> Most people these days don't have a word processor or, indeed, "any number of other tools". It's all "in the cloud", usually Google Docs or Office 365 Browser Edition(tm).
Read that again. ;-)
> Most people these days don't (arguably never) understand files and folders.
We can debate on the skills of "most people" back and forth, but I think it's fair to say that "save as web content" is easier to figure out than figuring out how to navigate a social media site (and that doesn't necessarily require files or folders). If that really is too hard for someone, there are products out there designed to make it even easier. Way back before social media took over, everyone and their dog managed to figure out how to put stuff on the web. People who couldn't make it through high school were successfully producing web pages, blogs, podcasts, video content, you name it.
> I'm going to stop you right here: You are vastly overestimating both the will and the computer-aptitude of most people.
I disagree. I think they don't have the will to do it, because they'd rather use social media. I do believe if they had the will to do it, they would. I agree there are some people who lack the computer-aptitude to get content on the web. Where I struggle is believing those same people manage to put content on social media... which I'll point out is on the web.
> There is a reason Youtube and Twitch have killed off literally every other video sharing service
Yes, because video sharing at scale is fairly difficult and requires real skill. If you don't have that skill, you're going to have to pay someone to do it, or find someone who has their own agenda that makes them want to do it without charging you... like Youtube or Twitch.
On the other hand, putting a video up on the web that no one knows about, no one looks for, and no one consumes unless you personally convince them to do so is comparatively simple.
> there is a reason smartphones killed off personal computers (desktops and to a lesser degree laptops)
Yes, that reason is that smartphones were subsidies by carriers. ;-)
But it's good that you mentioned smartphones, because smart phones will let you send content to anyone in your contacts without you having anything that most would describe as "computer-aptitude". No social media needed... and yet the prevailing preference is for people to go through a process of logging in, shaping content to suit the demands of social media services, attempting to tune the content to get "the algorithm" to show it to as many people as possible, and put their content there. That takes more will/aptitude/whatever, but they do it for the distribution/audience.
> Social media became the juggernaut it is today because businesses figured out how to capitalize on the latent demand for easy sharing of information: Literal One Click Solutions(tm) that anyone can understand.
I'd agree with you if you said "distribute" instead of "sharing". It's really hard to get millions of people to consume your content. That is, until social media came along and basically eliminated the cost of distribution. So any idiot can push their content out to millions and fill the world with whatever they want.... and now there's a sense of entitlement about it, where if a platform doesn't push that content on other people, at no cost to them, that they're being censored.
Yup, that does really require social media.
> The internet and more specifically search engines in general have always been that distribution platform. The only thing that changed in the last 30 years is how easy it is to get your stuff on that platform.
No, the Internet & the web required you to go looking for the content you wanted. Search engines (at least at one time) were designed to accelerate that proces of find exactly the content you were looking for faster, and get you off their platform ASAP. Social media is kind of the opposite of search engines. They want you to stay on their platform; they want you to keep scrolling at whatever "engaging" content they can find, regardless of what you're looking for; if you forget about whatever you were originally looking for, that's a bonus. It's that ability to have your content show up when no one is looking for it where social media provides an advantage over the web for content makers.