Chris Best

People are not immutable.

They, you know, they enculture to a space they're in.

And when I say the rules, what I'm talking, I'm not talking about, like...

you know, what's the moderation policy or what's the, you know, terms of service or something.

I'm talking about something a little bit deeper.

I'm talking about kind of the underlying, the underlying game, the underlying economic incentives.

Okay.

If you're a social media platform who makes all of your money from, you know, a super efficient platform level ad exchange, right?

And your business model is essentially aggregating attention and then selling it as a commodity to the highest bidder.

You've built a system where you can, you know, if I'm that platform, I can value your time, but I can't really value what you value.

or at least that's not part of my economic equation.

And so if I go then build, let's say a feed algorithm and I'm running experiments and I'm trying to say, hey, how do I want this to work?

What's gonna be good?

What's gonna be bad?

How do I make my business successful?

I'm gonna optimize for how can I get as much of your time as possible

kind of regardless of how much you value it.

Like I might say, hey, I want you not to regret the time you spent, but in terms of raw economic reality, it's your time that matters.

When you take that

equation and you kind of like do the things that actually optimize that business, you end up pulling in these directions that create these, you know, hellish is probably the is the extreme way to put it.