I think part of the problem is the loss of a shared value system, or that there is none online. Like before the newsfeed you talked to your friends and then signed off when you were done.

People liked to smoke, everywhere and then we changed the laws so they couldn’t, but until then every diner had a big smoking section because smokers went to diners with smoking sections.

Like, Facebook and tik tok could choose not to sell over-optimized digital crack. Google could choose not to have AI summaries, or maybe, the government should make them illegal, but like, I dunno, this argument of “we can over optimize everything to take advantage of people’s innate psychological weakness and that’s just people asking for a product is a cop out.

This is a good example of why you want to interrogate the urge to be contrarian and ask whether it’s leading you into a cognitive pitfall. While it’s true that there is an element of consumer choose, that has to be seen in the light of the respective power gradients and knowledge - otherwise you’re like the tobacco companies arguing that people just love the taste or oil companies arguing that Americans don’t care about climate change and just love driving everywhere, ignoring the enormous amounts of money spent promoting that culture and removing competing options. The average millennial sure used Uber and AirBnB a lot - and probably believed that prices were lower due to efficiency rather than VCs subsidies trying to run competitors out of the market. Social sites like Facebook spent billions of dollars trying to make their products more addictive – I know neuroscientists who were recruited for that specific goal – only to struggle with finding enough new content to keep people seeing ads, I have to assign most of the blame to the people who intentionally built that system rather than the people who fell into it not realizing that their trust was misplaced.

So many of these examples don't hold up if you stop and think about it. The first example staying that Google's shitty results is "our" fault for using SEO. But it's SEO spam that's the problem, not SEO itself. When I search "Dentist <CITY>" someone is optimizing to be at the top of that specific search, but that person is usually a dentist in my city which is what I want.

Similarly, I'm well aware I'd spend less time on sites not deliberately engineered to be addictive. That's not because I'm having a miserable time, I'm just balancing it with other stuff.

>Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm sure this will be unpopular but a large majority of these recent negative practices are a result of consumer behavior. Things like microtransactions, dealer markups on cars, clickbait, are all so prominent because they _work_. We have the power to reject them, yet people don't. The algorithm driven feeds with engagement bait and rage bait work.

And many other situations are damned if you do damned if you don't. Journalism websites have paywalls and people complain. They have ads and people complain. One way or another these people have to get paid. It's the same with shrinkflation. If costs increase, then either the product gets smaller, or the price gets higher. Either way, people complain.