I couldn't have said any of that better myself...

> Human social pressure and follower mindsets are part of the human experience but systematically gaming those instincts in real-time so money flows to a social media company at all costs in some strange digital sharecropping scheme is what’s new and the hierarchy of others trying to capture a small piece of that pie creates these distortions.

To what I think @krapp's point is: these dynamics are not exclusive to social media. At their core they're led by something far more primal than what social media only exacerbates. Governments are not as naive as the general public. Regulations effected in 2026 to "regulate social media" could have consequences on how information is spread among people in 2040.