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Yes, but in order to properly learn our lesson to prevent this from happening again, we need to call out the root of the problem instead of/in addition to the tools or symptoms.
i think even without capitalism, social media works better on scale (even federated social media, does so but decentralised). you will join the bigger systems, and those systems are more likely to grow if they are bigger...
they will be much less toxic without capitalism though
The "bigger systems" pre-corporate internet (and somewhat in the transition) were sometimes fairly large forums dedicated to one niche (sometimes multiple, but in the same general field). Once Reddit specifically came along after YouTube/Google laid the groundwork for the corporatization of the Internet, it centralized basically every forum to one website. Now even today, forums still exist, but it's nowhere near what they once were.
That's also not to mention sites like Geocities allowing basically everyone to have their own website (which of course, is another version of centralization, but with much more control given to its users).
And it's not like corporations didn't try to take control of the internet before 2005/2006. Just look at AOL in the 90s for a prime example, along with Flash, ActiveX/Internet Explorer, Quicktime/Realplayer browser plugins for video, etc.
Without capitalism, we would still see the internet grow, as even in the late 90s, it felt as if you were being left behind in society if you didn't have an internet connection, but the way in which it grew would look much more akin to how it looked in the 90s and early 2000s.
The internet sure was far from perfect back then, but it was ours'.
I do miss that early internet, it was more discovery and exploration and much less doomscrolling.
and I agree that corporations destroyed it.
i realised that the response StumbleUpon cannot exist nowadays,is because internet is just a handful of sites rather than countless small ones. God StumbleUpon was superior to wherever we have now