I see it more as capture of unwitting content producers. It's the same faustian deal made by medieval landlords to their serfs. The social media companies own the real estate and tools for improving it and allow their users to live and work there for free so long as they sign over everything they produce to their lords.
That's not even remotely true. If you're sufficiently big enough on social media you can get your own advertising deals directly with advertisers and cut out the platform itself. If you're small enough that you can't do that then your content isn't worth much anyway on an individual basis.
Will anyone pay me for this comment? I'm guessing not. Will anyone pay for yours? Also probably not. Because in both cases they take minutes or less to write. 99.999% of most content on most social media is equivalent to this, what is it worth?
The internets "landlords" didn't decide these comments have no monetary value, we did.
>The internets "landlords" didn't decide these comments have no monetary value, we did.
I disagree. The value of my "creative" (I'm using that in a very broad sense) output is real and belongs to me.
While that may not be translatable to a pay day, not everything is a commodity to be bought and sold.
There are a variety of issues which created the current (dysfunctional, IMHO) landscape, none of which have anything to do with monetization.
Firstly, there's the huge barrier to entry that comes with the prevalence of asymmetric internet links. If I have (multi)GB symmetric network links, I can host as well as consume.
Secondly, there's no broad-based mechanism for individual control of creative output. PGP or a similar mechanism would be great for that. But instead, we have centralized platforms (see my first point) that dictate how and to whom data is shared.
With symmetric network links and strong cryptographic access controls, barriers to an individual having control of their creative output are significantly reduced.
Some folks will want to monetize that, others will not, with a mix of both being the norm.
But claiming that there's no "value" in something because you can't assign it a monetary equivalent seems a pretty narrow view of value, especially WRT to social interactions with friends and family.
If you took a social network and split it into one network with everyone who has more than 50k followers and one network with everyone who has less than that, everyone would use the second one, because it would be the one with all their friends and family on it.
And then all the pop stars would move to that one because they're inherently the ones chasing the users, whereas dad doesn't want to install another app on his phone which means mom can't stop using that one and neither can you.
With the right micropayments architecture an upvote could easily be 0.1 or 0.01 cents. Or even $1. None of it has to be visible to the user either, just like mobile data bills aren't visible to the user
