[wongarsu]

Social Media used to be better when you actually had a connection to the other person. Nowadays it's mostly anonymous or parasocial. All social media sites have drifted to influencer content (TikTok, Meta, Youtube) or to moving the identity of the other person to the background (reddit, HN). The inbetween of early social media with smaller groups of people who know each other has gotten very rare

The other factor is that everyone now knows how powerful social media can be. Remember when we had positive movements like Occupy Wallstreet, the Arab Spring and Anonymous Hacktivism all facilitated by social media? That doesn't happen anymore. Small things like getting traction for a petition still work, but anything that questions existing structures has no chance of succeeding anymore. Instead social media is overrun by bots that simulate broad consensus on many issues

[whstl]

Bingo. In a nutshell: parasocial relationships doing psychological and financial damage; anonymous inflammatory content doing social damage.

And that’s without putting things like dating apps, advertisements and privacy violations in the mix.

[Noumenon72]

Are you sure this isn't an Eternal September thing where the initial organizers were just an early-adopting minority, now overrun by a majority that actually has broad consensus on many issues? Also, do you actually have any evidence of bot effects? Would you be able to unleash a bunch of bots on Bluesky and make it seem to have a consensus on tariffs being a good policy?