I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment expressed in this post. Our attention is extremely valuable (both to us and to advertisers), and consumers today broadly squander it.

For consumer digital products, the only business model that seems to work is advertising, because consumers are cheap and refuse to pay money for software. But the result is that they instead trade something far more valuable for the software, which is their attention.

The products that get built, as a result, are supremely well-engineered to attract and retain attention, to the detriment of their users. Most of the "news" that reaches us these days is not at all an attempt to actually educate us about the state of the world. Instead its just a collection of inflammatory and enraging facts that are chosen to optimize for engagement (to hold your attention)

In theory, someone could rebuild an ecosystem where people stopped squandering their attention and monetized it with money, but this would require consumers to stop chronically undervaluing their time and overvaluing their money.