alt Hacker Newsnewspapers didn't follow you and your friends everywhere you went to feed all your metadata back into an addiction algorithm
people massively underestimate how insidious having millions of data points about a person is, these companies are literally modeling your behavior
I strongly believe the worst vices of social media would all persist if there were zero advertising.
You can see that by looking at more minor or fringe social media sites. Public "liking" is literally all it takes for people to degenerate into performativeness, sensationalism, grandstanding, misinformation, etc.