This wins today’s Good Stuff award. As someone who was present at the creation of social media and was a cheerleader for about a decade, I can say it wasn’t always like this. But economics is the ultimate ruler of this situation. In the race to commoditize and maximize users and profits, social has gone off the rails. Reminds me of the 19th century railroad boom. To create differentiation and hang onto customers, the roads had many different track gauges. The practical effect of this meant cars couldn’t cross lines and sending freight meant unloading and reloading again and again. The Roads started going out of business and merging but that left a problem with the tracks which was solved in a about 1862 when Abe Lincoln set the gauge at 48.5 inches, if memory serves, and that’s where it is now. Social has a different problem since each vendor has a slightly different monopoly, short form, long form, etc. and people don’t switch easily because their friends are not all on the other platforms. The Lincolnesque solution might be to require all users to use their real names and thus own up to what they’re doing.