I'm not sure I agree I agree with the premise here.

Social networking was the high point of tech for me. And I think we are past that. Social networking appears to be dead, and it was replaced by social media. I'd say that social networking is good for our mental health and our communities. I'm not sure social media is.

The last 10 years or so have proven to me that centralized social networking is not viable. It's not socially viable. It's not legally viable. And it's not economically viable. Centralized social networking failed.

Social networking, to me, focused on staying connected with friends, family, communities, peers, etc.

Social media, to me, feels a lot like taking randos on the internet and trying to make them famous in front of a bunch of other randos on the internet. The ultimate goal is to find the most engaging, socially/legally palatable, content and hype it up to as many people as possible. The ultimate goal being to create as much engagement as possible to keep people inside the social media experience long enough to effectively monetize them.

You reward engaging content to encourage people to create it. Sometimes you share a portion of monetization back with the most engaging content creators. Other times, you reward engaging content with "internet points" that give people the warm fuzzies of "being liked." Sometimes you let creators sell their own advertisements to self-monetize the fame you've given them. But, ultimately, its about fueling an attention economy that is decoupled from our personal social networks.

When your goal is to take randos on the internet and hype them, you're giving them "a platform" they wouldn't have otherwise. You have ethical/social/legal/moral questions about when it's appropriate to hype content and who you should or should not make famous. Not to mention you're pumping all that content _through your servers_. You have to pay for the storage and transmission of that content. You have to have conversations about your legal liability when it comes to that content.

And I think this is where the recent social media "scandals" went off the rails. Many users thought they were on a social network. They thought they were sharing their content with their platforms. Platforms they built themselves in the real world. A social media app doesn't "give you a platform" with your grandma. You brought that platform to the social media app.

So when the app starts talking about what you are allowed to say on "their platform" many people suddenly realized they didn't have their own platforms. Their communities, their families, their friends, their peers, their _own platform_, was handed over to this hype machine. Users thought they were posting content to share with their friends, family, etc.

But what they were really doing was sending it all to "some dude in Palo Alto."

It's weird that we have to have the conversations we do in our society around social media. It seems very unnatural to me. A byproduct of centralized social networking failing and growing into social media.

Centralized systems are wrong for the kind of communication people thought they were engaged in. Centralized systems work really well for social media. They work very poorly for social networking.