Its not that complicated to define. Lots of people have done it from Tim Wu, to Jaron Lanier to Clay Shirky to Tristan Harris. The problem definitions and solu

Its not that complicated to define. Lots of people have done it from Tim Wu, to Jaron Lanier to Clay Shirky to Tristan Harris. The problem definitions and solutions are almost 10 years old now. It's just that YouTube, Facebook and Twitter didn't give a shit. Plus all kinds of side show debates about free speech, privacy, anonymity and half a dozen other things have taken focus away from the fundamental change social media introduced into the way humans as a group communicate. That fundamental change is these systems attach a publicly visible number next to every thing anyone says. Whether it is a like/view/upvote/click/follower/retweet count it has an effect on how people think and behave. Whether it is the President, a Journalist or a 10 year old the numbers have an unasked for influence. There is no good psychological/sociological reason for these numbers to be publicly visible in real time. Engagement and Recommendation systems can still collect these numbers and continue to do their jobs without publicly displaying any of these numbers in real time or not at all. These changes can't be rolled out instantly because a large part of the population are hooked and need to be slowly weaned off.