Instead of having adventures into the great unknowns of the web, we instead now spend most of our time on social networks: boring, suburban gated communities, w

Instead of having adventures into the great unknowns of the web, we instead now spend most of our time on social networks: boring, suburban gated communities, where everybody's "profile" looks exactly the same, and presents exactly the same content, in the same arrangement. Rarely do we create things on these networks; Instead, we consume, and report on our consumption. This is a brilliant observation. Facebook started as a scrappy but fun college thing, and now it's a platform for people to brag about travel and the food they eat. To get anything decent out of humans, you have to create a context for excellence. Otherwise, it's Sturgeon's Law that sets in. That is a natural way of things, even when the technology is well-designed. This is similar to complaints about job sites or dating sites because "the sites are broken". No, the sites are fine. They do their jobs extremely well. It's people that are broken. The problem is that there's no money in creating a context for excellence, and the economic pressures on an organism like Facebook to mediocritize (remember that this often happens by default; no one explicitly decides to make their platform shitty) are just too powerful.