The problem of mainstream social media (and why half-baked fixes don't really work).

The problem is scale. Scale. I don't mean millions of users. Or tens of millions. I mean these sites with over a hundred million users. They become a bigger than life staple of the political consciousness (and also attract the sort of problems you might run into in politics, particularly the nastier side of politics).

It is also prone to context collapse. Truth is, we operate in different contexts all the time. Present ourselves differently in different scenarios. Mainstream social media pumps in a load of information and collapses everything down into the same one arena. There also isn't much breathing room without "taking a side".

Even imperfections of the moderation, inability to get correct information to inform such moderation. Scale. Also, due to scale, every mistake is now political and a million eyes will scrutinize it (sometimes, in an uninformed manner, as guess what, the hearsay also spreads at scale).

Ridiculous conspiracy theories? Again, the problem is scale. We've always had conspiracies.

They're also all in the same pot. Right up against one another. Not much breathing room.