[nojvek]

Companies make profits because people spend their money on what those companies have to offer.

Facebook offers a dopamine hit. And so does X and TikTok. To some extent also HN.

The infinite scroll slot machine.

At the end of the day, we are an evolved version of dopamine driven apes.

Meta family of Apps (Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram) has total WAU of 3.05 billion. Almost half the planet.

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Sam Altman, Sundar Picchai, Mark Zuckerberg saying that AI will somehow cure cancer and solve climate change seems pretty far fetched.

The closer reality is that as the AI models advance, they will figure out ever better ways of making their apps as addictive as cocaine.

[latexr]

> Companies make profits because people spend their money on what those companies have to offer.

And then you proceeded to list examples of cases where that is not true. No one is spending money to get dopamine hits from Facebook or TikTok. If that cost money, they would have a fraction of the users. Other companies spend money on those platforms so they can manipulate you where your attention is.

[nojvek]

Ad payers are people too.

Even if a user not directly paying, they are indirectly paying by clicking on ads and buying from the advertiser. In which case the cost of advertising is baked in.

Meta made $130B in revenue. Thats a ton of ad payers and ad clicks.

[turinturambar81]

Facebook does not profit because of user fees, but selling user data, and selling adspace seen by users.