Splatoon 3 is the only good social media platform

polygon.com:

Imagine, for a moment, that there was a healthier alternative to Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and every other social media service you could ever think of. Yes, even BeReal. Imagine somebody created a new, better social media service from scratch. No doomscrolling. No toxicity. No discourse. This new service would have the power — nay, the responsibility — to free us all from the yoke of Being Online.

Imagine what this service would look like. Imagine that it could solve the myriad problems that are endemic to all social media platforms. Imagine that it could turn the social media experience from a glorified Skinner box into something fun.

What if I told you that this service already exists, and moreover, that it launched in 2015 alongside a hit game for Nintendo Wii U?

For the uninitiated, every iteration of Nintendo’s ink-’em-up shooter Splatoon has shipped with a bare-bones posting feature that allows users to draw a monochrome landscape (or portrait, in Splatoon 3) and have that image appear over the user’s avatar, and even on billboards, posters, and walls.

As somebody who has led entire social media departments in the past, and also gone semi-viral for a tweet about Amelia Bedelia, I consider myself a bona fide expert in this field. I’d like to think I’m qualified to say that Nintendo has accidentally created the only good social media service in existence. Here are a few reasons why.

The reason Twitter often feels like a toxic dopamine machine is because the service is geared toward “engagement.” In other words, it doesn’t matter whether a post is good, bad, harmful, or helpful. As long as people are talking about it, you’ll see the discourse on your feed, since the Twitter algorithm sees all