Comment by mort96

We aren't going to stop algorithmic social media through sheer force of public will without government involvement.

Social communities aren't nimble. There a ton of inertia in a social media platform. People have their whole network, all their friends, on the platform; and all friends have their friends on the platform; etc. So in order to switch from one platform to another, you need everyone to switch at the same time, which is extremely hard.

Facebook started out pretty nice. You saw what your friends posted and what pages you follow posted, in chronological order. It had privacy issues, but it worked more or less how we'd want to, with no algorithmic timeline. But they moved towards being more and more algorithmic over time. Luckily, Facebook was bad enough that it has gotten way less popular, but that has taken a long time.

Twitter is the same. It started out being the social media platform we want: you saw what your followers posted or boosted, chronologically. No algorithmic feed. But look where it is now. Thankfully, Musk's involvement has made plenty of people leave, but there were a lot of years where everyone, regardless of political leaning, were on Twitter with an algorithmic timeline. Even though a lot of people complained about the algorithmic timeline when it was introduced, they stayed on Twitter because that's where everyone they knew were.

YouTube too. For a long time, the only thing you saw on YouTube was what people you've subscribed to posted. It built up a huge community and became the de facto video sharing platform as a nice non-algorithmic site, and then they turned the key and went all in on replacing the subscription feed with the algorithmic feed. Now they've even adopted short-form video where you aren't even supposed to pick which video you wanna watch, you're just supposed to scroll. And replacing YouTube is hard due to its momentum.

So even if everyone agrees that algorithmic feeds are terrible and move to a non-algorithmic platform over the next few decades, what do you propose we do when that new platform inevitably shifts towards being an algorithmic platform? Do we start a new multi-decade long transition to yet another platform?