The Next Big Social Media Platform Won't Look Like the Current Ones

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/the-next-big-social-media-platform-wont-look-like-the-current-ones.
A year of conversations with people reveals the same frustrations with algorithmic feeds, misinformation, and lost privacy.
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After noticing his own compulsive, unsatisfying relationship with social media, the author spent a year deliberately asking people online and in person, across ages and backgrounds whether they felt it too. Nearly everyone did, describing the same handful of problems: addictive design, unexplained irritation, an inability to tell real from fake (especially with AI), a desire for feeds they control, disappearing privacy as data trains AI models, and safety treated as an afterthought. The piece pairs each observation with current research and data, then looks honestly at where platforms newer emerging alternative platforms still fall short of actually solving it.