The thing you’re worried about is actually fixable. But it requires someone to build open source alternatives to Facebook and other Web2 social networks.

I wrote a comment showing far worse and more dangerous trends. But now let me address what you wrote 42 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29759615

Yes, capitalism gets like this when the small thing you built becomes bigger than you. And if you take VC money and then IPO to Wall St they will force you to perpetually every extract rents from your users in the form of their attention, engagement, advertising tolerance, and your “slow AI” will push out of management anyone who doesn’t get with the program to satisfy quarterly earnings. People who bought shares at $200 will make a lot of noise and can be quite persuasive to make sure their shares don’t drop to $5.

That’s why Google dropped “don’t be evil” motto and now gets “right up to the line without crossing it”: profit motive of shareholders.

Web3 was going to fix it but (the network would be owned by the participants) but the industry got stuck using outdated technology (blockchain) because it perversely promised things built on it to become slower and more expensive over time, so buying the block reward / fee token would pay off by making it “worth more” in the future.

This is going to be fixed. We are working on exactly this microtransaction alternative: https://qbix.com/token

However, keep in mind that advertising may always be more lucrative than microtransactions, for Facebook and other capitalist “privately owned” social networks. There are many goods and services in the world that pay far more in commissions to the social network, and as long as that is the case, it would be more lucrative to get money from them than having the users pay some membership fees to access content. And besides, if you can get free content, why pay for it?

No, the way to get out of this mess is to finally realize that capitalism and the profit motive has diminishing returns the bigger an organization gets, and that transitioning to a gift economy with no profit motive and no celebrities (wikipedia, science, creative commons, peer review) is far better for humanity.

Once everyone is in VR and using neuralink, it will be even more pronounced. The problem started when your computers were miniaturized into mobile phones and had always-on internet. You’re already a “cyborg”. Now, consider … would you want your back end software to be produced and hosted by a for-profit capitalist company beholden to wall street? Or by an open source thing like Wordpress, Matrix or Qbix that you can at least control your own metaverse and not pay rents?

Most people, like a slowly cooked frog, will just choose to become the borg basically. Not as a conscious decision, but by a thousand cuts from friends who urge you to get that latest VR headset with the brain interface so you can smell their latest pot pie, which is a limited edition sponsored by Friday’s, of course. It’s like the movie “Eagle eye” where everyone is recruited to keep you on track, and everyone is peer-pressured by N people.

Unless permissionless open source platforms become compelling enough to compete and disrupt centralized for-profit platforms, as Web 1.0 disrupted and destroyed America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, MSN, Minitel, magazines, newspapers, and other gatekeepers — while VOIP / multimedia on the Internet severely undercut the telecom cartel ($3 a minute calls), cable channels, the companies using the radio spectrum etc.

We are currently living in digital feudalism. That’s what you are describing: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/