Was Social Media a Mistake?

Not at all.

Someone was going to do it.

The mistakes are:

Failure to educate people better on the dynamics of speech. The idea of,"right to not be offended", comes to mind. We don't have a shield in the First Amendment for good reason.

Agency in conversation. We control our end of things, and we control our responses too.

So often the goto is righteous indignation. So many other tools are available. Humor, disregard, honest engagement... A lot gets escalated way too easily. Very favorable risk reward ratios result in mega drama, lots of butthurt.

Doesn't have to be that way.

Weighting of things isn't done well in a lot of cases too. A clown gets at us, and we allow that, instead of calling the laughable as such?

Norms. Social media could be used more to understand others better. For those who embrace doing this, it's pretty awesome. Perspective is out there. A world of it for the asking. Near free... such an opportunity wasted.

Had the software come with better norms, the hard work in all this, our social media problems would be much less, maybe non problems.

The biggest, in terms of "fake news", seems to be the idea of conflating opinion and advocacy into "news", now a bludgeon. Evaluating these things is part of the cost of being connected.

People are ill equipped, and often appear to have some expectation of there being trusted, work free, sources that they can count on.

Those don't really exist. For profit news, and the education problem I first mentioned, combine to render many people, too many people, victims of some kind, rather than critically minded enough to navigate things.

Technical solutions have their place, but also costs. One being dissent all to easily marginalized as toxic, propaganda, fake, whatever flavor of the day is.

Most of the problems are human ones. It's gonna take a generation or two for new, better norms, education (when we start digging deep on that one), to take root and begin to turn things around.

I just hope we don't lose frank, real expression, citizen reporting, advocacy and other vital things along the way there.

At times, I feel a Disneyland type Internet is our doom.

Hate the thought of all that. I've met and interacted with awesome people, had some of the best, raw, real conversations ever online, and the idea of it all being rendered safe?

No pain, no gain kids.