With all the talk about how harmful social media can be for various groups because of the clever algorithims enticing people to keep clicking, bringing up pages that confirm their perceived prejudices. I have never heard anyone suggest charging the user a per month fee and making the site ad-free. Their would be no need for sustained attention to watch more ads, no need for algorithims collecting all kinds of personal data. The trick would be to legally require these companies to do this. What am I missing here?
Any social medium provider is free to try this model, there is no governing body telling them whether they can or can’t. So I presume that they have all concluded that this model would cost them considerable income. What advertisers are willing to pay in order to put their ads in front of you would probably surprise you, and it is always increasing with the new ways that the providers are always developing to get more information about you. And it is all more-or-less hidden from you.
What you are missing is that the site would instantly lose 98% of its users.
Again the OP said that this would have to be mandated by law to work. Which immediately raises two problems.
One is political: getting any honest legislature to actually write and pass such a law. Much less the semi-honest ones whose members receive (or would receive) a lot of donations from the website operators and advertising vendors to kill this silly onerous legislation before it gets started.
The other is that absent a hermetic government-run firewall around a country, there is no practical way for country A to demand that all websites accessible within its borders obey Law X. It’s much too easy to set up the website in Country B that doesn’t care about Law X and Country A’s residents can access it just fine from home.
The SDMB tried it. Sorta
Facebook told us years ago that “it’s free and always will be.”
The “user” isn’t the customer. They’re the product.
I’m with ya, OP. It feels like we’ve let this trainwreck go on even though there’s tons of agreement that it’s harming society.
I think subscription-based streaming sites still aim for maximum attention, so I don’t think the ad-sale motivation is solely responsible for the addictive aspect. Any site seems to wait to keep you on it as long as possible, even if it’s costing them some marginal overhead to keep feeding the user content.
One option would be a government run social media service that could actually be optimized for user satisfaction and social health. I was a fan of this until the fascists took over.
We could just ban social media sites. I’d be fine with that.
Separately, we could also just ban advertising. I think it’s long overdue.
It’s already a thing in the EU:
From what I understand, it’s nowhere as profitable as productizing you and getting money from advertisers who will bid a lot of dollars against each other.
Same reason Google Search doesn’t offer an ad-free subscription.
They don’t care about serving you or society. They want the $$$. The EU forced their hand, but we don’t have a government that cares enough. Ours is just too captured and corrupt.
If Netflix or HBOMax started out free with constant ads and then started charging a few dollars/mo ad-free, would they lose many viewers? I doubt it.
Netflix and HBOMax are not social media sites.
I feel like any such legislation – if proposed in the next 2.33 years – would exempt Truth Social 