One of the many problems with the double-sided ad money powered markets of Big Social, presented as “free” platforms to users, is skewed incentives. An individ

One of the many problems with the double-sided ad money powered markets of Big Social, presented as “free” platforms to users, is skewed incentives. An individual user does not bring any revenue. If they are horrified by an ad they cannot just vote with their wallet and switch to a competitor (network effect together with free offer guarantee no honest business can really compete). Meanwhile, the only metric that matters to actual paying customers (advertisers) is eyeball count—they are not going to leave in droves if this platform is where the users are. Thus, letting the number of actual human staff grow to address some concern that involves end user satisfaction (including lofty goals like ethics, which is higher up the pyramid of end user satisfaction) is financially irrational to them, and automation rules. Sadly, this creates a situation where many people call for FB to be regulated. In my view, it will only make the situation worse by entrenching FB’s monopoly—rather, what we need is a general regulation that makes these types of businesses infeasible, so that we have a choice of smaller providers who charge their users (and are incentivized to make a product that benefits them) and interoperate with each other (and have to worry about users leaving). Instead of giving up on free market, we should make it work.