The real issue that a lot of people keep forgetting or ignoring is monetization. This alone is responsible for at least 80% of the damage we have in nowadays internet, not just social media. YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, Twitch streamers, podcasts, you name it, are there only as a business to these "influencers", and naturally the more you progress in time the more there's a need to be extreme to get noticed in this exponentially growing domain. So back in 2013 you could get an audience by making some prank on Vine, but in 2025 you have to pretend you are "exposing Somali frauds" to get the same engagement level, and thus the money and popularity, as pretty much no one will care if you made prank videos in 2025 anymore. There are bots running on Twitter as we speak that are actively shilling and grifting on trendy topics, podcasts paid by sponsors, even on HN especially since AI with these wrappers trying to sell subscriptions or asking you to sign up on their blogs. The list goes on. The problem isn't social media. The problem is the oldest issue in history: money and greed. Everyone is trying to monetize anything, including selling used socks or whatever on OF!
When your society is structured around "sell yourself or die", and the people with capital enough to call the shots like it that way... This is what you end up with.
Tangentially, I think that the “excuse” for these platforms that they need to make money enabled a lot of the current dystopian level of ad tracking.
Network effects be damned, we should all be a little more willing to pay to be part of platforms hosting digital communities or at least contribute in some way to the infrastructure.
And if we did, what would be the difference? Sure, there would be no ads on the platform (plenty of sponsored content, though), but there would still be an algorithm. And it would be minimally different to the one that exists today. The current ad driven model doesn't allow paying advertisers to drive the algorithm. Rather it lets you drive the algorithm by your revealed preferences and then allows advertisers to target you based on those preferences and insert their ads in the result, which is much more effective. But if we didn't have the ads, the algorithm remains. The question "what does this user want to see?" is equally as relevant to a company that wants to convince a user to keep paying for their subscription as it is to a company that uses it as an advertising vector.
The algorithm has not fundamentally changed. There is no secretive or sinister purpose to it. It is simply a highly imperfect predictor of what you want to see. When the algorithm promotes things you don't like it's because there are millions other people with different taste than you who do want to see that content. Certain categories of content grow and fade over time because things like that grow and fade in popularity over time too just as they always have and the algorithm picks up on that. The algorithm is not driving this, it is responding to it. We are in a prison of our own design.
The algorithm is just what the site owners, and their advertising clients, want you to see. If that means you're going to be shown a dozen BEN SHAPIRO DESTROYS COLLEGE STUDENT WITH NO MEDIA TRAINING videos, well, you're going to be shown those damn videos even if you hate it.
It's a predictor of what you'll click on. This correlates somewhat with what you want to see, but they don't care one whit about what you want, and the two don't always line up well.
In short, the problem is ragebait. I might open up some app because I want to see cat videos, but when I'm presented with "Polly McPoliticianface LIES about FLOWERS" I'm likely to click in anger about Polly's nefarious actions. Do this enough and you end up with something that just tries to make you angry all the time.
This is inevitable. Ragebait is noting inherent to social media or feed algorithms. Cable news is a 24/7 feed of ragebait. The feedback you provide to the social media (or cable news) algorithm is whether or not you chose to watch it, not why. This is not in conflict with what you want. If you didn't want to hate watch, then you wouldn't do it. That you want it for negative reasons doesn't take away from the fact that you do, in fact, want it.
are you having trouble with the idea that people might not want what their behavioral profile implies? Right now you clearly seem to be interacting with people posting wrong takes, from your perspective, on hacker news. Would you glad if all the internet reconfigured itself tomorrow such that all you could do was read people being terribly wrong about this particular topic? pages and pages of it. "how happy terminalshort must be" the algorithm thinks, a job well done. Right up until someone is wrong about something else you care about
