A. I don't care what 95% of people I am connected with are doing, and I regularly talk to the people I care about anyway.
B. I can't have any meaningful discussions on them
C. They are dominated by high volume posters who tend to be very opinionated. Very opinionated people tend to have extreme opinions which are usually wrong and aren't particularly interesting to me.
D. The networks present a false sense of reality which lowers happiness. Everyone always posts their highlight reel which makes you feel like the whole world is killing it constantly and you aren't.
This! I can resonate with all of your points. But this one is one of their major weaknesses.
If this is what happens in your feed, you have a shallower and less genuine set of social media connections than I do. I get highlights, sure, but just as much lowlights, and quotidian events that don't meet either description.
I suspect that the people who connect with networks of people who do exclusive self-image-burnishing social media posts would also connect with people that provide the same kind of fronts in other venues (including in-person), though I'll also grant that if you tend to connect predominantly with such people, social media magnifies their effect, as it's easier to consistently present an image online than in person.)
I don't think you have to be "shallow" to be biased towards posting highlights.
You spend a nice vacation in Asia? Your kid managed an important accomplishment? Found a restaurant that's awesome? Aren't these the kind of things that you naturally have the tendency to share?
In contrast, you spent your saturday doing nothing at home? Your kid did an average thing? You ate food that's just "okay"? Am I shallow if I don't like posting these things? Sure some of the days I might want to post about some average or bad things, but I think I'm still biased towards the highlights
Having said that though- I've been there since 2007, and I used to get lots of compliments for posting original content (pictures of food being cooked). People love to talk about food there- plus you get to hear actual line cooks talking about things. You don't have to wait forever to get a reply on a thread, and good threads (like costco food threads) can go up to hundreds of replies before being pruned. All in all, I don't hate the place. My usual bookmarks each day are: 1) HN 2) Reddit 3) /ck/ + /g/ + /fit/ 4) google news (only if important stuff is hapenning in the world, though I Have to admit that the fastest place to get instantaneous information nowadays is /b/)
Personally, I spend ALOT of my free time lurking 4chan's /g/ "technology" board, 4chan's /ck/ cooking board, and a carefully curated list of my favorite food and technology related subreddits on Reddit. I personally consider my addictions to be quite healthy because I learn and absorb a tremendous amount of information from sites that focus more on "actual content that matters" and less on worshiping the same small group of narcissistic acquaintances that congregate on platforms where "disliking" content is frowned upon.
Sure there's a lot of stupid crap on 4chan and reddit is full of corporate and government shills, but the internet has grown SO MUCH lately that the signal to noise ratio isn't as bad as it was in the early 2000s. My only problem nowadays is that I don't have enough time in a day to read/watch/comment on all the important stuff I find on the net. Compare that to the early 2000's, when useful information on the internet was so scarce, that I had to use minesweeper in my highschool computer labs to pass the time.
I for one am happy at how much content there is on the internet now. If you're smart, you can curate your own nonstop stream of "useful" content without that much effort. Problem is that you have to reject content that is curated by big businesses like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and program your own method of retrieving things that matter.
People will always complain about the exponential growth of information. Look at newspapers and the printing press. I'm sure that people reacted the same way towards pocket watches and newspapers as people nowadays are reacting to smartphones and social media. Some people just have addictive personalities in general, and will blame not being productive on whoever's in charge of "information" at any given moment.