alt Hacker News> This isn’t inherent to social networks though. It is a choice by the biggest social media companies and to make society worse in order to increase profits.
going beyond social media it's IMHO the side effect of a initially innocent looking but dangerous and toxic monetization model which we find today not just in social media but even more so in news, apps and most digital markets
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Yeah unfortunately this seems to be a common, if not inevitable, result of any product where "attention" or "engagement" are directly correlated with profitability.
And if we want to go beyond that, we really just have to blame capitalism. What happens when you build a society around the adversarial collection of money? You get a society that by and large prioritizes making money above all else including ethics and morals.
I will say I am strongly against what social media algorithms do.
But I am fascinated by the black mirror element. They said "hey algorithm what gets likes, what gets views - look into human nature and report back" - "human nature shows polarization does! emotional charged divisive content!" - that's just fascinating. Not learning, philosphophy, growth, education, health, no, the naughty stuff, the bad stuff. That's not to exonerate social media companies, no, such would be the same as exonerating big tobacco for what they do.