I disagree; incentives matter, and when one earns more by promoting harmful behaviors, that's what many will do. They mention the example of Snapstreak, which is designed to keep you plugged in; that's not a symptom of technology, but a symptom of the economic model of the group of people developing it.
Not that I disagree with your overall assertion, but without economic incentive there is really no incentive in most cases. For someone who does have economic incentive, it's really business risk reduction 101 to not pin your application to a network of invisible and hidden dependencies that you have no control over.
It's more profitable to do it that way. And after all, who can be blamed for following the incentives? Really, it's the users' fault for creating the incentives.
Given the track record of the web3 community in regulating itself, preventing fraud and corruption, and even building a tech stack that can be trusted... I don't think we should place a single bit of faith in their ability to align incentives with the kinds I'm talking about.
The kinds of economic incentives I'm talking about come from industry experts working with democratically elected officials with a system of government that is concerned with the rights and freedoms of a society to have access to technology and infrastructure for the benefit of everyone. The kind of Keynesian approach to economics rather than the Austrian school (which has shown itself to implode and fail and enrich the few at the cost of the freedoms of the many, less fortunate).
I work at a related office mentioned in this thread (but am posting personally here):
You're 100% right about all of these, and I would emphasize that *the tech is not the hard part.* I would challenge you a little bit about something 10x greater being "beyond objectionable" - a benefit to users may not align with the incentives you named. For example, there's public evidence that some state governments deliberately made benefits harder to access to help even their budgets.
Everything's downstream from the incentives. What kind of users do you attract by making your website faster/more efficient? People who can't afford a new phone, and whiny boomer nerds. Both of those demographics are more trouble than they're worth.
nothing. there is no incentive. its not about money its about providing value for free and for the world to use....at least that's what it used to be. Idk what it is now with all these corporate garbage going OSS.
Is getting rich a bad incentive? In order to get rich you must provide people with goods/services that they want at a price they can afford. It's win/win.
If the general public wants Hot or Not apps that is what they will get. Who are you to decide that their money/resources should instead be used on something that you want?
Those aren't the only answers. The notion that people only respond to direct incentives is incorrect and ahistorical. It's a convenient dogma for the selfish to promote, but I don't have to take it seriously at all.
Another perfectly good option is for tech people to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy. Which is what's happening right here in this discussion, so you could be part of that solution if you wanted.
That's the whole point of Web3. Unfortunately the incentives as currently designed are relatively simplistic and seem to go wrong more often than they go right, but the idea is there.
just like the far right wrongly assumes social net make people not work, giving all the demands in for profit minded investors and banks remove all incentive to fund innovation. all corporations are milking 50s and 60s tech still, to great success. just like Disney was still milking 40s cartoons.
Then that makes "incentive" a rather useless word, because everyone who wants to make the world a better place also has the incentive to make everything better. Why single out Google if it's also true of Microsoft, Apple, and me?
Getting users. Tech isn't the meritocracy everyone likes to pretend it is.
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