I'm sympathetic to this point of view—I write one blog and contribute to another!—but at the same time, it's not really FB, Instagram, and Twitter that're killing the web—it's us, every day, with every choice we make. Every time we fire up Facebook we choose to enable the proprietary web instead of the open web.
It's fun pointing at corporate villains. I've done it. But it's more true and less satisfying to say that we enable the online world that has come to be.
Given that this is the Y-Combinator news aggregator it's much worse than "us" choosing to use these services. Most of us here would love to be a substantial part of the next Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. I am sure the vast majority here would do everything they can to make it happen if they thought they had an idea that could turn them into the next Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs or even "just" Evan Williams. I've been ranting about Facebook being the new AOL since at least 2009 and yet I would become an unstoppable force in order to create the next one.
He's the universal soldier, and he really is to blame. His orders come from far away no more, they come from him and you and me, and brothers can't you see, this is not the way we put an end to war
"We" are extremely susceptible to psychological and emotional manipulation though, so it's still accurate to say that those doing the manipulation are to blame.
No matter how susceptible someone is to something, a decision they make is their own.
Trying to absolve the decision maker of responsibility for their decision is a sure way to disaster. If people at large start to feel that they are not to be blamed for their actions and it's considered acceptable to pin the blame on some corporate overlord, things will get out of hand real quick.
You are giving the individual human mind too much credit here. There are whole industries that thrive on our weaknesses, they find every little breach in our mind and abuse it. And they've been quiet successful at it.
No matter how susceptible someone is to something, a decision they make is their own.
At the risk of wandering into a lengthy philosophical discussion, this is really untrue in a non-dualistic materialistic universe, which our universe appears to be.
In other words, free will is an illusion, and the decisions made by people are entirely a product of their genetics and experiences.
So if people's experiences can be strongly manipulated by corporations, then so can their behaviors. It's not about responsibility, it's about reality.
...and the same logic can be applied to the decisions made by the corporate overlords. It's why we have the law.
People in general are irresponsible. A complex world makes it harder to identify pandora's boxes lying all around. And that just amplifies irresponsibility at a speed and scale we haven't seen before.
It's fun pointing at corporate villains. I've done it. But it's more true and less satisfying to say that we enable the online world that has come to be.