Its not the platform that you dislike, its the people on the platform. Every single new platform you go to, there you and they will be.
Whatever SM comes about, they are going to do the same.
Also, the one and only business model, of any SM, is keeping people on the app, and you don't do that by providing counter points / arguments against their world view. You do that by matching them with people who think like them.
Any social media will devolve into cesspools of group think that often ends up being bad for society.
Just look at Whatsapp. It has no ads feed, no subscription fees and yet, it has innumerable groups that do spreading of all sorts of conspiracy rumor mongering. WA is not even getting like minded people together. They are doing it themselves.
The next wave of SM will be similar. But, even more crass and materialistic. It will not bring people together. It will bring groups together that will fight ever more aggressively with other groups, drawing strength from numbers.
And human nature, with its fickle tendencies, will enable the dumbest and gullible to form the largest groups.
The unfortunate truth is that fights creates audience engagement which drives up user retention and thus stock prices. Financial analyst look at how much time a user spents on each platform to issue a price forecast.
I literally cannot think of a single thing, when it comes to WhatsApp specifically, that got worse.
The data gathered from WhatsApp is used to fuel backend algorithms and help Facebook sell your (and your networks) information and preferences to advertisers.
A bank used to keep your personal financial information as private. Now post-acquisition, the bank starts selling your personal financial information to insurance companies. To you, as an account holder, you don't know the difference because its all hidden away from you.
Maybe you don't care because the bank hasn't increased your fees, but other people you don't know can now buy your data and target you. Here's how data brokers work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA
What!? Can you tell me an example of how businessmen sold customer data in the Victorian times? Unless, your definition of the 'dawn of business' is limited to this century or your lifetime?
There is nothing inherently evil with data, it's what these today's businesses do with it and at this scale. There has never been a platform with over 1 billion users' data for sale. This has only happened in the last 20 years.
You don't seem to have a very good understanding of the topic you are commenting on. In both your original and this comment, you make incorrect and face-value assumptions of how things work.
I have no evidence of this but I have thought quite a bit about why social networks angering push content the way they do.
The WhatsApp algorithm can be described as: “show the chat with the most recent reply at the top, then show the most recent reply at the bottom if the user clicks on that chat”.
Suppose the Twitter algorithm was: “show the tweet with the highest count recent replies at the top of the feed, then show the most recent reply at the bottom if the user clicks on that tweet”
That is a pretty natural way to design a social media service that wants to host the global discourse. And that algorithm would inherently promote tweets that provoke a lot of responses. It would take a strong thumb on the scale to make it not be full of divisive content (the major social media companies publicly claim to be attempting this).
WhatsApp is a useful datapoint here because we know the feed is chronological, yet there are a ton of news stories about how the app is rife with divisive content and misinformation, just like Twitter and Facebook.
The most recent is probably not what I would want to see. Close family, friends, social circles first than influencers after.
TikTok, on the other hand, doesn’t show you anything from your friends and just tries to show you what will keep you watching. It seems to work well for them.
How much you chat with your friend tells me how close you are and how similar your politics and shopping habits are. Add that with your location data from your IP address (contrary to popular belief, you don't need to turn on location permission to know).
Whatsapp is the perfect power-up for platforms like Facebook. With your Whatsapp connections and Facebook profile combined, your data becomes even more valuable to advertisers. Why do you think Google and Facebook keeps on asking for your phone number?
You are making the argument that Whatsapp doesn't use algorithms to favor divisive content, therefore, it doesn't have malicious use. My argument is that Whatsapp still contributes to the data harvesting of Facebook because it is used maliciously to invade your privacy. It's just in a different form and just as bad. You are not looking at the whole picture and only a tiny slice.