More resources are being devoted to “capturing value” and “marketing” than to actually providing the goods and services that people want and need. Companies have found it easier to manipulate people than to server the public interest.

Those two cogs aren’t close enough to touch and even if they could touch, they wouldn’t interconnect.

@Rozauhtuno A modern website or mobile app is very intentionally designed to transmit signal (direct observations of behavior, and other actionable data) in one direction and noise (basically bloat) in the other. To forego any monetization opportunity is to leave money on the table, and of course that is a literal sin against the principal-agent principle. If we wanted search to be a utility, content to be a library, communication to be person-to-person, or platforms to come without vendor lock-in, we should have left the Internet in mostly academic hands, as it was in the early 1990s.