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Was social media a mistake?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026
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Social media run by corporations based on algorithms designed to maximize engagement was a mistake. It may, however have been inevitable.
By that I mean I'm not sure a clever person with a time machine could go back 25 years and prevent it from having roughly the popularity and influence it does now even if someone with a quarter century of future knowledge tried to outcompete it with something that isn't centralized or optimized for engagement. Those traits were evolutionary advantages over that time period.