Ask HN: In your mind, what is the ideal social media?
With the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, along with growing concerns over the Internet and social media in general, people are starting to question social media and internet corporations. In your mind, what would the ideal social media look like? How would it be moderated, hosted, and operated?
4 comments
It would be better to analyze what is broken about the current platforms before thinking about the ideal one. Current platforms are broken because they're centralized and motivated by profit. This means the mechanics of the platforms are designed to maximize profits at the expense of everything else. So the ideal platform must be a non-profit. If the new platform is still a business that must make money for its shareholders then it will inevitably end up in the same place as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram full of political grifters and scam artists.
Elon keeps saying that his goal is to make Twitter the source of truthful information but it's pretty obvious that the biggest cheerleaders on Twitter are not interested in truth, they're mostly interested in increasing their clout among the Twitterati. I guess that's another thing every good social media platform should try to avoid, constant navel gazing and meta-analysis of the platform itself because the goal should be to help people discover useful information instead of gaining followers and clout by meta-analysis of what is happening on the platform itself.
Elon keeps saying that his goal is to make Twitter the source of truthful information but it's pretty obvious that the biggest cheerleaders on Twitter are not interested in truth, they're mostly interested in increasing their clout among the Twitterati. I guess that's another thing every good social media platform should try to avoid, constant navel gazing and meta-analysis of the platform itself because the goal should be to help people discover useful information instead of gaining followers and clout by meta-analysis of what is happening on the platform itself.
What's wrong with social media?
It's not boring enough.
Just go out in the real world to buy some groceries and you'll see how boring and mundane the whole experience is.
Big social media platforms are populated by 3B people so they should represent a similar experience, but NO! The content presented to you is not randomly picked from a sample of 3B, so you don't get in your feed a random Indian guy wishing happy birthday to his random grandma.
You get non-random content. Now the reason why you get non-random content is a bit contentious.
People who love to critique social media companies would say they have an hand in that and operate out of bad faith to optimize engagement, people who want to give them the benefit of the doubt would argue that humans are wired to pay particular attention to verbal fights, proper fights, train wrecks, bad news, drama and incendiary content in general. So in the latter case each and everyone of us trained the algorithm to show us incendiary content by paying attention to incendiary content in the past.
Maybe truth is in the middle.
It's not boring enough.
Just go out in the real world to buy some groceries and you'll see how boring and mundane the whole experience is.
Big social media platforms are populated by 3B people so they should represent a similar experience, but NO! The content presented to you is not randomly picked from a sample of 3B, so you don't get in your feed a random Indian guy wishing happy birthday to his random grandma.
You get non-random content. Now the reason why you get non-random content is a bit contentious.
People who love to critique social media companies would say they have an hand in that and operate out of bad faith to optimize engagement, people who want to give them the benefit of the doubt would argue that humans are wired to pay particular attention to verbal fights, proper fights, train wrecks, bad news, drama and incendiary content in general. So in the latter case each and everyone of us trained the algorithm to show us incendiary content by paying attention to incendiary content in the past.
Maybe truth is in the middle.
I think Hacker News has a pretty great system built on mostly positive upvotes but it might be even better to have social media that don't even have voting or liking and just let you express yourself without them.
We already had it in the early years with Facebook, before Zuckerberg added news and the ability to communicate with strangers.