It's almost as if a better solution would be to leave mass media to a few distributors per city and a few national ones.
You know, like newspapers.
What do we really gain by having direct and immediate access to the uncensored thoughts of casual acquaintances and relatives and all their casual acquaintances?
What do we really gain by blog posts? I personally have learned a lot about technology from peoples' blog posts, and Stack Overflow posts. Maybe not as much from Hacker News posts, but I've still learned some. And by reading reddit posts such as stuff in /r/askreddit I've learned a lot about people with backgrounds quite different than mine, and I believe the ability to better empathize with them.
All of your examples involve moderate to high self selection for thoughtfulness and have a culture of self-critique. Reddit has it historically and HN has it in daily practice.
However, Facebook is nearly a wasteland of relatives and acquaintances yanked into the network, sometimes against their better judgement. Once their and fluent in the technical aspects they feel free to be themselves, not necessarily a thoughtful member of the network.
No, of course not, that's an indefensible position.
Their benefits out weight their detriments. I'm just not a fan of amateur journalists with no oversight, poor training, an ideological axe to grind, and possible mental pathological tendencies.
How do you filter all that out? Ahhh, you can't. At least not without a cultural homogeneity that leads to strong social support for education and care of the less well off. How do you get that? Time.
You know, like newspapers.
What do we really gain by having direct and immediate access to the uncensored thoughts of casual acquaintances and relatives and all their casual acquaintances?