A possible set of interventions here could focus on undermining the ads-based revenue model that sets the incentive structure for most of the internet. If your revenue comes from ads your incentive is to keep your users around as long as possible (addiction) and to learn as much about them as possible for improved ad-targeting (privacy concerns). The Center for Humane Technology (https://www.humanetech.com) have argued that monthly subscription models might produce better incentives because they require users to feel like the subscription has improved their lives over the last month to renew (although in practice I’m not sure how much better this is; eg. Netfilx still has auto-play enabled by default, exploiting status-quo bias to keep users watching even though it’s not clear why Netflix should want this).
A specific intervention could be contributing to open-source ad blocking or privacy enhancing projects, like AdBlock, or advocating for their use. My main concern with this approach is that it’s somewhat adversarial with big-tech, and I’d expect a lot of pushback if they started getting enough traction to be actually shifting incentives.
A possible set of interventions here could focus on undermining the ads-based revenue model that sets the incentive structure for most of the internet. If your revenue comes from ads your incentive is to keep your users around as long as possible (addiction) and to learn as much about them as possible for improved ad-targeting (privacy concerns). The Center for Humane Technology (https://www.humanetech.com) have argued that monthly subscription models might produce better incentives because they require users to feel like the subscription has improved their lives over the last month to renew (although in practice I’m not sure how much better this is; eg. Netfilx still has auto-play enabled by default, exploiting status-quo bias to keep users watching even though it’s not clear why Netflix should want this).
A specific intervention could be contributing to open-source ad blocking or privacy enhancing projects, like AdBlock, or advocating for their use. My main concern with this approach is that it’s somewhat adversarial with big-tech, and I’d expect a lot of pushback if they started getting enough traction to be actually shifting incentives.