Can anybody briefly explain what a “rot economist” is? Is it meant to be capitalised “ROT economist” which stands for something? Has my browser not rendered the characters correctly or something?
This story of course includes the now almost mandatory attack on e2e encryption, which according to this account when coupled with the people you know feature is “a dangerous tool” - with little explanation as to the nature and size of the danger.
This part is interesting: “Worse still, accounts that were less than 15-days-old now made up 20 percent of all outgoing friend requests, and more than half of friend requests were sent by somebody who was making more than 50 of them a day…”
The explanation leaves a lot to be desired though:
“…heavily suggesting that Facebook was growing its platform’s “connections” through spam.”
Doesn’t this make perfect sense where a new user joins Facebook with no friends to start with, then in the first few weeks of using it finds all of their friends and adds them?
The whole thing reads like a grab bag of grievances rather than a forensic takedown, shame.
It's "rot" as in the companies/society are (metaphorically) rotting.
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.
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.
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.
But I will say the tone makes me stop short of sending this to my parents, who actually need to be swayed (whereas I don’t).
So if your goal is to be interesting and informative to people who are already on your side, you did well. That’s a worthy enough goal imo.
The incentives created by capitalism + internet + global web/smart phone adoption mean a lot of what happened was inevitable. If someone in Zuck's position had taken a moral stand along the way, you could just swap out their names with any of a million opportunists ready to swoop in. I say this not to absolve Mark, Sheryl or anyone else involved, but just to recognize that these are systemic failures that need systemic solutions. Pinning the blame on individuals doesn't get us any closer to solving the general problems that all social media platforms invite.
For literally decades, the institutions and laws that may have provided those solutions have been gutted or eliminated.
Collapse is inevitable.
It's trite at this point, and yet worth reiterating: You are not the customer.
HN has terrible insightful discussion.
WHAT DO WE WANT? WE DON'T KNOW!
WHEN DO WE WANT IT? RIGHT NOW!
The largest price issue left is housing costs and that has nothing to do with "corporate profits", it's about bad land use regulations.
(Another funny thing about the "ever increasing corporate profits" argument is that it's literally anti-Marxist, as Marxism says the problem with capitalism is its profits continually /decline/ due to over-production.)
