It was not inevitable that a few companies would create a small number of “platforms” that would dominate the diverse practices we imagined the term “social media” stood for, but that is what happened. Slowly, but surely, most social media platforms withered as a handful of companies/platforms became dominant and used both technology and policy to lock in their users (Gillespie, 2010). It was also not inevitable that corporations would exploit community and sociality, but they did (van Dijck et al., 2018). Moreover, it was not inevitable that these companies would convert these platforms into new channels for passive consumption where only a small number of users contributed content, but that too is what happened.
So sad a paragraph!