My problem with social media is that is all about centering the user and letting them feel important and socially connected. You end up with a billion fools, with their carefully chosen avatars and third-person personas, shouting into the void, desperate for acknowledgement and esteem. And like any addictive system, the social platform provides just enough constant feedback to keep them there. It will entice them to agree with and regurgitate any opinion that their social bubble approves of. And along with the fools who clap, other fools will boo. And we all love a good old scrap when we've got our own gang backing us up!

Most social media platforms are toxic. They all want to be addictive, so they all have these same "flaws". They don't allow for progress. At one point I was an avid Redditor, but I was once part of a subreddit that for canned very unfairly, and with zero opportunity for appeal. It simply found itself with a percentage of its followers not believing a certain prevailing dogma. Systems like this don't allow for human progress. You just get billions of people shouting the same handful of ideas all the time. People from different sides no longer have to bother with tedious definitions, logic or proofs. Opinions are getting more polarised, and people are less tolerant to those outside their bubble. We're now in a situation where college graduates in first-world countries don't believe that the earth is round, that vaccines work, or that biological sex is actually a thing.

Honestly, I'd prefer to see a purpose-built debating platform taken to new heights. Unfortunately it wouldn't be a success because it wouldn't be designed to addict the masses. It wouldn't give everybody their 10 minutes of self importance on the soap box, and drip-fed feelgoods, and righteous anger at the enemy. Instead, people would be interacting with a system that has advanced text analysis, detecting bad definitions, spellings, grammar, logic and attitude. Progress in a given debate would be slow and tedious and definitely not for everyone's taste. But imagine any debate you like, conducted in this manner! One week in you would have a two-way conversation that could be followed by any layperson, catching them up with term definitions and the key points of disagreement. Add to that some type of overlay that allows users to weigh up the relative values of each argument using a variety of philosophical lenses.