Social Media provides little to no value for the average user anymore...<p>1. It siphons personal data to be able to sell it backhandedly to other parties.<p>2. It miniplates user post visibility and timelines towards popular people and entities, preventing independent creators from growing.<p>3. It charges for visibility by requiring the purchase of ad boosting from creators that aren't even profiting off of their work at all.<p>4. Promoted (paid) content is often not clearly marked as such, a lot of harmful content is often disseminated far & wide on platforms through covertly paid marketing.<p>5. Users are unaware that these platforms crawl posts and use personal content later on o power LLMs, which take full credits for ideas created by human beings on social platforms, without any sort of compensation.<p>6. Many accounts have vast numbers of fake followers, views, and likes... Upholding a false impression of success and growth on platforms. Even many celebrities (already considered popular) often resort to shady tactics to look more popular and successful on social platforms.<p>7. Many platforms distort time perception, and even manipulate timelines already, some even completely prune trending topics in order to manipulate public perception in investing, shopping, entertainment and in far more serious aspects like politics, especially when they have a monopoly on attention, such as during pandemic related lockdowns.<p>Modern Social Media is a now disguised form of free labor exploitation and distortion of perception imposed on all of us heavily now that large companies have developed to run vast platforms. Social Media has also fueled many scams like NFTs, Crypto, Shoddy products and services, and now the idea that stolen and parsed text and user content is somehow "Artificial Intelligence".<p>Social Media has been manipulating us for ages now... It would not surprise me if 97% of users or more have not even earned a dime off of it since it emerged in the 90s, but the problem is that almost everyone on Social Media acts as if they're successful, and that social media is somehow a legitimate industry, all well above reality and their means.