Networks are trying to move away from long tail content since it is so expensive to moderate. I think in next 10 years expect social networks and video playing websites to become much like network television. Ie there will be a vetted list of large creators, and everyone else will be a consumer. To do that you need to take away peoples ability to control exactly whom they follow / subscribe to.
> Networks are trying to move away from long tail content
This concisely expresses many of my misgivings with the Internet today. Things have been dumbed down and often cater to the lowest common denominator that people share. Evolutionarily speaking, it's chasing after low-hanging fruit (cheap and easy) and then hyper-optimizing for it to the point that it's all that remains. The problem is that it's sterile and dumbed down.
I don't like that we can't customize things or get out of the sandbox anymore now that everything has been siloed. With email and RSS we could construct filters and programmatically access our data. We could change the interface, query, backup, share.
The platform powers that be are dictating how today's internet works. They're taking away our browser tech (Chrome everywhere, increasingly without add-ons). We can't export our data in meaningful formats.
This is the hell future 1990's Microsoft could only dream of.
I understand the economic and legal pressure for this to happen, but how would that make social networks anything other than mass market gatekeepers, like newspapers and TV networks once were?
Wasn't the attraction that you could follow someone who matched your interests, like "antique model steam engine refurbishment", or whatever niche interest an individual might have? If twitter had a vetted list of large creators, they'd be right back in the "all of this network content is lowest-common-denominator dreck" situation that ABC/CBS/NBC were in circa 1985. Which may not be a bad thing for society as a whole (we can have an agreed-upon set of facts again! No alternate facts!), but why did we go through 30 years of media upheavals and the loss of the good things about newspapers and TV (equal time doctrine) to get back there? Was this all just about creating a different set of media moguls?
I think the "antique model steam engine refurbishment" is where we go off the tracks with social media.
If you are single mindedly contented with some obscure niche you have so many wonderful options today because nothing is easier to advertise to than groups with really specific interests that require buying things.
What's lacking is well rounded, pleasant experiences. I'm not a collection of discrete interests and I definitely don't want to become one nor am I interested in meeting one.
There's literally a scifi story about this scenario; a society creates enough "TV networks" to appeal to everyone. (They weren't TV networks, but close enough for this discussion.)
Except they made a mistake, and one person slipped through the net, and was completely miserable and driven insane by this.
To answer your actual question, I bet most social networks would be perfectly fine with just being mass market gatekeepers. It's expensive to have 100,000 newspapers and TV networks to appear customized enough for everyone watching; but it's cheap to have 100,000 versions of Facebook's wall, or Reddit's front page.
Why can’t a network have self moderation at a global and local level? Reddit does this to an extent, with each community having its own separate moderation and culture, and the front page which is curated from a list of communities. The trick is have a moderation bottleneck, the curation, between the local and global stages.
Because as a CEO you dont want to wake up every day to headlines that you are profiting off exploitation of children / nazis / hatecrimes. A probabilistic filter of best effort moderation does not cut it from a CEOs point of view. The world at large and the media makes a huge hue and cry (often for justifiable reasons) when objectionable hateful content is found on a large network. If you are a CEO you want to bring the possibility of that down to zero. The only way to do that is via dealing with large established players with whom you have signed contracts. Reddit does get this right more than most other places but there are parts of Reddit that Jack might not want to defend in front of Congress. In fact more than Congress, there is an even bigger constituency - advertisers like Kelloggs, Disney, Cadburys. These tier1 brands want a family friendly image and dont want their content shown next to anything possible objectionable. Jacks job is to reassure Disney that their ad will never run next to a tweet that propagates hate crime. How does Jack give this guarantee?
