Twitter and Facebook in 2019 are both dumpster fires, but they aren't the totality of social media. Before (and concurrent to) them we had Friendster, Myspace,

Twitter and Facebook in 2019 are both dumpster fires, but they aren't the totality of social media. Before (and concurrent to) them we had Friendster, Myspace, Orkut, and a plethora of hybrid services that have social networking features. Facebook and Twitter (1) optimize for mobile, where expressing complex thought is difficult, (2) perform relentless A/B engagement testing seemingly without accounting for the fact that people engage with things that make them unhappy, and (3) have a huge news/media presence. I think all these elements and probably more contributed to the cancer these services have become.