I agree with you 100%, but I would add the bubble effect.

You watch something, you like it, then you get all the time similar things.

Simple example: you click on a post about vegetarian meals. Then the next you see is cows ending up in a slaughterhouse. And then etc.. In less than a week, your posts are all about "why become a vegan".

The end effect is that they shape our children culturally, and it's very hard to explain what is true vs what is fake. Or why something is right vs wrong. They are just not there yet.

> a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe networks that are off the radar and will take them to very dark places very quickly.

‘Fringe networks’, and ‘off the radar’ feel like a very negative framing for a kind of smaller, more intimate, and often pleasantly communal feeling internet that I quite like!

Old fashioned online forums—maybe even Hackernews itself?—would likely fit into this ‘fringe’, ‘off the radar’ internet, and yet, it still feels much less toxic here than it does on twitter.

> The real problem is social media. Their machine learning algorithms are optimised to boost toxic content

…and you need a massive network to enable this, right? You can’t do it without the money, and the volume of content, that the giants in this space have.

If this just pushes kids onto the small web—sure, it’s not _all_ wholesome—but at least it’s not as carefully, as deliberately manipulative.

Your comment made one word immediately pop to mind - rotten? But I'm increasingly of the opinion that the 'dark stuff' on the internet isn't really the problem, so much as the seemingly innocuous stuff like people posting extremely 'select', if not outright fabricated, sections of their lives on social media. It gives people a mistaken perception of what their own life is like or what it could/should be like. Even more when this is taken to the next level with insecure kids consuming and interacting with one another in this context.

And then there's the issue with ourselves even. We pretty much all do, say, and believe dumb things when we're younger. It's just a part of growing up. But I can't imagine what life must be like if you mix this reality with social media. Not only does this then stay attached to you forever, but pretty much anything can be artificially reinforced. With both factors probably working to impair general maturation.

These are all just consequences of 'normal' things that you'd have even if we censored 100% of vice on the internet, and it's still quite awful.

When we were growing up, internet was for smart people. Chat rooms and video games were for "nerds", the "cool" people all hung out in person.

When someone wanted to do something counter-culture (i.e the *chan websites), there was actually a shared interest behind it. People would spend time making content and actually doing things on the web.

These days, internet is so ubiqutious that the majority of the users are simply consumers. There is no drive to build anything. Modern day kids aren't going to be spending time trying to figure out how to get around social media bans with technology, because most internet users simply just don't care enough to organize and build something.

And here lies the actual fix unless you just want to sit back and wait for regulators to pick it up - phones should be the means of communication, not consumption.

Remove those apps that make you do so, and the world becomes a little bit brighter over time. I did it years ago with FB apps (which was draining battery while unused, typical fb crappy engineering when they can't even snoop on you in more subtle ways) and have 0 need to put anything there. I can check FB on desktop if I need to, and do so rarely due to lack of any actually interesting stuff there.

Same can go for any other social cancer out there.