Social Control Media is Sinking
Social Control Media did not start at any particular moment. Put another way, things didn't quite "start" with one particular site or network or domain or whatever. It's hard to say what the first Social Control Network was as that depends on how one defines this vague concept. Was USENET Social Control Media? How about forums in Yahoo? Or before Yahoo? Were any forums predating the Web considered Social Control Media?
The "like" or "Digg" button (the notion of "scores" for entries) didn't mark the beginning of Social Control Media. Reddit definitely wasn't the first and it merely imitated things that had come from elsewhere. Nowadays when people speak of Social Control Media they typically allude to Twitter (or X.com), Facebook, Microsoft LinkedIn and so on. Australia went further and correctly identified the video-sharing site YouTube as Social Control Media, hence TikTok counts too. How about Microsoft GitHub? Many correctly classify that as such; notice that Microsoft merely buys such platforms (LinkedIn, GitHub), it does not create them because every time it tries - e.g. Soapbox and Copdeplex - it fails.
Consider what has happened to the "Big Social Control Media" sites; Facebook rebranded as "Meta", seeing that the site Facebook was becoming less relevant and its brand increasingly toxic. Twitter shed off about 80 if not 90 percent of its staff. YouTube has had several waves of layoffs in recent years in light of financial strain and Microsoft (LinkedIn and GitHub) had so many waves of layoffs and office shutdowns. No doubt they are shrinking and it has got nothing to do with "hey hi" (AI), it's about inability to shows profits and a lack of long-term plan.
In Mastodon, as we showed on the first day of this month, there's stagnation. The Federation or Fediverse isn't growing.
To the outsiders - i.e. to those who are less biased than the 'addicts' - it would rightly seem like the era of centralised "social" sites (they're not social, they're about controlling the users) is ending, not overnight but gradually. Some people recognise this earlier than others. █