I don't see why advertising needs to pervade every aspect of social media. Imagining Facebook's advertising revenue cut by 85% really doesn't make me sad at all. Facebook has to lay off some people, who will then go out into the economy and get jobs possibly doing something more productive with their time than selling advertising.

There is not a 1:1 venn diagram overlap between "the internet" (the actual backbone and middle mile infrastructure that runs underneath) and "the web" (http/https based content websites and social media things like instagram).

Your approach seems unnecessarily complicated and prone to failure, I prefer we instead pass legislation and solve the problem quickly and with largely guaranteed success. Will this cause disproportionate harm to a relatively small number of mostly wealthy people in the process? I imagine, but sometimes life's not fair. Roll around crying tears in your piles of money.

Or, recognize that tempers are rising and mass torch construction planning is underway, and adjust your business practices accordingly. No one is forcing them to do anything, yet. They might not be so lucky if someone like a Bernie Sanders was somehow able to slip through the political filters like Trump managed to.

When people say this, what they really mean is they prefer a society where people are less empowered to speak their minds, looking into the past with rose tinted glasses.

Meanwhile, society today is more educated, richer, healthier and more cognizant of its problems than ever. Try telling a 50s housewife to stop driving around her gas guzzler while smoking.

> I prefer we instead pass legislation and solve the problem quickly

and in the process demolish liberties - that's something only dictatorships do.

> and mass torch construction planning is underway

That sounds a horrible thing to wish for. Such talk is purely vengeful. Even if i don't care if facebook is shut down tomorrow (don't use it), it's pretty clear people will start using the alternative the day after tomorrow, and that may be VK or the chinese alternative. The social media cat is out of the bag and it's wrong, indeed violent to take away people's empowered rights to speech

Taking away people's rights to force-install someone's idea of utopia in a society is called authoritarianism

>When people say this, what they really mean is they prefer a society where people are less empowered to speak their minds

Somehow I think you might be missing a pretty broad middle ground between ridding society of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of yearly man hours spent on convincing people to consume, and oppressively limiting speech...

Personally I'm generally for rather limited legislation, but the depths to which ad companies are going to vacuum and aggregate every bit of personal information from our lives is, frankly, terrifying. A society wherin each and every one of our actions, habits, and beliefs is monitored and recorded is called a dystopia, and all that data is only a legislative handwave away from an authoritarian nightmare.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but in this rare case I start to wonder if some sort of legislation may be necessary, even given the typical heavy-handedness and technological illiteracy of the legislative powers. But, honestly, the layman has proven to be too ignorant to understand the scope of this problem and vote with their clicks/wallet.

Maybe sometimes, but banning advertisement based business models doesn't necessarily constrain free speech in any major way, and it is in no way my intent. I in no way advocate restrictions in speech beyond this particular "restriction in free speech", but I am always open to consider new ideas.

> Meanwhile, society today is more educated, richer, healthier and more cognizant of its problems than ever. Try telling a 50s housewife to stop driving around her gas guzzler while smoking.

This seems completely orthogonal to the topic. Does this have something to do with "looking into the past with rose tinted glasses", which I also don't understand?

> and in the process demolish liberties - that's something only dictatorships do.

That statement is objectively false. Democracies have thousands upon thousands of laws that "demolish liberties".

> That sounds a horrible thing to wish for.

I agree, so you'll be happy to hear that not only do I not wish for it, I would very much like to avoid it happening.

> Such talk is purely vengeful.

Not purely. It can also be an observation of increasing polarization and anger forming in a society. This topic has appeared quite frequently in a variety of media reports over the last several years, and it seems like a reasonable thing to be concerned with.

> it's pretty clear people will start using the alternative the day after tomorrow, and that may be VK or the chinese alternative

That is a prediction of the future, and regardless of whether it is "clear" to you, the certainty of arbitrary predictions actually occurring is not. And if it does come to pass, we can react accordingly.

> The social media cat is out of the bag and it's wrong, indeed violent to take away people's empowered rights to speech

Lots of people have imaginative opinions about what is "wrong" and "violent", but this has always been so, and mankind has always had to find a way to come to compromise. Having an opinion is fine, but keep in mind everyone has them.

> Taking away people's rights to force-install someone's idea of utopia in a society is called authoritarianism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by strong central power and limited political freedoms.[1] Political scientists have created many typologies describing variations of authoritarian forms of government.[1] Authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic in nature, and may be based upon the rule of a party or the military.[2][3] etc etc etc

And once again, you'll be pleased to learn I have no intention of "force-installing my idea of utopia" in society, any more than thousands of political representatives in the past intended to when they advocated for various legislation.