zlacker

>>walter+(OP)
While reading this article, I imagined an Eternal September writ large across the whole industry. Maybe in the beginning it was a few idealistic visionaries, who attracted other idealists who could get behind the vision. Then it succeeded wildly, and attracted everyone and thus became merely human. A mix of the worst and the best, and probably in proportion closer to 80/20 than 50/50. The vision became a game, one that need only be stable, but not optimal or humanist in its value system.

>>psyc+Z6
I would argue that it's even worse than that. The Eternal September scenario would at least let us off the hook, morally speaking -- it's not that the thing we built is bad, it's that people are bad, and so as people piled on to the thing we built it eventually became just as bad as they are. Which would be depressing, but at least not blameworthy.

But while people have their faults, I think it's closer to the truth here to say that we built something that took those bad people and made them worse. Chasing engagement and clicks, we built systems that rewarded bad behavior, with the inevitable result that the people who found the most success in our systems were the ones who behaved the worst. And since everybody wants to be successful in whatever environment they find themselves in, that drove people to be worse than they otherwise would have been as they chased after the same success for themselves.