Slow social media
herman.bearblog.dev
herman.bearblog.dev
I am working on mobile apps and redesigning and reengineering a lot of the site and I love your thoughts on a blog focus. I’d love to let people host a small blog on the site that would also connect to their actual blog. I’ll add that to the roadmap.
Definitely stop by some time! https://seven39.com/
I like what youre doing but just saying - youre dealing with a very difficult problem.
If you’re looking for an actual antidote to the addiction, I don’t think that will exist in the form of a product, that will come from individuals themselves if it ever does.
I will say I did visit the site months ago and found that just hanging out with random people wasn't that compelling to me. In the early days, it was fun because it was new and there was a lot of energy, but after that, you really do need something to bring you back day to day.
These things already exist and struggle exactly because people comfortable with the walled garden approach forgot what FB was like in 2006 when you only knew 15 people on there. The lack of critical mass of your personal contacts outside of the walls is exactly how FB and IG keep you from venturing outside the walls.
Friendica is one of several fediverse platforms the author basically describes. You can even self-host an instance for yourself and friends/family.
And you may say:
> I tried Mastodon once, which is not immediately intuitive, and the apps aren't perfect. Plus, the wikipedia article describes something that isn't perfect, so I shouldn't bother.
Perfect. IMO, the minuscule friction to enter is the benefit. The walled gardens exist and hold people in such high numbers exactly because they've reduced the friction to enter and increased it to leave. The definition of a trap, yes?
Do they limit forwarding? Or give users an option not to be shown forwarded messages?
For me, unlimited posts (or rather, minimal friction in posting), and blind forwarding are what destroy social media. If you can make only 3 public/group posts a day, chances are lower they will be crap.
I'm on Mastodon. It's only very mildly nice. The reality is that it still suffers from all of this. I still have to cut off connections because of the guy who's always ranting about some politician/political party.
Increase the friction for people who want to rant!
Most of it, at least - it does give the option to not be shown forwarded messages. There's controls on the home timeline to not show boosts, quotes, and/or replies.
What a bizarre complaint. Running into people you disagree with is part of the human experience of participating in society.
Mastodon has great self-moderation options. You can mute a person on a timer or permanently, optionally blocking their messages and replies to you and/or their public posts. You can also use any number of word filters to hide posts behind a warning or silently remove them from your timeline.
But really, this is how socialization works. You meet someone, talk to them for a while, eventually decide if you do or don't like them. I don't really get how you can twist this into a critique of social media. It's just how humans are.
> > I tried Mastodon once, which is not immediately intuitive, and the apps aren't perfect. Plus, the wikipedia article describes something that isn't perfect, so I shouldn't bother.
You use a quote angle bracket, indicating that it is a quote. It is not a quote, it's a straw man.
Nobody is saying "this isn't perfect, I won't use it." People are saying "I can't figure this out, I guess I won't use it."
> Meta basically turned Instagram and Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content'. Even Pinterest is starting to look like TikTok! They followed user engagement, but not the underlying preferences of their users. I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
So no, the problem isn't high numbers with friction to leave. The problem is that the sites' incentives are different than the users. Facebook had high numbers and a lot of lock-in and was a much better product before they decided to basically stop showing me any content from my friends that isn't controversial. Twitter has high numbers and a lot of lock-in but it's better there because I can still get a linear timeline of tweets from the people I follow.
But this may serve an equivalent purpose:
> And finally, there should be a reasonable cap on the number of times a user can post per day. Roughly 5 times per day feels like the upper threshold of what you can post while being intentional about what it is you're posting.
Amusingly, just yesterday I said in a comment:
"Imagine you have a quota of only 1 HN comment per day. You probably will be a lot more careful on what you reply to."
1 HN comment a day is interesting as it would also introduce a lag into the speed of development of threads as you wouldn't know ahead of time what threads you would want to post in until they've all been created.
Something I think about personally is what would be the result of requiring people to invest a personally meaningful amount of time and/or money into posting. "I have to pay to speak?!" people ask. Well, yes.
Of course, this immediately seems to tie someone's ability to post to personal finances which isn't the intention. But the key idea is that it has to be something personally costly enough that it implies an honest and intentional signal, which always seems to end up as either time or money.
Some forums implement time-gated posting which is interesting. If you have to wait a minute to be allowed to post, can you still be bothered? But would I have paid to write this specific comment? I'm not sure, I guess that depends on the market rate for posts at the time. I have no doubt there are tens of ways this system breaks down that I haven't thought through.
