[mlatu]

he is right in a way that makes it hard to see what facebook is turning into profit: the users attention.

sure they are creating a space without taking away volume for other people to build there, but nobody will care about the other things because a proper map of the internet is not concerned with what is there, but what a given user spends their attention on.

[dan-robertson]

I think the argument which is charitable to Facebook is that they make money by more efficiently matching advertisements to slots: advertisers are less willing to pay for generic slots in a newspaper than targeted slots because, in theory, a slot seen by someone more desirable. Facebook do advanced targeting to allow slots to be sold at closer to their fair value by making buyers better informed and they take a fee for improving the efficiency.

But it’s still reasonable to argue that the targeting is not as effective as claimed, the fee is too large, or that there are political reasons to dislike targeting and we should disallow it even if it makes the ad market more efficient.

[mlatu]

i mean, of course i want the best THINGS for my bucks, so advertising good wares is kind of desirable...

but perhaps that is not enough. perhaps the scope needs to include production of wares: i dont just want inferior wares to not be advertised, but rather not even made. time, effort and resources wasted on trash products are a shame we are going to feel painfuly in the coming decades if humanity ever wakes up from the capitalist dream

[cupofpython]

>but what a given user spends their attention on

I want to point out, since I have not seen it elsewhere in this thread, that user's do not need to be on the internet at all. Does no one remember what it was like to be bored? With respect to living everyday lives, social media addiction is becoming an issue. Instagram specifically is a huge item.

So it would be contradictory to say Meta is responsible for manipulating its users and successfully furthering people's addiction to social media in general, while also claiming that people are using meta products with time and attention that would have been spent on the internet anyway (0-sum).

Are they or are they not incentivizing people to spend more time on social media than they otherwise would have?

[runnerup]

I might not need to be on social media but I do need to be on the internet.

- Vehicle and Public Transit Navigation

- Apartment shopping

- Amazon.com

- Determining visa rules for extended travel

- Obtaining medical records

All of these are possible without the internet but all of them are a massive waste of time without the internet. I’m okay with being bored but some things would be an enormous waste of my life.

[cupofpython]

Facebook created value out of nothing; peoples boredom in-between doing all of the above. I am just saying people are treating facebook like it is stealing attention from everything else on the internet and I dont buy it.

I think it is a stretch to say any of the things you listed are competing with social media for your attention. The "attention" social media is taking from its users was previously spent on being bored, not taking care of other pre-existing needs. Social media becoming mainstream has created new "needs" for people to stay in touch with their online network. These new needs spawned economic incentives. Facebook is arguably the reason social media is mainstream at all. They have certainly earned the right to claim they are not stealing economic activity from those other pre-existing needs. You previously could not create an economic model out of people who were checking in with friends because they were bored. They created that