When people say that social media is unhealthy, they usually have in mind a certain generation of social media when like counts had been introduced, an algorith

When people say that social media is unhealthy, they usually have in mind a certain generation of social media when like counts had been introduced, an algorithmically-generated feed, a membership that sought to include everyone, including your family members, etc. Essentially that kind of social media only arose towards the end of the first decade of the new millennium when Facebook became entrenched. Yet many older members of HN spent a significant portion of our lives on the internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and we don’t feel that that online life was destructive. If anything, it was often liberating: someone growing up in a strict conservative community or in a relatively poor country could discover there was more out there. A broad range of smaller special-interest forums instead of a feed-generating one-stop-shop like Facebook or Reddit, tended to keep partisan politics and conspiracy theories away. I’m not pessimistic that that kind of good internet socializing can’t be restored for much of the population – I deleted my Facebook and Reddit accounts years ago and yet I still have found enjoyable connections with other people on various hobby forums. Some independent forums are struggling as younger generations are lost to walled gardens like Facebook, but there are efforts that could be made to fight this.