Our society has more dependencies than node.js, and the incentives in facebook’s world are skewed toward big payoffs for bad actors who will benefit at the expense of all others.
I’d classify this comment as fitting a very common paradigm called ‘If I were the god this would be my simple solution, so let us dispense with further discussion of the matter.’
The same is true for Facebook. They have thousands of very smart people who are incentivized to do everything they can to get you to scroll, scroll, scroll. To think it's going to be useful to tell society at large to "just walk away from the dopamine pushers" is not going to change the situation.
As the number of people that can freely access the internet grows, you see them focusing around a single social media platform. That's because social media strongly benefits from centralization, it's easier to talk to family and friends if you don't have to manage fifty different accounts.
The idea that there was a 'multitude of cultures' before Facebook is just wrong. There was the main social media platforms and a bunch of niche offshoots. That's why this is such a tricky problem to fix because even if Facebook vanished tomorrow, eventually there would be another platform which absolutely everyone would circle around.
One solution is open, decentralized protocols.
The article addresses that a little bit here:
> ...the internet platforms were able to pursue business strategies that would not have been allowed in prior decades. No one stopped them from using free products to centralize the internet and then replace its core functions.
It's easy to talk about open and decentralized protocols but social media is a popularity contest, not one based off the best or most free platform. As the article mentions nothing was and nothing is stopping them from capitalizing on open and free products, followed by gutting and replacing them.
XMPP, RSS/Atom, and HTML are three examples of EEE in modern times.
- XMPP => proprietary chat that locks users in
- RSS/Atom => algorithmic news feeds that lock users in
- HTML => AMP -- if you want distribution, they tie your hands with markup and monetization restrictions
- etc.
If this was the standard model, you'd have greater utility as you wouldn't have siloed platforms and you'd get greater control over your personal data (as EU has already recognised and is legislating in any case).
In retrospect, at least their business model wasn’t opaque.