The first comment in a given day has no wait. The second requires waiting 10 minutes. The 3rd requires an hour. The 4th requires 3 hours, and the 5th another 12 hours or so.
Obviously: No edits (or let the edit count as the comment).
Lots of variables to play with. The nice thing about time is that it is egalitarian. Richer people don't get more access.
> If you have to wait a minute to be allowed to post, can you still be bothered?
At work, I often log out of HN. The need to log back in often does act as a deterrent. I also occasionally use LeechBlock, with a 60s delay. That too acts as a deterrent.
Interesting. I've tried blocking things via hosts file to add that kind of friction, but it's too easy and often I'm waiting on something that takes longer than the time it takes me to 'fix' the hosts file.
> At work, I often log out of HN.
This works for me for posting but doesn't help so much with the FOMO of new threads. If I had to be logged in to view I imagine I'd read far fewer threads.
Not sure about social media, but in the days of forums I posted way more thoughtful and helpful posts on the forum I attended.
(I'll be honest, I didn't read the post yet. I'm doing this now)
Requires some (significant?) investment to have an opinion on a book. It's often pretty obvious if someone hasn't read a book and is commenting on it. The interval between comments is hours/days because users are off reading the book.
You create 'content' by doing something orthogonal. You pay for access vs selling attention for ads. You only look at Strava when you are working out, so engagement is authentic vs contrived/performative. I care about my friend completing a run because I know they did it.
One of the best thing they did was allow the chance to add photos.
You can have as large or as small a community you want, you can have known people, unknown people.
Mastodon comes close as well, but the effort to start a discord community is so much smaller compared to running a Mastodon instance.
What about a requirement "at least one direct interaction in a year"? Maybe with a reminder "you didn't catch up with X in 11 months, are you still connected"? This will both:
* Achieve the main reason of social network existence, i.e. give people an excuse to have a chat with a former friend and keep in touch. I sometimes thing about messaging a person I knew years ago, but it feels awkward enough that I don't do it usually.
* Naturally limit the number of connections, because now having connectione require (small but still) work. A very small dopamine addicted users may still try to collect connections, but I feel like this platform will be hostile enough for them and they will leave anyway, not finding what they want from SM.
And comments should be disabled by default. Users should have to take the extra step to enable comments ("I would like feedback") and if they're off by default, it won't feel strange or negative to the viewer.
The best online discussions I have seen where at simple forums where the posts were listed in chronological order without likes or anything.
I don't expect to learn much at all from internet discussion at this point. It serves a minimal socialization purpose and then my actual learning is from books and language models.
I actually had a moment just yesterday, imagining/hoping my toddler daughter will grow up and refer to my phone in the same way I did with my parents cigarettes when I was a kid. My mom always claims she had no idea they were dangerous when she started as a teen. I wonder if we'll all sound the same with social media and our devices to our kids.
Always. This broadcast ability is then a path to financial renumeration, which will see the rise of copy cats and another arms race to gather attention from people on the network.
Fundamentally, information / clout / something is resistant to being distributed equitably on information networks, especially online networks.
The admins regularly ignore this, because the users like seeing posts from "I'm a carpenter looking for work right now!".
So, even with a supposedly sequestered monetization area, it bleeds into everything.
Have any countries proposed legislation to help reign it in? What would that legislation look like? My main idea is to simply outlaw ML-based recommendation algorithms, but obviously that is not as simple as it sounds and is mostly based on looking fondly on the earlier days of social media, when I felt like it was making my life better instead of worse.
https://www.newarkadvocate.com/story/news/2022/09/30/ohios-a...
Getting rid of any non personal accounts also. So no companies, brands, or meme accounts, and accounts that exist for non personal content only.
I think legislating what is good and bad math is going to be exceptionally difficult.
Here's my random idea: all commercial accounts must be labeled as such, and people should be able to opt-out from seeing any post by such accounts - except ads because, as I said, not allowing a platform to monetize is unrealistic.
Social media companies, by contrast, can publish posts from their anonymised users that contain almost anything, and it is permitted. It can be racism. It can state that £300M a week could be spent on the NHS if only the UK would leave the EU. And those posts can be sent to millions of people without regard to truth or the damage they can do.
