Firmly believe what’s ruined social media is special interest groups and the rest parading as people like you and me. My evidence for this is the overnight take-over of r/politics in 2016 and the subsequent introduction of extremely divisive talking points which eventually transformed it into the glorified hate-site it is today. YES I’m bitter, Reddit before then got me through some tough times.
Well, judging by the extremely racist and most often dumb as hell /r/Europe, the racist and self-hating r/ukpolitics and the racist, smug and self-important r/germany, it's people who ruined social media. And the Internet, for that matter. Let in too many idiots and everything turns into Idiocracy.
How odd, I find r/Europe mostly pretty wholesome and somehow generally with a unifying spirit which I don't find elsewhere, specially when a specific topic arises and many posts start showing up, dealing with that topic from the perspective of each country. And r/Germany often has very nice pictures making me wish to go on weekend trips, also sometimes interesting topics and topics helpful to foreigners. I don't really see any other racism than then normal one which you find in the non-internet media, like Greece/Italy hating on Germans and stuff like that, but in r/Europe somehow this is understood and dealt with as something which is a given and nobody sees a reason to expand on it, to turn it into a topic. It's somehow accepted like a cliche where fun of the stereotypization is made, sometimes with a bit of humor. I wonder how this is on Facebook.