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That's an argument for regulation or banning specific functions, perhaps the algorithms, rather than the entire platform.
Twitter for example remains just about possible to use in an 'algorithm free' way. I see a list of posts by people I follow in reverse chorological order. Which is basically how I use lfgss only here I follow a handful of conversations. Hence Twitter and lfgss are very similar to me.
jellybaby-
That's an argument for regulation or banning specific functions, perhaps the algorithms, rather than the entire platform.
The platforms themselves have perverse incentives. The platforms are broken.
They aren't connecting people through interests and across bubbles and social groups... instead they reinforce echo chambers.
They aren't acting in the interests of people and society, because neither of those is the paying customer. The paying customer are advertisers, and anything that supports advertisers will be done.
The business model and customer is the big difference... the platforms are broken. The algorithms that manifest through the platform are the result of the underlying economic model and incentives.
Velocio
As if it needed saying, there are very significant differences between the way this social media forum is run and the anti-social media sites. @Velocio, who will be able to say all this much better than me, doesn't exploit data, e.g. connections, interests, and so forth, that anti-social media use to accumulate information on members and to sell targeted advertising, and this forum actually exists for the benefit of its members. Other sites most certainly don't exist for the benefit of their members. Moreover, it is actually a forum. The vast majority of interaction takes place in shared threads to which members can contribute. On the anti-social media platforms, there are huge levels of interaction on members' personal pages, i.e. not in forums, and virtually all data is exploited. Sure, because LFGSS is on the Internet, some shadowy service(s) probably gather data from LFGSS, but it's much less readily exploitable, and it's not done from behind the scenes.
On anti-social media platforms, people are left to face the onslaught of those who want to manipulate them almost defencelessly, especially unhappy people hungry for an education they were denied when young, but vulnerable people in general who look for some kind of salvation, who will be very susceptible to latching on to the first or second thing that's designed to lure them in. It's worth stressing that you get very uneducated people with PhDs, by the way, and educated people who've never seen the inside of a university. On anti-social media platforms, people are as divided as they can be just by the way these sites are organised, e.g. that, famously, different people see different things, that they're alone in running their profile, etc. Apart from @hippy, there are no algorithms on LFGSS. Sure, we have individual user accounts and we can PM, but it's a very different model to the anti-social sites, which are rightly called 'anti-social' because they essentially interpose the platform between members, who give a lot more to it than they ever get out. That's the reverse on here.