The optimist in me thinks this problem with corporations and addiction will soon pass. And my reasoning is two-fold: 1) all addiction is "accelerating", 2) soci

The optimist in me thinks this problem with corporations and addiction will soon pass. And my reasoning is two-fold: 1) all addiction is "accelerating", 2) social media is ripe for parasites. First about accelerating addiction. There is a know phenomenon: the more drugs you take - the more is required to reach the same high. Same happens with porn: the more porn you watch, the more depraved varieties you look for in order to replicate the experience. Well, same happens with "clicks" addiction. At first a simple "Today I Learned" post gets you going, but as you indulge more and more the more depraved content is needed to sustain the interest. Soon it turn to memes, then to politics, then to actively looking for "other group" to hate on. And at this stage the same user base that was once "addicted" are no longer profitable. They manifest themselves as racists or anarchists or whatever gets them the same rush as they once had from a "TIL" post. But in either case they are no longer profitable for the corporation. Maintaining and policing everything becomes more and more expensive. The company begins introducing various "changes to policy". They try to sell those changes as "better thing becoming even better", but in reality they only try to combat the natural consequences of their own platform. Second thing - currently the corporations themselves are an untapped resource in the market ecosystem (so to speak) and other companies will feed on them. We already see some forms of this happening. Take reddit for example. It thrives on addiction, but is also speedily acquiring parasites that, in turn, feed on reddit. Bots, ad farms, vote manipulation. Reddit wants to sell ad space, but how can other companies trust the metrics, when bots abound. How many of those "clicks" are actual people? Reddit tries to put algorithms in for bot detection? - old users are start selling their accounts for real money. It is an arms race. While at the same time new competing platforms also advertise themselves via reddit. So those two observations, taken together, suggests that the profit part of the social-media corp is slowly decreasing, while operation costs are increasing. Sooner or later they will die. The new ones will spring in it's place. However the acceleration in new corps will be a lot faster. For one, the "parasite" companies now have experience and they won't wait until a platform becomes popular - they will jump on the host a lot quicker. And the users, coming from a dying platform, will demand memes, porn, and hate almost immediately. Hence there is no real cycle here. Just one dying idea of a social media. At least that is what I like to imagine is happening.