Forums have been around for decades and build worthwhile village communities that largely self-police and are free from centralised corporate control.
Here you set yourself up to decide that the forums' communities are 'worthwhile,' but in the context of this discussion, one might speculate (though you did not state) that other major social media platforms such as FaceBook and X's communities are not worthwhile. You didn't say that.
Online forums are under the control of the ownership and particularly moderators, and moderation sometimes reflects ideological loyalties. Some of these forums have pretty intense conflict at times. One major difference is even a really large online forum tends to be a minor player compared to FaceBook or X (e.g.: CruiseCritic.com). So they fly under the radar. If as many people poured onto one and it gained the membership and social prominence of FaceBook, we'd probably see similar issues. How many Americans have heard of Quora? Near everybody's heard of FaceBook.
TV was, until recently controlled by schedules. Without VHS or DVD you couldn't watch the same thing on repeat and kids TV was limited to certain hours of the day. Shows like Lost promoted a lot of forum discussions and even now big streaming shows are talked about in the office.
So it was practically regulated situationally, and people's freedom to consume (what, how much, when) was very limited by today's standards, and you seem to imply some content should be considered 'worthy' (implying some should not?).
That's probably what the Chinese Communist Party thinks when they decide what to allow and under what terms. And, as some here seem to wish, the CCP banned FaceBook from the country.
Videogames have been social since Spacewar! with even a room of kids on their Gameboys letting them talk and discuss things in person. Videogaming promotes a community on and offline and many of us made good friends from school because of our shared love of them. They can be addictive but only in the same way as a book you cannot put down.
Video gaming addiction affects a minority. Some of the same criticisms of social media would hold up against video gaming (which has its own set of alleged issues).
Now social media has morphed from being just another useful tool into an engagement magnet designed to suck up seconds of a users attention in the name of nothing but profit.
The makers do not want you to go anywhere else; it is designed to be addictive and suck out your time.
Most any corporate product in a free market society is designed and marketed to promote maximal engagement and usage. Chocolate chip cookies, potato chips, binge watching on Netflix, comic books, t.v.s shows (this episode ends on a cliffhanger so tune in next time when...), etc... And they largely exist to turn a profit. It is up to the consumer to decide whether and how much of that product to consume. And McDonalds does not want you to eat at Burger King.
Recommendation algorithms destroyed the idea of a finite timeline and pushed the idea of forums as a private village of hobbyists into a public square of discordance.
You may value a 'finite' timeline and 'private village of hobbyists,' but a great many of your and my fellow citizens may prefer an infinite timeline and public square even with its 'discordance.'
In fact, one of the key criticisms is that via Friends lists and algorithm-generated feeds of similar content to what you've Liked, etc..., FaceBook lends itself to ideological echo chambers that foster polarization and vilification of the other side. If you're seeing some discordance, that implies we're talking to each other, even if it's acrimonious at times. And Americans today could benefit from that dialogue rather than simply clustering with the like-minded.
I've see far too many friends, teenagers and children sucked in by the feed, too many children ignored by their parents not because they were playing Pokemon or watching reruns of Friends but because they had been hooked, lined and sinkered by the endless video feed.
Presumably your friends are adults and making their own choices. The issue of minors is serious, given that not only are they developmentally vulnerable but don't have the degree of legal agency that adults do.
By the way, from what I've seen (I have a kid), watching YouTube! videos and playing iPad games, particularly with online participation with others, can be every bit the 'time suck' that FaceBook is. Was starting to think my kid might never grow out of
Hello Neighbor.
It doesn't promote any sort of community or discussion and is nothing but an outright negative.
It doesn't have to. If free-willed adults want to consume social media, they can.
If the governments just legislated against recommendation algorithms and you only had that finite feed of the people you follow or are IRL friends with,...
But a lot of people want those recommendation algorithms informing lengthy feeds with content they might like and wish to spend a lot of time on FaceBook.
I know it's tempting to conceptualize the issue as the dastardly social media companies hypnotizing innocent sheep to keep people locked into a virtual world so it can profit off them (hey, we're in the early days of
The Matrix!), but a lot of the 'problem' has to do with how free-willed people choose to exercise their liberty and spend their free time.
