Depends what you mean by social media.

Digital socialization is not necessarily bad.

Easy self-publishing at scale is not necessarily bad.

A marketplace for human attention, where products are optimized for “stickiness” and “eyeball-hours” is bad, but doesn’t necessarily need to be social media. (Buzzfeed comes to mind, and Ricki Lake before that.)

The social media that we ended up with is essentially a chokehold on the means of digital socialization, forcing users to perform for an audience instead of connecting to individuals, and capturing the economic value of that performance as an asset for the platform owners.

We could’ve ended up with something quite different.

Here’s a hot take though:

Products that are built under these conditions will inevitably tend towards a shape that reflects the logic of the market, and they continue to reflect that logic even when financial incentives are removed.

For instance, Lemmy is very Reddit-shaped, and therefore reflects some of the market logic behind Reddit, even after you stick it on the fediverse.

Edit: Barry’s Economics has an excellent video on exactly what sucks about the social dynamics baked into these platforms: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU