[lenerdenator]

Friends haven't been a focus of social media feeds for almost 20 years now.

There's not a lot of money in hosting a website where people share in-jokes and comment on each others' graduations, engagements, and baby announcements. Well, maybe there is, but there's a lot more money in farming engagement through ragebait and division.

Meta in particular is a great example of why you cannot judge companies purely by profitability and why you shouldn't ever let the CEO also be the primary shareholder and chairman of the board that's meant to govern the company's behavior.

[hedora]

Twitter was similarly bad.

A better heuristic is market share. We should reintroduce media ownership rules that cap audience share to something < 10% per distribution channel. Meta, Disney, Paramount, etc should not exist.

[lenerdenator]

In a way, I'd argue Twitter was the thing that motivated social media to take the path it's currently on.

Facebook was originally about people you were acquainted with in real life. You had a pre-existing reason to engage with them. That engagement wasn't as lucrative as SV investors wanted, but it was there.

Twitter never had that premise, or lost it very early on. You screamed into the ether, and people either responded or they didn't. One way to increase the chance of receiving a response is to say outrageous things. Once people figured that out and how to put ads adjacent to the outrageous thing, there was at least some pressure on Facebook (later Meta) to do the same thing, because we're here to make money, not friends.

And really, there are elements of that in old media, too. Their business model was to have captivating programming on TV and radio that would keep you tuned in to see what was happening in the next part of the show after the ad break. Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Springer, every 24-hour news channel, etc. were all very good at this, coarsening of the discourse be damned.

Regardless of who owns it, if you introduce a motive to constantly and eternally increase the value of a media company, you will see a move towards slop content at some point if you have a long enough timeline. It's inevitable.