It's simply cheapens everything about social media in general.

The reality is everyone, myself included, can be and will be a bad actor.

How do you build and run a "social media" product when the very act of letting anyone respond to anyone with anything is itself the fundamental problem?

Using your real name isn't enjoyable anymore because people look for things to use against you. Did you say or do something 25 years ago that today people will penalize you for? They'll search for it. So, using a handle.. ok, see the first paragraph above.

What does one get out of joining new social media? You can be amazingly creative or eloquent. Nobody is going to care and whatever it was, it is forgotten the next day. Create or dialogue for your own entertainment, at the end of the day, it's completely unproductive. No one will remember your contribution, no one will even remember you existed the next day.

I think we've all seen enough photos of people's dinners or pets.

So what is left?

I think one problem is audience reach. It's all-or-nothing. Do you really always want to broadcast to the world? (Twitter) or do you always want to broadcast only to your "friends" (Facebook) or do you want to collect names but never speak out of fear of workplace politics (LinkedIn).

One social media network I thought was interesting, but is dead now due to mismanagement (as usual) was Google+. It had the concept of circles. It was more work absolutely, but you could tag people with being a family member, or a highschool friend or a circle of people who climbed Mt. Everest with you. The advantage of this would be you could write about how great this nylon rope is, and not have it go to your family or work colleagues in the non-rope industry, or whatever.

It took years, but Google+ was STARTING to grow, then Google as usual decided to kill it off, along with Hangouts which was their iMessage competitor (included SMS at one point).

Tons of users automate accounts, posts, and even live streams, so it's impossible to tell which accounts are real, as platforms do nothing to stop impersonators and spam accounts. The Internet is no longer live nor real time, everything is also moderated and filtered by QC. Platforms censor complaints and anything they deem negative about them, people have been conditioned to say nothing because of that.

Even reddit burries private messaging on it's site, I don't want to install yet another clunky and limited app.

As so called "social media" tools, they really discourage social behavior and encourage ads and really impersonal promotion of products. It's the platforms, not the users that got us here.

Instagram actively hides pics from my step kids, nephew and niece to show me "reels" from people I don't follow. Last night a photo from my step daughter flickered briefly and then was lost. I couldn't find it again until this morning. I literally can't find their content anymore without scrolling and dodging videos that keep popping up.

Youtube broke entirely a few months ago. The content creators I've subscribed to are now rarely in my feed which is full of "recommended for you" videos and movies for rent. Several content creators I follow have their business dying from sudden drop in ad revenue due to the changes.

Facebook does this weird thing were after someone I know recommends a video, my feed switches to recommended videos entirely until I click back to home. Stuff appears from friends or family days after posting, now at the top of my feed.

Twitter is, surprisingly, the least broken, at least I mostly still see the people I follow. I still miss stuff because of the algorithm, but it's not, yet, forcing a ton of stuff I'm not actually following down my throat. And the ads are still clearly ads.

1. It siphons personal data to be able to sell it backhandedly to other parties.

2. It miniplates user post visibility and timelines towards popular people and entities, preventing independent creators from growing.

3. It charges for visibility by requiring the purchase of ad boosting from creators that aren't even profiting off of their work at all.

4. Promoted (paid) content is often not clearly marked as such, a lot of harmful content is often disseminated far & wide on platforms through covertly paid marketing.

5. Users are unaware that these platforms crawl posts and use personal content later on o power LLMs, which take full credits for ideas created by human beings on social platforms, without any sort of compensation.

6. Many accounts have vast numbers of fake followers, views, and likes... Upholding a false impression of success and growth on platforms. Even many celebrities (already considered popular) often resort to shady tactics to look more popular and successful on social platforms.

7. Many platforms distort time perception, and even manipulate timelines already, some even completely prune trending topics in order to manipulate public perception in investing, shopping, entertainment and in far more serious aspects like politics, especially when they have a monopoly on attention, such as during pandemic related lockdowns.

Modern Social Media is a now disguised form of free labor exploitation and distortion of perception imposed on all of us heavily now that large companies have developed to run vast platforms. Social Media has also fueled many scams like NFTs, Crypto, Shoddy products and services, and now the idea that stolen and parsed text and user content is somehow "Artificial Intelligence".

Social Media has been manipulating us for ages now... It would not surprise me if 97% of users or more have not even earned a dime off of it since it emerged in the 90s, but the problem is that almost everyone on Social Media acts as if they're successful, and that social media is somehow a legitimate industry, all well above reality and their means.

This latest iteration dies and i hope nothing spawns from its ashes

I think it’s great that you’ve tailored your content so well. But you’re the exception rather than the rule.