I have been active on internet forums since the mid-late 90s. Facebook and Instagram and their other social media didn't create any of those bad human traits, they were rampant to begin with.

What these normie-networks did do was make a UX for public posting so easy that scores of low-education users were able to be influenced and re-share low-infromation-quality stuff in huge magnitudes. FB is guilty of making a super accessible user experience, and then in not being aggressive early enough in having high standards for its userbase. But it didn't invent society's ills.

I found myself stepping back from social media and deleted a lot of my accounts in 2016 -- the election and the Cambridge Analytica thing was a big reason. LinkedIn could have been the worst because I had spent so much time promoting myself and prospecting, I met a lot of good folks but I also met so many bullshitters who helped make me into a bullshitter.

The influx of normies circa 2000 did not seem so bad to me but Facebook and Twitter were another thing.

I was thinking a lot about it, but at the times of IRC and forums (and modems ;) ) this was not an issue on society scale. Facebook actually revolutionized it and made it available to anyone including showing the more contraverse opinions to other people as it was more likely for them to click. They were/are literally pumping up all the bad in society, to earn more money.

My point is that the less savoury aspects of human interaction were still happening, just not in the open. The popularity of the internet as a medium of human interaction just made it visible, recordable, searchable and pressed the gas pedal. I wouldn't particularlyblame FB for inventing this.

So your argument is that making computers and the internet easier to use for normal people is cause for societal destruction? I can’t be convinced, but that does seem like more of an indictment on people than it does tech.

Not my argument. You are fighting Umberto Eco (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco ) here.

Let me repeat him as you probably didnt catch it (I dont understand how, but this is one of the things, I dont understand, so I wont argue about it):

“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”

I can just confirm that what he has seen and described is correct. And the more that you are standing your ground, the more you are proving, he was correct.

His entire argument amounts to Eternal September[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September