alt Hacker NewsThe real issue that a lot of people keep forgetting or ignoring is monetization. This alone is responsible for at least 80% of the damage we have in nowadays internet, not just social media. YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, Twitch streamers, podcasts, you name it, are there only as a business to these "influencers", and naturally the more you progress in time the more there's a need to be extreme to get noticed in this exponentially growing domain. So back in 2013 you could get an audience by making some prank on Vine, but in 2025 you have to pretend you are "exposing Somali frauds" to get the same engagement level, and thus the money and popularity, as pretty much no one will care if you made prank videos in 2025 anymore. There are bots running on Twitter as we speak that are actively shilling and grifting on trendy topics, podcasts paid by sponsors, even on HN especially since AI with these wrappers trying to sell subscriptions or asking you to sign up on their blogs. The list goes on. The problem isn't social media. The problem is the oldest issue in history: money and greed. Everyone is trying to monetize anything, including selling used socks or whatever on OF!
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When your society is structured around "sell yourself or die", and the people with capital enough to call the shots like it that way... This is what you end up with.
The algorithm has not fundamentally changed. There is no secretive or sinister purpose to it. It is simply a highly imperfect predictor of what you want to see. When the algorithm promotes things you don't like it's because there are millions other people with different taste than you who do want to see that content. Certain categories of content grow and fade over time because things like that grow and fade in popularity over time too just as they always have and the algorithm picks up on that. The algorithm is not driving this, it is responding to it. We are in a prison of our own design.
Tangentially, I think that the “excuse” for these platforms that they need to make money enabled a lot of the current dystopian level of ad tracking.
Network effects be damned, we should all be a little more willing to pay to be part of platforms hosting digital communities or at least contribute in some way to the infrastructure.