Advances in food production means that the proportion of people starving and undernourished is lower than ever. It also means that, for the first time, excess food is a problem for more than just kings. It would be kind of crazy to complain that these advances in food production are per se a bad thing because they enabled obesity. They're just a tool that accelerate both good and bad uses.
It was already possible to feed the idle, addiction-prone part of your mind with channel-surfing and People magazine. The Internet has accelerated this possibility by making everything about access to content more efficient, but describing efficiency solely as "making access to bad stuff" more efficient makes no sense.
To me it seems similar to blaming an advance in fuel efficiency for making it cheaper for bank robbers to get to their targets. It's true, but also missing the point.
Our economy is intertwined enough that "your actions somewhere down the line may be making it easier for someone to make choices that ruin their lives" is probably true of literally every single person. If you work on a product making low-skill hiring more efficient, you're also lowering McDonald's costs and making it even harder for people with unhealthy relationships with food to resist, and thus "you may be ruining some people's lives".
It's so broad a claim that it's utterly meaningless.
If you started your own site there's absolutely no way you could be profitable competing on both hosting costs and payout to creators.
I broadly agree that creators hugely benefit from these platforms, but that really doesn't seem to be what they're optimizing on imho. And you basically admitted they're a monopoly with that final statement.
Having a low cost infrastructure for video streaming and good advertising deals is not a monopoly, it's an investment.
Something like RescueTime baked into iOS would be Apple's greatest productivity feature.
How could the system incentivize companies like Facebook and Google to use prosocial utility functions in their recommendation engines?
e.g. a video recommendation engine that on default settings suggests videos it thinks will cause the viewer to feel satisfied and change activities if it thinks it will improve their overall wellbeing to stop watching videos now.
I know just the person...
Facebook allows you to reconnect with old friends more easily or meet new people in person.
YouTube has some of the best resources to learn software development, math, history, and really anything for free.
There are pro's and con's for every company.
I invested in Google and Facebook years before their first revenue and profited enormously. I was an early adviser to Facebook’s team, but I am terrified by the damage being done by these Internet monopolies.
Facebook and Google get their revenue from advertising, the effectiveness of which depends on gaining and maintaining consumer attention. Borrowing techniques from the gambling industry, Facebook, Google and others exploit human nature, creating addictive behaviors that compel consumers to check for new messages, respond to notifications, and seek validation from technologies whose only goal is to generate profits for their owners.
The people at Facebook and Google believe that giving consumers more of what they want and like is worthy of praise, not criticism. What they fail to recognize is that their products are not making consumers happier or more successful. Like gambling, nicotine, alcohol or heroin, Facebook and Google — most importantly through its YouTube subsidiary — produce short-term happiness with serious negative consequences in the long term. Users fail to recognize the warning signs of addiction until it is too late.