Honestly, I'm torn about social media.

I know full well how harmful and addictive it can be, and how Big Social exploits so many people.

However, I also know that it's given so many marginalized people a new lease on life.

It's helped disabled people socialize. It's assisted people living in remote communities to talk to each other. And yeah, #MeToo was a big moment.

Getting rid of social media isn't the answer.

A thought: what if we built social media to enable true human-to-human connectivity?

Because, right now, that's not happening.

Right now, it's relevancy algorithms and bots and A.I. that's acting as a social media middleman that's inserting itself between you and your friends.

People aren't talking to people.

They are talking to algorithms in the hopes that algorithms will connect them with their friends -- though that's no guarantee.

It's not social media when talking to your friends is a gamble.

If you're saying something for friends to see, and the algorithm hides what you're saying because it assumes that what you say is "not relevant" to your friends' interests, that is *not* social media.

That is anti-social media.

Not everyone wants "social" media that's made for humans.

To them, humans are a barrier to what they really want: to hit the high score.

For many people, the appeal of Big Social is that it's a video game.

If you're building social media for humans, you need to thwart the impulse to treat it like a video game.

That means reducing the gamification aspects that make Big Social so addictive.

Instead, authenticity of social interactions needs to be prized above all else.

I'm still concerned that "authenticity" will be reduced to "use real name and face", for example with BeReal. For many trans women and/or privacy/anonymity-conscious people such as myself this makes the social network quite inaccessible.