zlacker

It boils down to incentives. When entire business models are built around hijacking your attention and keeping you "hooked" for as long as possible, you can't expect calm technology.

Vote with your wallet.

>>jmstfv+(OP)
Voting with your wallet isn’t always an option when the advertising cancer has already infected everything. See my earlier comment for some expensive examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21802985

>>Nextgr+J
The more generalizable version of "vote with your wallet" is to stop using those services, if possible. Eventually, those companies will either stop engaging in this behaviour or die.

>>jmstfv+(OP)
"Vote with your wallet" doesn't work when one party rigs the election by giving away their product for free.

>>smackt+2S
The thing is, I'm pretty sure "free" spyvertising-funded stuff harms both paid and actually free, as in non-commercial, solutions. The market for the former is reduced significantly, and with the demand/audience for the latter also hollowed out, the incentive to work on them is reduced, in a feedback loop (worse actually-free product or service, more users go to the spying one, repeat).

I've seen a company try to build a streaming/DVR box. It failed for a bunch of reasons but among those was that it wasn't expected/able to spy on the user and monetize the data—all its competitors did, and they all sold their devices, retail, for right at what these devices would cost the manufacturer to build them (in part, but not entirely, because they're subsidized by spying), so if they wanted to make any money and wanted to actually get on store shelves (often a minimum margin required) they were talking a significantly higher price; meanwhile most people aren't even aware that their competitors are spying on their users in some super-creepy ways, so that's a really hard sell, especially if you aren't already at or beyond feature parity.