This is why time matters. Society has generational amnesia. New generations will think of this as normal, and will even call you weird for thinking it could ever work differently. There will be an equilibrium, but it will be much farther than you consider reasonable.
You can see this dilemma on YouTube. Videos with highly exaggerated facial expressions, arrows, and sensationalized titles full of exclamation marks tend to attract far more clicks (and therefore more revenue) than those with honest titles and straightforward thumbnails. This trend has forced even high-quality content creators to adopt these tactics to remain financially viable. Despite the misleading titles and thumbnails, their actual content often maintains the same high standards once the video begins.
If you are watching from the browser I can recommend Clickbait Remover for Youtube. It replaces the title image with a frame from the video itself. It also changes the case of titles for them not to scream at you.
it is not about explicitly voting down a Youtube channel to punish the creator for making exaggerated claims,
that type of action does not scale
what will happen instead is that people will develop an immunity to these types of thumbnails and you will visit less - behaviors are the main driving mechanisms
it will be boring like exaggerated burlesque facial expressions in the early movies
Why would they stop working when everyone does it?
The methods described might be new, but the underlying principle is simple and fundamental - charge customers based on their willingness-to-pay. If customers are willing to pay $10 for your product, as opposed to $20, almost all businesses would take that into account when setting their prices.
In a low-tech world, you can only price stuff using one-size-fits-all. So you would price stuff based on something like median-willingness-to-pay. This puts your product out-of-reach for half its potential customers, while giving a big discount to the other half. The techniques described in the article are designed to "fix" the above - sell the product to as many people as possible, and give everyone a more even discount compared to their willingness-to-pay.
There is no reason for this strategy to stop working just because other companies are also doing it. In fact, it will only snowball once this practice becomes more commonly accepted.
In a macro sense, fine-grain-price-differentiation is undoubtedly in the best interests of all corporations. Whether they are in the best interests of consumers is more debatable. I'm guessing the answer is no. In theory, the best possible outcome is perfect price differentiation, coupled with increased corporate tax rates (or capital gains tax rates) that are used to lower income tax rates. I doubt this will happen anytime soon.
> Once you know the prices are jacked up just for "you", and once you know you are being "played," you behave differently and resist.
This isn't true. If you find out that only Tesla is customizing their car-price for you personally, you may decide to boycott Tesla. But what are you going to do if every single car company does the same thing? Boycott all cars and take the bus? Hence my point that price-personalization works even better when more companies do it, not less.
Yes, but that just changes your price sensitivity (potentially all the way to 0 if you refuse). There might be some ringing or chaotic dynamics in the price discovery dynamic system but a sufficiently advanced algorithm could take that into account. Still dystopian depending on your perspective.
> Why would they stop working when everyone does it?
If everyone does it, it's a de facto cartel.
Cartels generally end when one of the members breaks ranks and starts selling the product for less than the agreed-upon cartel price and vacuuming up all the customers. The result is often a price war.
All these techniques, from gamification to behavioral mining, were developed in isolation - when only one actor maximized their profits.
Their results apply when most other actors don't pursue the same goals.
Once everyone starts to do it, I predict none will work and will be counterproductive on a larger scale.
A bit of a tragedy of commons.