The classic response to this is “well, you can’t expect us to police such a large amount of content, it’s impractical” - a fair response - but then there’s a bit of sleight of hand from Meta et al: they conclude that they should therefore be allowed to broadcast anything a user shares. But an alternative conclusion is _well, then perhaps you shouldn’t be broadcasting inflammatory nonsense from any person/bot who posts_ and you have to find a new operating model.
It’s tricky because free speech is important, but I think we’ve seen enough times how dangerous, divisive, and destructive social media is. If there’s no way to prevent people and states from abusing it, then it probably shouldn’t exist. When the retrospective is written on the fall of America and the west, social media will be one of the key explanatory factors, along with hypercapitalism.
I get why youre making the comparison, but, regulatory bodies tend to be averse to acting quick because they want "all the data" to be more certain in decision making. Such data only comes with time.
With the caveat that it is very clear people want this horrible social media we have. They consume outrageous content, they pass it on, they create it for these platforms.
A lot of proposed regulation frames it as big bad tech companies making people do things like they're victims. But without people participating there would be nothing on there and in reality the human factor feeds back into these loops ... and keeps them going.
I think a lot of the proposed legislation comes at it at the wrong angle and is unlikely to fix it because in the end the users are a key component, not just some terrible algorithm or creepy CEOs.
Personally, I'm against government intervention for this sort of thing. I prefer government to be constrained to securing my liberties, rather than restricting my behavior "for my own good".
As a parent, I talk to my kids about social media like I talk to them about junk food. I want them to recognize that it's bad for them - it's addictive, and provides short term pleasure that results in long term misery. Avoiding it, or making good decisions about how you interact with it, is a personal responsibility issue.
I see this (and, honestly, most problems) as much more than a personal responsibility issue. To me, it’s an issue of misaligned incentives and unpriced downside costs. It’s clear that market forces push companies to build an addictive service that produces long term misery. It’s also clear that social media has a cost on its users (producing long term misery, reducing acute productivity) But this cost is not paid by the social media company.
I’d argue that widespread use of the social media that today’s market incentives create is bad for society as a whole, not only for any one individual. Correcting market incentives that don’t align with social good is, in my opinion, one of the most essential purposes of legislation.
There are no good answers, because the reality is the next medium is probably quite different from the last. But yea personalised small group chat, feed, news makes sense.
When there is an already-existing community like that, I think a dedicated social media platform for that particular community can be beneficial. That platform then does not have to be the social media for everyone.
However, funding (for hosting and maintenance) is still an issue.
Chat groups in WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram etc fulfills part of it but that's only a subset since people in one chat groups know each other to a certain degree.
In the beginning when I left Facebook over ten years ago it felt alienating. Then it felt too quiet. Then whenever I met people, months apart or even years for distant family, I realised it didn’t matter. We connected like it had been days since our last meeting. Eventually more and more of them have also quit social networks entirely, though most use group chats for their immediate family — parents and kids to orchestrate activities etc.
It feels paradoxical to say that, but I think it's true both that social media is bigger than ever in terms of flurry and activity, and that normal people participate less (outside scrolling the feed passively). A few people are semi-professionalizing in it now, influencers with sponsorships, local celebrities and trendsetters etc., while normal people's normal life updates are dwindling. The Pareto split is sharper.
I'm always surprised at how HN folks are either unable or unwilling to admit that the fediverse exists beyond Bluesky or Mastodon. I far prefer lemmy to reddit, and Friendica is essentially that the author is describing. This stuff exists already, and it's the perverse incentives of social media such as walled gardens and a critical mass of people that are what keep them alive.
Most everyone is on facebook that I know of and they're not going anywhere and I'm not. I actually missed that an old coworker had died recently. Frustrating.
Email, phone, text.
I have a few friends who won’t communicate outside of Meta products and I just don’t interact with them any longer.
One thing many forget when presenting new ideas for social media platforms is that we've been burnt by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Imgur and even LinkedIn to some extend. I'll never trust a social media platform again because of people like Mark Zuckerberg. There's nothing you can say or do that will convince that your new platform won't turn to shit just as fast as Facebook did.
The business model doesn't work out, because not enough people will pay and you cannot run these platforms on ad revenue and be trustworthy.
Path[1] did that, but with a cap of 50, and then 150 (based on the Dunbar number of meaningful human connections one can retain). They had a crazy growth period but eventually went kaput.
