MK

On the old internet, you could show a different side of yourself in every forum or chat room; but on your Facebook feed, you had to be the same person to everyone you knew. 

Social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.

Instead of being fed from above a limited diet of standardized cultural products, everyone — not just a minority of highly educated omnivores — can now craft a varied and customized cultural diet from the digital cornucopia. People create these customized diets by sharing the work of “curation” in differentiated niche taste communities. This

The whole idea of social networks was networking : building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide.

Moreover, as the critic Rob Horning has argued with respect to TikTok, algorithms do not simply discern what we want and serve it to us; they train us to want what they can serve us. Successful platforms do not just discover what consumers want — they produce the consumers and the forms of consumer desire that they need.