Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay

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When the biggest platforms seem to be flailing or punting on problems, it’s often because they’re trying to address broad social issues with market solutions. They’re rediscovering, at scale and at great expense to their users, the ways in which a society is more than a bazaar, and the pitfalls of allowing human attention to be sold and resold as a commodity. If a platform is addressing a collective problem in a maddeningly strange way, consider that it might see itself, or only know to govern itself, like an eBay. If it can’t keep bad actors from using the service to exploit other users, that’s because it’s modeled after a system in which finding the highest bidder — or the biggest sucker — is gamely understood to be the point. EBay invited us onto an auction floor and dared us to compete with one another; millions did. Social-media companies found a more lucrative approach, with an even bigger payoff, by building the auction floor right under our feet.


Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay