It's actually the opposite of your model. Before social media, we only had a few majour opinions hold dominant positions in society and it was difficult to compete with those dominant ideas because organizing and communicating was difficult and took a lifetime. In order for your opinion to get a shot at challenging a dominant idea, you would have to spend a life time to work your way up in the hierarchy so that eventually your opinion would be taken seriously. All that social media did was equalize the playing field. All of the silent opinions now have the same volume as the dominant opinions and those silent opinions are now given the evolutionary chance to compete for attention. And they are winning the evolutionary arms race to dominance. It doesn't have anything to do with immediate gratification or short attention span. No one has ever been able to articulate a reasonable point because no one really can afford to spend the time to know enough about a set of information silos to actually be able to formulate and articulated point on a topic. Humans mostly just parrot what sounds reasonable and good to them at the time because expertice in a field is unatainable to all but a few. The frustration actually comes from the econimcs of thought - humans used to have only a few opinions to choose from and that was okay. Now they have an infinite amount of opinions to choose from and they are suffering from the Problem of Choice which is a known phenomenon in economics.