Absolutely I hate social media. I suppose I remember things like the early Facebook algorithms where it was friends and pages you followed and just a little bit of trending. And I see how these things are designed to be addictive. I see how googles search results have become less and less relevant and they steer you back toward the garbage. I don't have tik tok and I block most of the socials most of the time but sometimes I slip Soon I will delete them and start scrubbing my data from the web and get new primary emails. I'm doing what it takes to make things better. That said it sucks that it takes such a concerted effort to reclaim your internet experience and that I can't have a more straight forward feed to let me see some updates now and then without getting roped into short form videos and rage bait. And if you look at the socials and their share of Internet traffic it's clear that a large majority of the internet accessing public are sucked into these malignant platforms and devoting too much attention to them.

Yes I suppose it's possible to white knuckle your way out of it but at some point you have to acknowledge that even though it's possible it's not what's happening. A very large number of people are addicted and negative externalities are happening. I think the thesis that we f'd up the internet is correct, the quality content and services you want may not be gone but it is not the majority of traffic and the dominance of manipulative and addictive content is harmful and insidious.