That’s not supposed to happen. Adding a way for people to make income is supposed to incentivize better content and allow people to invest in that content. Instead what you get is a flood of addictive and sensational / tabloid trash.

… or another way of looking at it is that you do get “better” content but better is not defined in a way that truly benefits anyone.

YouTube is the most dramatic example. The quality of the whole platform tanked hard when monetization was added.

After seeing this a few times I have started noticing it everywhere. The profit motive just doesn’t incentivize quality the way we are taught that it should. It can when the incentives align but they often do not.

Another common example is actual reductions in quality to drive more spending like engineered obsolescence or “nerfing” software to drive lock in. The incentive is to produce an inferior product since that is most profitable.

This doesn’t mean I think the answer is a government bureaucracy running everything like a single monopoly. That leads to a whole other set of perverse incentives and an inability to go elsewhere.

Yes; Most people get hung up on terminology and/or specific interpretations but i am convinced this is the natural order of things for the Human species. The balance without going to extremes is what is important.

While also somewhat contested in Germany, and not free of (some) valid criticism, I would advocate to try and use the term "Social market economy" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy

My opinion, however, is that my parents did the right thing to drag me out of such a system and into a capitalistic one. I am watching my peers suffer.