I don't think social media was doomed from the start - there were many years of healthy enough communities (I'm mostly familiar with LiveJournal in the early 20

I don't think social media was doomed from the start - there were many years of healthy enough communities (I'm mostly familiar with LiveJournal in the early 2000s) that didn't have all the downsides of modern social media. You saw updates in most-recent-first order, if you refreshed the page you got the same thing (perhaps with a new update at the top, but it was easy to tell when you'd caught up), and if you had too much stuff to read, you figured out how to trim some of it away ("FRIENDS CUT!"). The cost to operate the infrastructure was fairly minimal, and it accomplished most of the things we actually would like from social media without the downsides. What we haven't proved is that you can have social media run by a publicly traded, ad-revenue-funded company without all sorts of harmful effects (with the main interface being smartphones with push notifications). That's where all the nasty "engagement" effects come from - trying to drive eyeballs to ads to improve revenue. It's very much a zero-sum game - every pair of eyeballs has 24 hours in the day, so the goal is to command their attention for as many of those hours as possible. That's where the evil creeps in.