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It seems like the root cause of all this is advertising. Social media companies need attention grabbing features to draw eyes on ads, makes you wonder if we'd s

It seems like the root cause of all this is advertising. Social media companies need attention grabbing features to draw eyes on ads, makes you wonder if we'd still be facing this dilemma of social media was sites were a paid service.

baq 9y ago
And advertising is needed mostly to sell stuff. If there wasn't any need to sell, there wouldn't be much advertising. I don't see non-free social media of current scale possible, unless you count the telephone network and the whole Internet as one. You already pay for that.
prostoalex 9y ago
But people justify paid services by the amount of attention they dedicate to it. If you barely read the magazine, you'll likely not renew the subscription.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Paid services diminish circulation / market / network size. For mass consumer products, advertisers seek higher readership. That's a conflict which dates to the Penny Press of the 1830s. A great little book on the conflict inherent in advertising-driven media, from 1909: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft