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.

I'm always fascinated when people claim YouTube pushes content like this. It's an extremely common take, but I don't think it's true.

My experience has been that if I stop clicking something, the algorithm soon stops recommending it. It occasionally brings back a blast from the past--e.g. I watched a sumo competition once, and once in a blue moon it recommends another. But you can downvote bad recommendations, and I simply don't get recommendations for ideas I've never engaged with before.

FWIW I'm not saying the algorithm is great. My feed is absolutely worthless right now, but it's all goofy Japanese content because one of my kids is extremely into that right now. There's zero political content because she isn't showing any interest in it. Heck, most of the stuff isn't even in English anymore.

now that we have cheap spam filtering, why don't we go back to forums