It's being treated like a gold rush but I don't think it really is. This is like dotcom 1.0 all over again. They didn't know what the best use cases for the internet were but they still poured billions into it. The gold rush didn't come until the 2000s when social media took off.
Normally you get a frontier exploration phase where fringe people experiment with the new technology and try to figure out what it's good for. It feels like we just skipped that step entirely.
It's sad that the "gold rush" on social media just means "using the Internet" is a depressing experience of being tracked incessantly and sold to, constantly. A lot of the content isn't to educate or delight, but to build a following exclusively so that you can sell to said following.
It's more like the "poo rush", where you are the one getting pooped on.
Normally you get a frontier exploration phase where fringe people experiment with the new technology and try to figure out what it's good for. It feels like we just skipped that step entirely.