Nola

And how many accounts are just dormant for a decade or at least until some bot farm hacked it and repurposed it to do some Hasbara on your local community sub?

Honestly? Cause much of the entirety of the US tech capitalist model is just digital feudalism.

Create a compelling reason to join your digital kingdom then when enough people move there you put up the enclosures and start profiting off exploiting your subjects and charging tolls to people wanting to access them.

And ideally enough of that peasantry remain dependent on your digital commons that realistically they can’t leave.

The upside is that this process naturally lends itself toward enshitification over time. The downside is that unlike messageboards of old, social media deploys incredibly addictive algorithms to keep a core type of user engaged. And then those habits harden and leaving feels impossible.

In summary, they want the world as it largely exists now but they don’t want the poor reputation, political backlash, civilian unrest, and for some of them, the personal guilt associated with the exploitation they built their fortunes off of and need to sustain to keep it.