This expectation was indeed common in tech circles in the 00’s “web 2.0” days, and it didn’t seem ludicrous. Removing government and corporate gatekeepers (like newspapers and TV networks) meant that disenfranchised voices could finally be heard —anyone could have a blog or whatever and be heard. It wasn’t crazy to think that if only everyone in the world could finally talk to each other that we could work out differences and make friendships across political and geographical boundaries.

That was the hypothesis. The worldwide experiment that is still running seems to have falsified it.

> This expectation was indeed common in tech circles in the 00’s “web 2.0” days, and it didn’t seem ludicrous.

I heard people voice similar expectations about roughly equally ludicrous categories of online services then, but never social media as such. Most of them were ludicrous for reasons that were obvious at the time, and apply equally to social media:

(1) In the short term, the digital divide was acute, and any benefits they brought would naturally increase inequality across that divide.

(2) In the longer term, where one might presume the digital divide would erode, they overlooked that while the services involved were generally still in the venture-subsidized artificially underpriced/undermonetized phase, any plausible business model would either promote inequality by narrowing reach to an elite or promote inequality by creating sharply tiered service or (most commonly) a sharp division between a broad class of users being engaged to be marketed to moneyed interests and the moneyed interests buying their eyeballs. Any prediction of resolving inequality was based on venture subsidies and monopoly building dumping being converted into a permanent state out of charity.

We may then just have different scopes for what counts as "Social Media" and what are other "categories of online services". The wikipedia definition seems good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

> Most of them were ludicrous for reasons that were obvious at the time, and apply equally to social media:

It seems post facto to conclude that they were obviously ludicrous at the time. Perhaps with hindsight it seems as ludicrous as a belief in alchemy in the middle ages, but it wasn't obvious that you couldn't turn lead into gold before we had chemistry. In the Web 2.0 era lots of smart people thought social media could make the world better. I raised money and founded a "social media" startup expressly thinking it would empower people, and many of my peers in that world were equally earnest.

Facebook’s own mission statement is “to give people the power to share and to make the world more connected” (emphasis mine). And if you were there when Facebook was founded, as I was, before celebrities and politicians were accommodated by them, you would have felt very empowered indeed.