“User engagement” is code for “addiction”

Re:“User engagement” is code for “addiction” by rapind on Thursday March 04, 2021 @04:02PM (#26348278)

We’re just witnessing advertising’s race to the bottom. Eventually everything published is questioned because all forms of media are incentivized to push drivel for eyeballs.

The optimist in me see’s how ridiculous and blatant the drivel is becoming and suspects we’ll achieve some sort of collective enlightenment before we extinct ourselves. A smarter media then emerges (timing is everything here) eschewing advertising dollars in favour of a more consumer friendly model.

Then again, I’m probably being naive.

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Re:“User engagement” is code for “addiction” by ceh123 on Thursday March 04, 2021 @05:47PM (#26349588)

Paid services to align interests with the user (best user experience wins) are the way to go and I really hope they win out in the long run. I also think individual driven filters and algorithms are the way to go. In my experience, heavily AI/ML driven algorithms for user experience (think spotify suggestions) lead to overfitting super quickly. ML assistance can be amazing (obviously), but I know I want some degree of manual control on my algorithms.

Another plug[0] but, I'm hoping to be a part of this solution. Just a personal project right now, but I'm building a search website whose end goal is to be ad-free (paid) and let users create filters to remove any of the countless trash websites that SEO their way to the top of google.

Currently I've just got it working for web search and a few filters I've created for myself (removes a ton of websites I never find value in, some blogs, news sites, pinterest, etc.)

[0] https://hadal.io

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Re:“User engagement” is code for “addiction” by PontifexMinimus on Thursday March 04, 2021 @10:14PM (#26352132)

> Paid services to align interests with the user (best user experience wins) are the way to go

I agree; aligning interests is important.

> I really hope they win out in the long run

It's hard for me to see how they can. Advertising supported services are free to the user, which improves take-up which means that network effects are in their favour.

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Re:“User engagement” is code for “addiction” by ceh123 on Friday March 05, 2021 @11:56AM (#26359031)

Hope they can and believe they will are definitely not the same in this case. I do hope we get some great competition for paid alternatives in all sorts of categories, but I agree that it's a long shot for these types of services to win in most markets.

Ad supported free services will (unfortunately) always dominate network effect driven spaces.

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