Thread (personal view). I watched the Social Dilemma on Netflix. Highly recommend. It brought back many good and bad memories... and mostly made me very uneasy. Most folks you see on this video have profited tremendously from the "attention selling" industry. Back 10y ago, it was

essentially the new gold rush. Google had paved the way, of creating an industry where the entire game was to deliver value to users, in exchange for their attention, which could be monetized. Google created tremendous value early on (knowledge search, maps, etc.). The next wave

of companies... much more debatable. Social media didn't create value by surfacing/making content/information available, they created value by letting you engage with others. It started all good... but then when time came to monetize, it became clear that to maximize revenue,

they had to maximize screen time, engagement, and to do so led to a slew of product decisions and algorithms tuned to maximize what each user wants to see. In my brief stint at Twitter, we even worked on several projects where the idea was to come up with a model

that would look at all historical data/interactions between users and content, and assign a probability to each piece of content: how likely will the user engage with it (fav it, retweet it)?

This was what all of us did. Many of us got paid nicely, sold companies/technologies to these ads giants, so they could get better and better at pushing the right content to the right user. Some of it of course contributed to the quality of the experience (instead of looking at

random content/tweets, you would be getting the things you like most). But overall it led to a massive effect of echo chamber, and addiction. I personally still can't get off Twitter.

Awareness about these issues, and a documentary like the Netflix one, are critical to help everyone understand what's going on. But I fundamentally don't think these companies will be able to pivot any time soon. For all the nice talk, the bottom line is these are publicly traded

companies, whose sole business model is to sell ads in exchange for attention (screen time / time spent on surface area of products owned). Any company has a duty to maximize shareholder profit... which in this case leads straight to doing everything possible to maximize

capturing user attention. Many have been worrying about this for years, but without rethinking the business model from the ground up, there's really no way to fix this. "Free internet" leads to exactly this, nothing else. Historically very companies have succeeded at pivoting

away from their existing core business model... so it's hard to imagine why it would be different this time.
Sadly, after a few years in this industry I came to realize that the core of it was very much like finance/Wall Street. There's a game (user attention and $), and once

you're part of these companies, you have to play the game. The better you play it, the more recognized you get.
I still enjoyed my time there, learned a lot, there are many amazing folks there, but I think we were all too naive and/or greedy, and we're going to need a big reset.

I moved to greener pastures a few years ago, at NVIDIA, working on core technology/compute/AI for applications like autonomy, and I've been much happier since. The products we build is what we sell, the industry feels so much healthier to me. I do hope folks who continue

driving social media find the light, and bring these companies to a next stage. Twitter had a lot of folks who cared about helping the world/economies/emerging countries; they're just going to have to let go of Ads asap.