I agree with you that the "networking" aspect of social networks is functioning, but I happen to think it is functioning to make the "social" aspect less pleasa

I agree with you that the "networking" aspect of social networks is functioning, but I happen to think it is functioning to make the "social" aspect less pleasant. > This means the conversation falls back to tribal bickering and shouting You are right that this will always happen, but I do not think it will be the dominant interaction. One of the reasons this interaction comes up so much is that platforms optimize for it - bickering and shouting is engaging. It gets clicks and eyeballs and shares. Jerry Springer was a popular tv show (and good for that team) but it's wrong to say that we can only make TV like Jerry Springer. There's a great deal of research in the UX / Social Science world on "affordances" - UI features basically. They're the nouns and verbs that we have in digital spaces. Often the research is very basic but it is out there. I think social media companies could do a lot better with the affordances they give to people. They could be more playful. They could be more free form. They could slow down conversations where people are rapidly tagging each other and sentiment analysis suggests they are fighting. Etc, etc. The human brain is a very complex thing and one of its primary purposes, as far as we can tell, is to be social - the thing you say isn't a task. I don't believe being social isn't a task. I just think we're very bad at helping our brains be social (a thing they evolved to do for millions of years) in a medium we just invented maybe fifty years ago. We can get better, but only if we try.