[shant_extry]

In spirit I agree with you 100%. As someone who (minus a MySpace account that lasted about 2 weeks, over 20 years ago, and a LinkedIn which only exists for job applications) never had Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (you name it, I haven't had it). So I've been watching what's happened to people from the outside. I know there are positives to social media but the challenge is how to keep them while removing the bad elements.

I actually love your example of selling an otherwise good product with a poisonous ingredient and I think the most middle-of-the-road weapon against the negatives of social media is to remove those ingredients. For example, no infinite scroll, no algorithmic ordering, forced slow loading if you've been on it for more than a certain number of minutes, etc. (I'm just spitballing). In other words, undo/ban all technological features (or "ingredients") of the things that the social media companies have done that are deliberately meant to pull on weaknesses in human psychology. They know they're doing it. They hire experts to do it.

You've already got the receipt for this. That memo isn't a company that stumbled into harm and feels bad about it. It's one picking a launch window based on when the people who'd object are busy.