I think this is a good example of the folk wisdom that kids don't have the best decisionmaking skills. I spent time in many an IRC flamewar as a middle schooler myself, so I'm not judging :) of course. Reddit first came out while I was in high school and subreddits became a feature near the end of my time in HS. I definitely was making better choices about the content I consumed as a high schooler and I've gotten better as I've gotten older!
I deeply appreciate Reddit's openness to customizing the experience. The defaults suck, I agree, but you can choose to curate the experience how you like. Moreover despite lots of jaw clenching over financial incentives, Reddit still offers the Old Reddit interface _and_ an API which lets power users consume Reddit however they like. These values were pretty common among other fora/BBSes at the time. The experience one got on 4chan's /a/ or /jp/ was very different than /b/ or /pol/ or /soc/ (and most of 4chan's famed toxicity came from the latter 3 boards.) Forums were usually partitioned by topic.
> In a weird way I actually think that the weird stuff twitter has been doing to try to make it look like they're doing something about unhealthy social media usage (all the "remember the human" stuff) would probably be more effective on a reddit-type social media platform.
I don't think the algorithmic feed as-is is compatible with healthy usage, no matter what rhetoric a company uses. ML models need to not only take engagement as input but also some sort of personal toxicity input. I need to be able to say "content X is addictive to me but not for a good reason." The model also needs to offer as much transparency as possible to the user, offering things like partial dependence plots for auditing by the user. I'm not sure whether a ranking model trained that way can still provide good ad targeting performance. Moreover knobs like this are probably just too complex for a layperson to interact with. Many engineers don't understand how a partial dependence plot works let alone laypeople.
My problem with social media is about the lack of choice. I have no qualms that the majority will continue to use social media the way most people in the past would spend time mindlessly flipping TV channels or window shopping at malls and boutiques. But there was always alternatives. People that didn't want to spend time window shopping could be found in libraries, bookstores, bars, playing sports, or outdoors. Once you became an adult this was expected. That didn't mean I was ostracized from them. I encountered people in college who hung out in very different places than me but still connected with me over shared interests.
In the social media age every form of social media is siloed. If you're not on Twitter you can't engage with people on Twitter. If you're not on Facebook you can't see people's Facebook content. You _have_ to join the platform to reach people on the platform. I'd love to see a world of federated social media where we can all talk to each other no matter our hobbies and third places.