It's probably like when the first cellphone inventors imagined the freedom and productivity that portability would offer humanity. And didn't realize that a sizeable portion of the eventual effort would turn into serving up cute cat videos and trying to prevent people from yelling at each other based on fake news.
Cute cats, per se, is not the problem. Did you know the "Cute cat theory of digital activism" [0]? Literally, the first online cat meme posters imagined the freedom and productivity that cats would offer to digital liberty.
> trying to prevent people from yelling at each other based on fake news
This turns out to be a much bigger problem that couldn't be solved using cat memes.
