This isn't theoretical, it's happening right now. The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people, the shift from public feeds to private DMs, and the "Do Not Disturb" generation are all symptoms of the same thing. People are feeling the manipulation and are choosing to opt out, one notification at a time.
That disengagement metric is valuable, I'm not gonna give it away for free anymore. I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works.
> The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people
That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle".
> People are feeling the manipulation
They don't. Even manipulation awareness is a market now. I'm sure there are YouTubers who thrive on it.
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How far can you game a profiling algorithm? Can you make it think something about you that you're not? How much can one break it?
Those are the interesting questions.
If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say.
That's what we're seeing with Youtube for instance: your choice is to pay Youtube's price for Premium (litteraly paying to not get bullied), sit through all the ads in the world, or get three strikes after playing the ad-blocking cat and mouse game for long enough.
Of course you're still free to go somewhere else, in a world where even public guides and presentations will often be pushed on youtube only, to alleviate for the bandwidth costs on standard web services.
I've never encountered this. What is it?
Depending on when you look at it, it might be worked around or fully enforced again, it comes and go, but at least Youtube doesn't seem willing to give up that stance entirely.