I am not talking about making it not engaging, I am talking about making a business model that doesn't rely on maximizing engagement.
It would likely be even harder to start as it certainly wouldn't go viral. But eventually people would get there to write and consume insightful content from strangers or just connecting with family and friends as social medias were initially intended to.
> Your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see. Radically different social media, back in the hands of the people.
Our attention span may be diminishing due to short-form content, from two and a half minutes in 2004 to only 47 seconds in 2023.
This concerning information is likely linked to Reels and Shorts and all sorts of short videos or posts we come across daily.
The issue is that some of the websites pushing those dangerous posts to us still have interesting features, and blocking them completely would likely not be beneficial.
I have then developed a draft of a browser extension that could filter out all of this content from those platforms, like short posts on LinkedIn or Youtube videos shorter than X minutes etc..
You can try it out if you use Chrome, for now it only works on LinkedIn and Youtube but I am waiting for your recommendations on which site to expend it further.
This is obviously a work in progress, I want to make it open source and allow everyone to contribute and would love to get your feedback !
There aren't only two options though.
It can be self-moderated by the community. A user who posts insightful nuances will have a bigger say in what is considered insightful in the future. Sort of like a PageRank for reliability.
It's a simple tool to enrich an article with nuances. You see an article that seems misleading or incomplete ? You just paste the url in the input box and add the nuances (bits of information) that will help understand the article better.
For now this is done on the website I created, but I am also working on a browser extension that would allow to see and add those nuances directly on the article's webpage.
If you encounter some misleading article you can simply paste the url in the input box on the homepage, it will then open a page where you can add nuances to this article for other people to see.
Thank you for the feedback, I am working on it !
A few months ago a young student in my former high school sadly passed away. He badly hurt himself fainting following a vaccination.
I learned about it on some online article, and was immediately struck by the comments on the page. It was just a battlefield confronting pro and antivax. No matter how little everyone knew about the story, they would all just blindly fight to defend some point of view.
I am not emotionally attached to many things, but the way our society has become so polarized on every single subject to the point that we can't have a discussion or have an opinion of our own makes me feel so angry and hopeless...
This might be the biggest obstacle to growth as a society.
So for some time now I have been thinking about a way to change that. I am convinced that the solution is to expose people to facts and ideas they aren't already used to.
In this optic I created a simple tool for people to add nuances to articles. The idea is to allow people to add any facts, views or thoughts about an article that would contribute to getting a broader sense of the story.
The goal is not to erase bias, convictions or feelings. But by exposing people to the full picture, I hope to help them have a better sense of the world.
If this is something you care about, you can checkout the url and start contributing now. On the homepage you can simply paste the url of an article and it will allow you to add nuances. Nuances can be nuanced too !
Hope you will make something great out of this tool. I will gladly listen to your feedbacks.
So how is this going to be different from existing comment system that you didn't like? What's the secret sauce which will transform existing "battlefield" comments into nuanced view of broader sense of the story?
The algorithm that puts content forward will be different from typical recommendation systems. You won't see nuances because they please your brain but because they have been recognized as factual and contributing to the understanding of the full story.
I guess by ineffective he meant for the "greater good".
This raises a new question. It seems like it has been established by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc that :
Maximizing shareholder value => maximizing time spent on the app => maximizing engagement => maximizing "sensational" and trash content
So do you believe that these implications will hold forever ? Now that this seems like the status quo, is there a chance for a new social media to exist where the first premise doesn't imply the others ?
My hope is that enshittification will do its job, and burns social media as it exists to the ground.
And that seems likely. The only way to keep revenue going up is to degrade the platforms a little more.
Its seems that "private" chatrooms like Telegram, Discord and such are poised to replace it, and new social media will truly become siloed, and that some platforms (like iOS) will fight the relentless notification attention seeking from these apps a little. I'm not sure that this is any better... But it sure would be different.
It would likely be even harder to start as it certainly wouldn't go viral. But eventually people would get there to write and consume insightful content from strangers or just connecting with family and friends as social medias were initially intended to.