We have ceded a lot of good-for-our-brains—and-wellbeing in order to be where other people are without friction. It’s a bit of a chicken or an egg situation that has created gravity wells in cesspools.
There's no reason why a subscription model could not also be used to subsidize people who can not pay, other than that companies are structured to extract as much as possible (by law, if they are public).
There are good network effect arguments about why this strategy can be effective, not simply 'altruistic.'
Ads simply make the extraction happen across the board, except that the ad model somewhat privileges technical users who know how to circumvent ads.
Our only recourse is that we punish them with our wallets, advice and habits and reward good actors.
I'm a firm believer of this but we need more people to join in.
And it already works to some degree.
I've now had a working search engine for almost 3 years.
My last 3 jobs (9 years) haven't forced me to use Windows.
I can chat and organize events without Facebook knowing.
And it is not like the quality has gone down either. My choices have mostly given me better experiences in a number of ways.
Edit:
If more people start
- advocating for better hardware and software,
- canceling subscriptions and memberships when it becomes clear they are reducing value or increasing price,
- building skills both to get independent from their current cloud (so you can move around or at least having a credibile possibility to do so)
- and for individuals to get better jobs
then I think things will change.
For inspiration: at least here in Norway, with several gym memberships, if you cancel they will quickly approach you with good offers, and they can get really good: I got several months free, a friend got offered free months and a sizable gift card.
Bonus: if more people join in this will get picked up by Wall Street and they will begin punishing this nonsense too ;-)
My base salary has doubled and I enjoy my work a lot more now that I don't have to accept all kinds of MS shenanigans to play a part in how I work.
Having a working search engine shouldn't be underestimated either: living from 2012 to 2022 knowing that search used to be a solved problem but wasn't anymore was really annoying.
Indirectly by pushing down the stock price. CEO compensation is usually tied to the stock price through options, bonuses, etc.
Directly through activist investors and shareholder groups (which nowadays usually are institutional investors) who vote to change company policies, fire the CEO, or in some cases fire the whole board.
> structured to extract as much as possible (by law, if they are public).
This is not true and it’s not what fiduciary duty means. Stop repeating it, it’s really dumb.
Companies very frequently do not monetize things that they could under the guise of “building brand recognition” or “establishing a user base”. It’s even as easy as “raising the price will alienate customers we think are important to long term revenue”.
It’s trivial to justify not extracting maximum price and public companies do it all of the time.
Look at Costco’s business model if you want an example
Think of Discord. Anyone can create and participate in a discord server. There are no ads. People with money pay for the premium features and perks and that is how the company makes money [1].
Not every product category is amenable to such business models but many are.
[1] To be fair, Discord likely sells user data to advertisers to make additional money.
I mean, we could also just direct-pay websites (for example with Brave's Basic Attention Token model).
Imagine a utopian world where you just pay per site visit, and in return all companies selling stuff don't have an inflated advertising budget and free market effects force them to pass the savings on to you, meaning the net cost increase for you is zero. And as a side-effect, quality products float to the top, since you hear of them mostly by word-of-mouth, meaning products compete on value-per-dollar.
Sadly human psychology and economics does not work that way haha. We pay what the market will bear, and increasing sales via a torrent of ads is cheaper than increasing the value-per-dollar ratio of the product.
I love this idea, thanks for putting this together. I'm biased, but I also wish more FOSS/OSS projects had a realistic contributor path for UX folks to contribute- so many (non-dev-tooling) projects suffer as a result of building without collaboration from people who might use the product.
I should have included that in my list of asks for OneBusAway. We have a ton of need for people in every user experience, discipline: visual design, usability, you name it. Also, product management would be a huge help.
I think this is an important distinction. Yes, humans have some inbuilt weaknesses and proclivities, but humans are not required to live in or develop systems in which those weaknesses and proclivities are constantly exploited for the benefit/power of a few others. Throughout human history, there have been practices of contemplation, recognition of interdependence, and ways of increasing our capacity for compassion and thoughful response. We are currently in a biological runaway state with extraction, but it's not the only way humans have of behaving.
> Throughout human history, there have been practices of contemplation, recognition of interdependence, and ways of increasing our capacity for compassion and thoughful response.
has this ever been widespread in society? I think such people have always been few and far between?
The example that comes to mind is post-WW2 Germany, but that was apparently a hard slog to change the minds of the German people. I really doubt any organization could do something similar presenting an opposing viewpoint to the companies (and their resources) behind and using AI
The default state is to have extremely poor hard working people and extremely rich not working ones.
No one would have dared to dream of the luxury working people enjoy today. It took some doing! We use to sell people not to long ago. Kids in coal mines. The work week was 6-7 days 12-14 hours. One coin per day etc
The fight isn't over, the owner class won the last few rounds but there remains much to take for either side.
what does "practices of contemplation, recognition of interdependence, and ways of increasing our capacity for compassion and thoughful response." have to do with luxury? it sounds like you're arguing for the opposite? scrolling Instagram isn't the contemplation I have in mind.
Seems like the increasing push to rely on AIs trained on pretty terrible shallow data alongside the negligible reading happening among young people does not bode well for the David Deutsch hypothesis about our capacity to use knowledge as a form of species evolution that will be able to solve all problems, though it might produce enough gullibility to believe in such a story.
Says a lot about our world that to be successful with a 'friend-based app' you really need to dark pattern your way into hijacking a contact list and robo-inviting all the people who are totally not a person's friends.
If you paid attention, every single successful social app got so successful because of dark patterns that could be summarized as: spamming you and your contacts.
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