There are people who want to turn the real world into a live action version of facebook/reddit/twitter. They've got this one weird trick, and historians hate them. You'll never guess where they work now.
But, here is the one weird trick: If you think something is good, do it. But, if you make up your mind that it's bad, stop doing it. Following that rule would have kept a lot of people off these services.
To my knowledge, nothing people say about social media today is fundamentally different than what they were saying in 2008: it destroys privacy, it destroys discourse, it consumes attention, and it puts control over your life into the hands of corporations. And people recognize this: I can't even count the number of times I've heard someone say (or write) "social media sucks" and then kept right on with it. My only advice is, if you feel like something is bad for you, don't do it.
I stopped using social media because I was sick of having this critic in my brain constantly judging if an experience is worth posting on social media.
Of course this is a huge trade off with not knowing what my elderly neighbor at a cottage I never go to had for lunch.
Absolutely. just buy my book for $9.99 ahem sorry
Truly, all the things people are now seeing as bad did get mentioned by some of the crusty holdouts and refuseniks. It can be especially personally edifying, for example, to go back and read opinions you disagreed with then but now value more; this is one of those cases where there's plenty of "I told you so." Some of which was horseshit then and is still is now.
One of my favorites is "geolocation should be used as network ID"; much of the hard routing becomes "free" and the need for encryption and forwarding points becomes explicit from the start. Now with 5G we're reaching that point; but with literally layers of legacy translations that are just extra baggage now. Wouldn't it have been easier to just do it right at the beginning?
I wish I had learned from them sooner.