Why do all social media platforms devolve into a popularity contest? It feels we're in a new era of discourse on what's wrong with social media & how to fix it. There is no shortage of things to blame. Blame the business model. Blame the advertisers. Blame the protocol,… Show more

In the late aughts, Twitter and Facebook still valued curiosity, but over the next decade they realized that it wasn't good for business; curiosity brought people to their platforms, but then it whisked them away. So Facebook began paying news companies to make videos that could be hosted on the site, so that users would never leave the page. Twitt

There are those who believe the social web is reaching its terminal point. I hope they’re right. Platform after platform was designed to make it easier and more addictive for us to share content with one another so the corporations behind them could sell ever more of our attention and data. In different ways, most of these platforms