[kryogen1c]

>Meta is like one giant cancer

Cancer is a great metaphor because its a perversion of natural, healthy processes. So called social media is nearly that, but actually grotesquely unhealthy.

People are dramatically unwell when they are not social, but that unregulated process is also negative up to and including being lethal.

[rolandog]

Exactly. It started out as something good: see what friends and family are up to. But now: scroll infinite algorithmically placed or sponsored rage bait trying to trigger you into behaving the way that advances certain corporate or foreign interests at the expense of whatever was left of our already tattered social fabric and our collective mental or literal health.

[1over137]

> It started out as something good

No it didn’t. That was just like the first free sample from the drug dealer. Give a “good” free service to rope them in, always with the next steps in mind.

[Quarrelsome]

I disagree. I feel like earlier social networks hadn't yet huffed the "lean startup" gas and weren't obsessed with engagement and thus were not yet trying to hook their users into an engagement cycle like where we are today.

I feel like the Myspace/Friendster and early Facebook were nowhere near as harmful (albeit for addiction, those sites were still vulnerable to grooming) as where we are today.

[danny_codes]

OG Facebook was perfectly fine. In your analogy it’d be more like someone replacing your Diet Coke with actual cocaine. Like, yeah Diet Coke isn’t great for you, but it’s not cocaine.

[rel_ic]

Being on "social media" is a fundamentally unsocial activity: you do it alone, it makes you lonely, and it separates you from others. Some people manage to bootstrap a social layer on top of the base medium, but most are being driven apart for profit.

I call it _anti_social media.