This is always brought up, and the simplest way to have a big impact is restricting these features: - Infinite scroll - Autoplay - Sort by popularity - Reco

This is always brought up, and the simplest way to have a big impact is restricting these features: - Infinite scroll - Autoplay - Sort by popularity - Recommender systems Note that e.g. Facebook had none of these features when it was getting popular, so any suggestions that social networks are impossible without them is revisionism. Suggesting friends based on your stolen phone contact list isn't really a recommender system as by definition they're contacts that you already know. Remove those, and most of the harm of social media is gone. If you want to go further, you can do away with user-facing popularity metrics (likes/upvotes/friend counts).