People definitely use it for this, but what has really surprised me is people's capactiy for expression inside of the bounds of the program I created, and how people are clearly using in as a sort of ad hoc social network of loosely collected boards and inspiration. There are no actual _social_ features in the app (no discovery, etc.), but what has been sort of inspriring is that The Will is just there for people to find ways of expression outside the idea of a "feed" and "posting".
I think those models have indeed become synonymous with "social media", but my only point here is to bring up a possibility of "social media" as something that can be much more expansive and look very different compared to the primary models we think of today.
Another person favorite of mine along the same lines is how the comments section of this Pilsburry recipe for "veggie pizza" has become it's own sort of ad-hoc social media for grandmas to share their own experiences with each other about the dish: https://www.pillsbury.com/recipes/veggie-pizza/4b2c60ae-69e5...
In fact, these days, I only post in it so that I can record the moment, to add it to the record of fotos which are convenient and fun to look back through.
I get some link to FB and TikTok in my chats and groups but I don't open all of them. I don't have the apps, so if I do I open them in the browser. I'm not logged in. No TikTok account. Links to Instagram are very rare. No account. I check WhatsApp and Telegram when I feel like, no pressure.
It’s hard to explain the difference between it and Twitter if you never used it, but the platform itself creates very different posting ideologies.
I miss chronological feeds the most.
Even in the early version, these life updates became a competition of who has the fancier wedding pics, who went to a trendy vacation spot this year etc., leading to an idealized picture of how the life of everyone else is going.
It's a bandaid on the lifestyle of having to move cities all the time and cutting connections. Seeing their life updates doesn't really keep the connection alive, it's an illusion.
There are people who fade out of one’s lives for various reasons, but it doesn’t mean that the relationship has to end at that. There are many schoolmates, coworkers, etc. who I wish l I had some idea where they were now, which I don’t have right now because of my general avoidance of social media.
This is just a way of keeping on the pulse and generating common context if said pair were to meet again, instead of simply awkwardly smiling and trying to end a conversation as soon as possible.
Example: I was an employee with my first fulltime job for nearly ten years. After I quit the job I instantly lost contact to all people. I would have needed to actually go the company building to chat with them (or calling at work), which I didn’t because it was Covid time. But on XING (LinkedIn-like platform for Germany) one former colleague left his private phone number for me, and I messaged him (after some years, because I was in a depressive phase), and now we meet every two or three months.
So it’s not about voyerism for me but keeping contact or at least give me some hints if any relation might be worth pursuing. I don’t want (or need) people in my list just for being a watcher of their life.
I dunno, if I don't want anyone to see the post I will not post it or limit its visibility, I am very much in the same camp as the person you're replying to.
People who I lost regular contact with but am totally happy to meet again once a year or every couple years. (Does not mean more often would be bad, just being realistic). Which we actually do, from time to time.
We also have a Slack with old colleagues form one company, but it's mostly a way to contact them or for the occasional tech question and chitchat, so it's even more closed off - but no different than broadcasting events, really.
But I'm also not arguing that it's strictly needed.
> if I don't want anyone to see the post I will not post it or limit its visibility
Yes, and nowadays people tend to share less. Exactly because in the 2000s these instincts were less sharp and then people realized that a wider circle of people is looking than they thought and things remain online for long.
It is a HUGE social benefit to me, as I've moved far away. I don't need Abe's phone number, Betty's email, and I don't expect even Christmas cards updating me on Charlie's family. But if any of them post on FB that their parent or child or dog just died, graduated, or got married (in a progressive animal-rights nation), I can make an effort to let them know I care.
I hope meta doesn't ruin this feature.
It's Also available in signal I think
some people are building custom, tailored social networks only available to their family, church, community, sports team, school, etc...
This was previously impossible but now AI changes that. I don't know if it will materialize, but a more federally distributed web with tons of small private social networks could be a future of healthy social
The feed (etc.) algorithm could be written in natural language and executed by AI.
Isn't this what Mastadon is?
1. People have to accept you as a follower, and the default is bi-directional.
2. There are no visible follower/friend counts.
3. Chronological feed which has an end (no infinite scroll)
4. No arbitrary character limit
5. No analytics (enforced by E2EE)
We don't have a max friends/number of posts per day though.
