The incentives and responsibility of the public social media companies are to serve shareholders and advertisers. This will almost always mean that the focus will be on quarterly profits and growth. Reliance on advertising for revenue results in making product decisions that aren’t aligned with consumer users. You end up with features being developed that focus on revenue at the expense of almost anything else.

User happiness as an outcome or features that thoughtfully consider users aren’t the top of the priority list — if they even make the list. I don’t think they started out that way, but they almost all ended up there.

This is aside from all of the other risks of centralized ownership. They become targets of governments, shareholders, advertisers, activists of all stripes, and so on. This isn’t unique to any particular large centralized platform company with this model.

This is where a decentralized protocol like nostr and a supporting ecosystem of developers and services has the potential to breakthrough. This can work.