I was reading through George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh last night and had a very similar thought. Their model of embodied cognition is necessarily decentralized in a really interesting way.

>TikTok is in essence just another video "doom scroller" app, that allows pretty much useless likes follows and shares

Absolutely this. When I finally bit the bullet and downloaded TikTok, I was on it for maybe half a day before I gave up because content discoverability on the app is absolute garbage.

One of the reasons I've stuck around on Twitter so long is that their search features are incredibly useful compared to most modern social media sites. They allow users to get a much broader picture of what's actually happening as opposed to feeling like you're just silo'ed in your own little bubble. I think that has further effects on the ways that community is created and content is gamed. I've noticed the same thing happened on Instagram as it grew more popular. The explore feed is full of content that is obviously designed to play the algorithm rather than being actually useful to users.

Agreed, I did notice though that Twitter can adjust, and even skew search results and even trending topics any time they want to reflect any ideal they want.

We think of algorithms just being tailored towards our needs, but algorithms now are also tailored towards generating company profit, to limiting negative topics, towards censorship, and towards many other things that protect platforms first...

When bitcoin crashed for example, on Twitter there weren't a lot of people prominently screaming and cursing trending online, even though many lost their shirts, and were upset ant irate over the crash... They WERE cursing and screaming at a brick wall on Twitter though, the algorithms and moderation surgically muted and ratio'ed many of those users in order to "temper and quell" public outrage from developing against the crypto world, which Twitter is invested heavily into (rather coincidentally)....

This is the kind of modern world we live in now... We had a few years where apps were truly "social" but now, most things are carefully monitored and curated by the time we see them. This is also why you often don't directly (and consistently) see content posted from the people you follow now, on a consistently ordered time line, as well.