(Before someone says I have rediscoered email -- I know email exists for a similar reason but not for instant messaging for a smartphone weilding generation)
The original Facebook Messenger and Google Talk both used XMPP, it has support for encryption and push notifications.... For a brief period, you could actually chat across ecosystems.
And it died, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
We do have matrix now, but it's still largely irrelevant, and doesn't really feel fully baked yet.
At this point, all the major companies have a huge vested interest in keeping things closed.
Without blue bubble lock-in, I, and quite a few people I know, would ditch increasingly mediocre iPhones for Android, so apple has to keep building iMessage exclusive features and has to avoid ever releasing an iMessage android app (most recently, Apple Invites, which integrates with iMessage cleanly and is impossible for third-party apps to integrate so neatly).
I expect Apple to continue to leverage "Apple Intelligence" as a feature that only integrates well with iMessage so that they can continue to lock users in, and keep the conversation as far away from open chat protocols as they can.
In the AI age, unencrypted textual conversations are a new source of training data, so Instagram, Twitter, and Google want to keep their own messaging systems to themselves.
I think this is more accurately
> And it was killed, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
Not to say there were not problems with XMPP or Matrix, "innovation" always feels slow because its federated, committee, opensource, etc.
... Really though, if you've got a whitepaper from 2020 about "building a protocol", and 6 years later you've got exactly 0 users actually using the protocol, it's maybe not even worth linking.
Writing a vague hand-wavy paper that says "We need a distributed graph, we'll use blockchain, there are IDs" is very easy.
Getting enough users that people can talk to each other, that's hard, and real usable applications help with that, while whitepapers do not.
The experience is what people want. Not the technology. The technology is this thing that delivers the experience but the consumer does not need to know of its existence nor how it works.
Just started building autogram.bio to help people create their personal corner of the web, and this post was exactly the motivation I needed to continue. Thank you!
later on it got some games and a realtime chat but it ended up dying because of newer social networks. it was great to keep your actual friends and family connected.
It was also invite based and it was exciting to get an invite back then. It was more like a phone book, it had detailed profiles where you could specify your favorite things, introduce yourself, upload a few pictures etc. It didn't have a newsfeed. Later they would introduce some kind of notification when someone uploaded new pics. But it was mainly "poll-based", i.e. you'd go to specific profiles to see if they uploaded anything new.
This was a significant break from the pseudonymous forum and chat culture (A/S/L?), and blended your real life with the previously totally separate online world for the first time. Now you could look up classmates, see who viewed your profile, of course it drove a lot of teen drama as you'd expect. It was a more public companion to the nascent MSN Messenger culture (which replaced the SMS-based more private teen comms culture, which replaced the family-landline-phone-based gossip culture and of course IRL-based one, feels weird to have lived through all those transitions - we didn't even have a family landline phone in the early 90s and would use phone booths to call family members in other cities).
The mainstream dominance of iWiW in Hungary was actually quite short-lived (~2004-2009), though it feels longer in my memory, there was so much happening, so much new stuff popping up. Note also that iWiW got bought by the local subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom already in 2006. So it was quite obvious that there's commercial value in such sites.
Initially Facebook was also more profile-focused, where the main activity was looking up profiles, checking their friends, reading bios, looking at galleries etc. (where you actually clicked links to explore, instead of being fed a feed and just scrolling), and the newsfeed-focus only got introduced later.
Nowadays, Facebook is mostly a public agora in Hungary, the platform for politicians and pundits and social critique etc (instead of Twitter like in other countries). I think the eager culture to post updates for real friends has dwindled, people are less naive about it and also realized they don't really care all that much about their second cousin's vacations or their old classmates' life updates. Real personal "social media" is mostly in private Whatsapp groups I think.
Young people do care - but the "checking on friends" and "showing off my glamourous life/vacation" has moved to Instagram and Snapchat. Partly because Facebook is full of "old people" and thus less cool. As the Insta generation starts to have their own kids, those kids indubitably will look for another platform...
The one key element I added was privacy. If your posts are private to your social group then there is no mechanism to try appealing to a broader "viral" audience. Also--if it is decentralized then the company (or person in my case) building it can't change their mind and start selling your data/eyeballs.
I have a LOT of thoughts in this space. Lots of people think they want some sort of healthier social-media alternative, but we're fighting against systems that are so finely tuned engagement monsters that is hard compete to protect your attention and time.
Herman- I'll reach out to you by email!
