Is there a place to watch lemmy user numbers in real time? interested to see if there’s a spike as users try out something else with their new free time.
It really does work that way. In fact, I’d say attention is one of the most valuable things on the internet. Giving something your attention not only implies it has value to you, but it gives that thing actual monetary value for advertisers.
Giving something your attention not only implies it has value to you
This is what we’re talking about: value to me specifically.
If something has no benefit to me, I can see that doing it is a personal flaw but I still can’t resist the compulsion (could be anything: time wasting reddits, crystal meth, alcohol) then it seems really weird to conclude that I “value” it. I’m pretty sure most people don’t use the word “value” like that: it’s for something that has a benefit to the person. In this case, the “value” is negative if anything.
Do you value your time?
Sure, generally speaking yes. Who wouldn’t say that?
Here’s your problem though: the process of logic where you look at someone’s actions and conclude that they wouldn’t have performed the action unless it was valuable to them only works if:
- Everyone is a perfectly rational agent that only chooses to perform actions that they believe will benefit them.
- Everyone is capable of perfectly predicting whether an action will benefit them overall.
Obviously neither of those things are true. Even if #1 was true, your approach still would run into problems because you wouldn’t know if a particular action was a misprediction (that actually didn’t end up providing value to that person) or whether it truly was beneficial. Since humans are both often quite irrational and pretty bad at predicting effects to boot, well… back to the drawing board.
