alt Hacker NewsSocial media is the smoking of our age, and it will come to be seen the same way we see smoking now.
Just like the tobacco companies, social media companies have known about the ills of their platforms for a long time and actively hidden it and/or publicly downplayed it.
No: It's more like leaded gasoline. People of the future will be like, "why would you let a big corporation control the feed algorithm?" Social media is fine. It's the algorithm that seeks addiction/engagement that's the problem. Not social media in general.
"Social media" is far too ambiguous anyway. For example, under most definitions, Steam is a social media platform. Yet no one is addicted to sharing things via Steam. But you can! You absolutely can share and browse people's posts, screenshots, videos, and even chat (text and voice)!
The reason why no one complains about Steam's social media features is that they're not designed to be addicting. That's not the point of the platform (it's to sell more games).