In my very subjective experience, mainstream social media actually became worse over time.

It used to be rage memes and dank memes, "mildly interesting" stuff on the not-so-popular Reddit and random conversations on Twitter.

It wasn't high-quality content, quite the opposite. But it was somewhat fun, entertaining, something on which to waste your time.

Now it's exhausting. People fighting, (mostly American) politics, bullshit of all kinds, bots of all kinds and content made for monetary incentives and terribly done moderation.

Obviously mainstream social media platforms have the network effect in their favor (as well as the money and the technical knowledge and infrastructure).

To be successful, Nostr needs to be at least as good as social media used to be.