This brings up an (at least to me) interesting thought. When we say “there are no truly free services on the web” we typically imply that we pay by providing access to our personal data (which is then used to further grease the whole online advertising and content targeting machinery). Your article suggest that we actually pay with something more precious: our time and attention which is being wasted on distractions and “ill-fitting” content. In addition there is focus drift — we start out looking for “A” but are being served something that frames our original question slightly differently. We follow that track without noticing that the information we’re getting (and the decisions we may base on them) are not quite what what we originally wanted (some great examples in this article by Tristan Harris).

In the real world things cost money and — despite markets being far from perfect — this leads to a reasonably efficient allocation of resources. For many of the services we consume online we lack that cost transparency and a tremendous amount of scarce intellectual resource is wasted as a consequence.

If your personal content aggregator was available for a fee and backed by a system by which the content creators would share in the proceeds — what would be the price and how many people would sign up for it? My gut feel is that both numbers are probably higher than we assume.