It is notoriously difficult to browse through, responses are sorted in non-intuitive ways, sometimes responses are hidden for no apparent reason, yet people regularly use it to communicate.
When people post status updates or pictures or whatever, they're trying to communicate, how many times have you gotten status or upload notifications from people you haven't talked to in years, but it never showed you your best friend's new baby pictures or something like that?
Twitter, It's designed around a character limit that strictly discourages longform communication. Yet, you get people trying to write blog posts using it, much to the chagrin of many HN commenters, and generally, the quality of most communication suffers greatly on twitter because of the inherent design.
I would argue that it feels like it works, for 99% of people. I strongly believe that "social media" is a low-quality and unsatisfactory replacement for meaningful social interaction and bonding.
But that's effectively the same thing if you can't get users to change networks/platforms, eh?
> I strongly believe that "social media" is a low-quality and unsatisfactory replacement for meaningful social interaction and bonding.
Sure. It's easy-bake oven internet for non-geeks. But they don't care. The cupcakes taste fine (to them.)
Facebook's mission statement.
Whole thing creeped me out.
They're easy to use because the major social media platforms know that reducing friction to use draws people in and keeps them there, while the platform serves their attention up to advertisers. There's even ways that they make it harder to stop using them than to just keep scrolling/refreshing. Dark Patterns abound.
People on social media are generally not communicating with each other, at least not in a meaningful sense. Social media users are sharing things that other people have created to draw attention, and whatever gets the most attention and shares, aka "engagement" sells the most ads, and makes the most money.
My mother who can barely use Windows knows how to chat with me on Facebook. People use social media to communicate between friends, family, coworkers etc all the time. That's how all of that monetizable data gets generated.
Yes, the purpose of social media is to profit from user-generated content and data, but it still works as intended for 99% of people.