I guess my point is more that, absent payments, how to order content is an impossible problem because there is no meaningful intersubjective comparison of utility.

With payments, there is an actual optimal point that we can think about our distance from.

Undisciplined

That's very theoretical though, and it usually requires that all the possible outcomes can be listed and ranked and assigned values over.   For something as nebulous as "what a user wants to see on social media, and how that affects the rest of society", it's not obvious how to implement the optimal set of side payments to make everyone better off.

But that being said, just because it's impossible to meet a certain set of optimality criteria, doesn't mean we can't meet a weaker set of optimality criteria.

How Stacker News avoids the Brand Age

Scoresby

That's very theoretical though, and it usually requires that all the possible outcomes can be listed and ranked and assigned values over.   For something as nebulous as "what a user wants to see on social media, and how that affects the rest of society", it's not obvious how to implement the optimal set of side payments to make everyone better off.  

But that being said, just because it's impossible to meet a certain set of optimality criteria, doesn't mean we can't meet a weaker set of optimality criteria.