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I agree about tiny loud minorities, but would also add the 4chan incubated fash stuff alongside Tumblr and parts of Reddit.

As far as censorship goes, it’s clear that the deeper problem is that mega social media doesn’t scale. When the aforementioned loud obnoxious minorities invade, it becomes totally untenable.

If you don’t censor you end up with either a Nazi bar or a Tumblr struggle session. If you do censor you end up with either a boring milquetoast platform or a censored echo chamber that just reflects the beliefs of the people running it. None of those things are appealing to most people.

As a medium for real communication it just doesn’t scale. Places like HN are tolerable because they’re small enough to be actually moderated and to self police. This is also why real discourse has moved to Discord, Slack, Telegram, Signal, and private sites.

Maybe brain rot is the platforms attempt to fill the void left by the fact that discourse doesn’t scale. This might alter my view slightly. My take has been that platforms push brain rot to be addictive, and there may be truth in that, but maybe that was more a later move to try to save the platform’s user numbers after the collapse of social media as a productive discourse medium in the late 20-teens.

In the end it’s that social media just failed.