I don’t know the research on this, so this could be totally off of reality, but my gut feeling is two main issues with social media:

1. It’s too focused on broadcasting yourself rather than cultivating close friendships

2. Social media at large scale seems to become increasingly toxic, with no real winning moves because different people want different moderations.

On (1), most social media is largely one sided. you’re tweeting out onto your own profile or making some grandstand on a post. hell, what I’m writing now isn’t anything more than some random words from a random person who doesn’t matter in your life - whether my words resonate or not being somewhat irrelevant. about the best I can hope for is someone to read this and either agree or disagree, and maybe discuss on it. but there’s some implicit desire for me to shout out my opinion into the void of the internet, and so here I am.

very little social media seems designed to take people on common interests and actually link them into longer term relationships like friends. it wouldn’t be close to this form of interaction if it did. the best example might be dating apps, but even those aren’t great bc they profit off a lack of success and so don’t put in the effort to be good, imo.

On (2), this seems nearly insurmountable. maybe client side filtering would help, and maybe LLMs or ML client side is getting good enough to be mechanisms for really intelligent filtering, but without each user being able to determine what they want to see and filtering, i don’t think large scale social media is tenable. I think you literally can’t moderate a good experience for everyone.

I happen to like the idea of going into an office as a young adult isolated into their home with no real life relationships. /r/technology immediately becomes frustrating to read because there’s a solid post a day where the comments section collectively calls anyone who wants an office a bootlicker; how is that going to make me feel?

in a different vein I’m quite progressive. if I read a comment on a programming subreddit trivializing the terrible conditions in much of the US because they make a programmer’s salary, it’s going to piss me off. someone reading this sentence who’s conservative has now gotten pissed off because of me by reading that above line.

so maybe you just moderate to repress opinions or anything strong? maybe we could start with decency? except to some people being decent and kind is an endorsement of status quo and makes you a bootlicker. so that won’t work. and beyond that do you really want to have a sterile experience? or is something in you craving the opposite? because I’ve found I went on Reddit far past fully knowing it was damaging to my happiness, because of some pull into the awful toxic doomer discourse now prevalent there. call it addiction or whatever, but it’s hard to stop.

we aren’t built to run at the scale of the internet, or the world, or even our own cities. social media as it stands makes it so difficult to turn any of that off; corporate incentive and profit also feeds off the anger it creates. the only good social media would be one detached from the capitalist profit machine, substantially smaller scale and dynamic to groups of compatible users, and it should probably be unrecognizable from the social media of today. (It also probably needs to be designed by psychologists and not tech bros, and given I'm in the latter I’m not volunteering to try.)