[1]: https://havenweb.org
Also Discord and Reddit are not too bad for more strangers with common topic based chat that isn't too algorithmic.
Whatsapp groups are as terrible as the alternatives. Every group I've been a part of that has more than N people (all who know each other) has devolved into endless memes, political talk etc, and very little connecting.
Give me Whatsapp where I have a setting to simply not show me any forwarded message, and I'll be happy.
> It feels like smartphones have saturated the available time. It's like the famous quote from the Netflix CEO: "Our main competitor is sleep." There aren't many more biological hours in the day to capture. At this point, it's mostly a war between recommender systems for your attention, as they've already consumed roughly all the available time.
...
> For me, the big issue with recommender systems isn't that they will destroy our minds, though that is a possible risk. It's the incredible waste of potential. Billions of hours of human time will be allocated today, guided mostly by clickbait incentives. The goal is to entertain people, not in a joyful way, but to help them dissociate.
> You have such an opportunity. There's probably a video on YouTube right now that, if I watched it, would inspire me to call my dad, talk to a stranger, or start a new relationship. Google could probably introduce me to a good friend, a co-founder, or my future life partner.
> They have the data, but they aren't using it that way. Instead, they're optimizing for a few more cents of advertising revenue, which is a colossal, civilizational-level failure.
...
> That is the crux of the incentives problem we've been discussing. One thing that gives me hope is we're no longer in the era of free software. Paradoxically, now that intelligence is cheap enough, people are willing to pay for software. It's more reasonable to charge for a subscription now because you can provide measurable value to someone's life. Paying $10 or $20 a month for a social media service that actually helps you live according to your goals is a much less crazy proposition than it was 10 years ago.
[1] https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/forecasting-the-future-of-r...
The largest social platforms right now are hardly showing any signs of slowdowns. The market signal is clear: this is what most people want and are fine with.
Perhaps a journaling-focused platform where social is a second-class aspect might succeed. You're documenting things for yourself anyway and if friends happen to see them and engage with them, that's an added bonus. Network effects would not matter here. In fact, this is how I used Path back in the day. I intentionally kept no friends on it and started using it like a journal, recording my thoughts, adding photos and checkins.
For profit social media is totally possible. But a "healthy" version won't happen until govts reform social media such that Attention is demonitized or remonitized.
The post is right in that Attention has been monetized by social media companies. How much Attention you pay to something and how much Attention you receive both got monetized. They monetized Attention by adding View, Like, Share and Follower counts to everything.
And those counts started acting like Currency does in the real economy.
For example a key feature of Currency is that it acts as Store of Value. That value can then be exchanged at whatever time for something else in the real economy.
But in the real economy the Money Supply is regulated and controlled by the Central Bank. Why did that happen?
Before Central Banks (a very recent invention) showed up individual Banks printed their own currency. If they printed "too much" all kinds of strange phenomenon started emerging in the real world. For centuries no one connected that back to how much money was being printed. Because people had no idea what the level of the money supply was. Just like on social media there is no tracking or visible signal of the global Money supply and interest rate setting to control it.
So any time there was a price rising in the market, bank runs, bubbles in the market people would blame everything under the sun other than those responsible for money printing. After centuries of chaos Central Banks started emerging to control what individual Banks could do. Same story will repeat with Attention(which is acting just like a Currency).
This is why Elon and Trump rush to start their own Attention Banks cause they understand better than anyone being able to print a store of value that everyone else uses gives you power.
This is also why having China influencing the money supply (Attention) of US is via TikTok is non-optional.
So people eventually land on 2 paths forward - 1. Demonetize Attention - which is what the post is talking about
2. Remonetize Attention - where there is tracking of how much Attention anyone can receive, and how much Attention anyone can pay. Similar to what controls exist on Banks in what they lend and how much cash they need to hold. And Banks can then run for-profit without doing as much damage as they did when they controlled the money supply.
Lots of scamming behaviour takes place on those platform by means of acquiring wealth on the platform in the form of social currency (likes, followers and so on). And Meta is there to help them exploit - and perhaps hopes to dumb people down further - so they get hooked to the platform more.
tl;dr: people have a huge diversity of preferences for social media, we need to rearchitect social networks to allow them to express those preferences while still connecting with each other, I think atproto enables this and is where I'm betting on.
I expect that by suggesting something that is quite literally what the author described, we'll both be downvoted to hell because HN has a staunch "fediverse, ew!" mentality.