, and the customer service is non-existent.

The coop, on the other hand, is beyond delightful. The speed always exceeds what I'm paying for, and every couple of years they readjust their packages to give me more speed for the same price. Only three times in almost a decade have I had any problems with them: One was an outage that was caused by a natural disaster, and the other two were problems with my ONT that were fixed next day at no charge. Oh, and since it's a coop, I get a check every year as part of the profit sharing. For me, it only equates to about a free month of service, but it's still pretty nice.

So I guess the tl;dr of it all is that you don't need to get rid of free markets to have social control of things. And since the profits go to the people paying for the service, there's no incentive to extract extra value, so there's no real enshitification.