It should be punitively taxed like any other societally harmful, addictive products: alcohol, cigarettes along with strict regulation regarding access to children.
> If those individuals got together and agreed that maximizing shareholder profit was no longer the common aim, the digital infrastructure could be different.<p>The article refers to "those individuals" as FAANG CEO's.<p>This article's stance that we just need big tech to forgo profits for the good of the people seems outrageous to me. Yes I would love to see it happen but I know it would never happen. Even if twitter, for example, made their algorithmic feed less addictive then that would just leave an opening for a competitor to come take market share.<p>Even if our government somehow mandated that big tech cannot tune their algorithms to consume the max amount of attention (<- BTW I have no idea how that could be done) then how would it be regulated? Open source code? Government issued devices? Also what happens with non-US companies, like tik-tok, that dont have to follow this "be good" principle?<p>This is just another vice created by technology that must be resisted by people in order to have a happy and balanced life. Another good example is food. Today's food is so addictive processed that we must resist in order to be happy. These vices did not previously exist.
In my mind the issue is payments. There is no reasonable way for me to pay a website a fraction of a cent for content, besides by viewing an ad. I'm hoping FedNow will help a bit with this in the US.
i agree with large swaths of the initial diatribe, but lost interest when i was 30% through the article (based on scrollbar position) with nary a solution yet proposed. Somewhat ironically, this article would benefit from extensive editing to be a 5 minute read.