I’ve given this a lot of thought as well and I’m also generally a little unsure, especially because the Internet was so positive for me in most other ways (it’s hard to overstate what battle.net communities did for my psychology and confidence as somebody who felt kind of alone) but I think what ultimately distinguishes the current harm of social media is that what we had back then was not nearly as sophisticated. Yes I’m sure they were getting some data from us, yes there was exploitation and problems, But the current infrastructure of the “attention economy” is absolutely insane and beyond destructive.

From a social perspective, it wasn’t really until Instagram blew up in popularity and we had to start learning not to take people’s feeds as representative of how great their lives were that this stuff started to creep up. IMO Facebook was a little more text driven and myspace was mostly just middle school drama that would’ve taken place IRL anyway.

I get your opinion on networks like battle.net. These also did wonders for me as a person and getting me into IT in the first place, got me connected with people double my age who just taught me valuable lessons on teamwork and growing up.

With my comment I was looking more into the direction of "the social media", where everything seems fake. I luckily grew up, when everything was still based on an actual timeline and not a deeply optimized algorithm.

I think that comment about sophistication is absolutely key. Not even just data harvesting, but actively working against the interests of a user to keep them actively engaged.