I agree, we don't get to decide what social media is. There's a place in the world for things like Pinterest and social curation sites like Scoop.it and stumbleupon (now "mix"). There's a place in the world for memes, animated gifs and all manners of other things.

Dlink could totally add value, if used "responsibly."

Therein lies the rub... pretty much anything can be used responsibly... or compulsively, to try to extract every possible drop of rewards. It's like the old "spoons don't make you fat" dilemma. Of course they don't. Eating two pounds of pudding for desert every night is what makes you fat.

Obsessively posting 300 links a day in search of rewards is what creates spam. Or potentially creates spam. I'm not a slave to work=value, either... I'm more oriented towards the approach Google took back in 2011 when they rolled out the "Panda" initiative to put the lid on search spam: Maximize user enjoyment of the web experience.