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Comment by nend | Hacker News Reader

This seems to hold true for many social media sites: facebook, reddit, twitter. It takes effort on behalf of the user to make their experience on the site "better".

And by better I mean, less divisive, and less mindless scrolling of memes/low effort content.

Thinking about it from the business's perspective, it probably ultimately also lowers their user engagement metrics. Users get a higher quality experience using the site, but also spend less time on the site. It sorta reminds me of the freemium/grinding experience in games today. It makes for a worse game experience, but a better company bottom line.

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I don't think it's necessarily a business incentives/metrics thing. Rather I think a social media experience can be at most 2 of 3:

- Uncensored/unmoderated

- Encompasses all viewpoints

- Civil

I do not think you can get a site to be uncensored and remain civil, assuming anonymity.

I think if its sufficiently niche (topic or membership wise), the communities can have fairly civil conversations (and even disagreements). I think this is largely due to the fact that being niche means its less likely to attract troll-types looking for a platform.

    It takes effort on behalf of the user to make their 
    experience on the site "better"

Broadly, I agree.

I would say that for me, Twitter falls approximately halfway between:

1. Facebook: which is only barely tolerable, after much effort, and still seems to optimize for negative emotions, spam, etc

and

2. Reddit: with minimal effort (just need to subscribe to subreddits) it is an entirely personalized experience of exactly what I want to see

Reddit is and will change more over time. Today I get “posts you may like” on my home feed which are basically rehashed horrible takes from /r/politics on a different subreddit.

True, but it's easy to find games that don't use that model (especially on desktop or console), whereas it's hard to find a way to consume thoughts from interesting people outside of twitter.

>it's hard to find a way to consume thoughts from interesting people outside of twitter.

You can subscribe to high quality substacks and publications

Read a book?

I don't think this is solvable, or indeed even a problem to be solved. Our definition of "better" probably overlaps quite a bit, but it decidedly does not with many, many people. There are a lot of people who really enjoy "memes and low-effort content".

The reason it takes effort on behalf of the user is because there's no such thing as a perfect read-your-mind content recommendation system that doesn't require any inputs from you, as much as people like to pretend machine learning is magic. Twitter/Reddit et al are a tool for building a content stream that fits you perfectly: their recommendations aren't intended to be blindly and indiscriminately consumed, but to narrow your search space to make the construction of this stream possible in the first place.

This is a simple extension of the trend of broadening distribution we've seen, from having three broadcast channels (all reporting the same news with the same slant and the same blind spots), through cable television, all the way up to today's wide-open, bottom-up distribution system. The root of this type of complaint about social media is that they treat their users with too much respect, trusting them to have the emotional continence and intellectual maturity to build a custom content stream that fits them instead of being told precisely what to believe and what to care about by Walter Cronkite.

It seems reasonable to propose that perhaps most people do not find that experience "better." Frankly, I've not been that careful about who I follow, and the curated feed is better than the uncurated one.

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