Ask HN: If you paid for social media what would you expect in return? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If you paid for social media what would you expect in return?

8 pointsabzullah25 comments

Obviously no ads. But what kind of features would make social media not a drain on your life and help improve it for you?

In other words, if you could redesign social media, how would you go about it?

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There don't appear to me any real technical challenges to social media. How do you attract a large audience and how do you moderate content to keep that audience around. So it comes down to marketing and moderation.

Vertical video was a real innovation, but all platforms adopted it pretty quickly.

Advertising and the associated data mining is the most efficient business model for social media. Nothing else comes close.

The biggest problem for me since the advent of X has been the diaspora: my people are on Spill, Mastodon, Threads, Instagram, and Bluesky. They used to all be on Twitter.

The two features I want: world class moderation and all my people in one place.

Only close friends and family, no companies and bots, chronologic feed and mass adoption. I know this isn't features, but the problem with social media is not the lack of features.

I think the whole point of social media is to connect us to the wider world.

Definitely, you should connect to your family and friends, but there should also be a way to connect to strangers. I guess you would want to find people who shares your values, and maybe even those who don't. But if you are talking to strangers, you'd want to know that the normal decorum we keep in face to face conversations would be respected online.

But definitely no companies or bots or addictive feeds or status chasing.

I think numbers should be done away with when it comes to upvotes, it feeds the ego too much, and we judge too quickly. Instead maybe use concepts like hot and cold, or some other relative qualitative measure. The system could use numbers behind the scenes, but they shouldn't be visible to the user.

Yes, obviously it should be possible to find each other, but Facebook have for instance always had a focus on connecting with a lot of people that you hardly know, just for the sake of connecting and giving some PM's really good KPI's. I don't need to follow along in my parents neighbors daughter in laws major life events, it's just noise at that point.

I think one problem of current social media is that it conflates those functions. That is, what’s messed up about Facebook is that it mixes up your most intimate things (sister-in-law had a baby) with the commercial ($10 off coupon for dinner for 2 at a Thai restaurant) and the crass (lid just blew off in the Gaza Strip, film right here.)

I like the idea that one person pays to set something up for their friends and family. No way am I going to get my mother-in-law to pay for something, but something like the Discord model could be great.

On Mastodon (or X) I still have the problem of putting together a persona for a feed: I am interested in photography (posting photos I take but also stuff about gear, technique and other people’s photos), anime, decarbonization, political science, sports, nature, science, software development, and some other things. (What I don’t do is as important as what I do do but is not a visible, you haven’t seen me call any crypto enthusiasts “blockheads” on this site for months because I find other people’s name-calling on Mastodon offensive and I want to be consistent.)

I definitely worry that people who might follow me because they like what I say about decarbonization might not want to get spammed with anime and sports in their feed, I felt my identity was really fragmented when I set out, it feels cohesive to me but what do other people think?

I do not see the way people think chronological feeds are so wholesome, when boosting or retweets get involved they measure vitality instead of predicting it and if you build a “discover” feed of “most boosted” you will get posts with an image with some provocative text (e.g. you’d think pride month was about pissing people off, not having pride…)

One reason I quit using the iOS Mastodon client was I could not turn off a very angry “explore” feed that didn’t respect my user blocks and keyword filters.

Two complaints people have about Mastodon arem (1) unreliable stats about visibility (keeps brands away like garlic keeps vampires away) and (2) insufficient discovery for new users (didn’t bother me, it was just like Twitter at the very beginning.)

> I think the whole point of social media is to connect us to the wider world.

I can't agree with that. I signed up for social media to keep in touch with friends and family, not listen to the crazed rants of their distance acquaintances and marketers. By the time I left, all the actual organic friends and family content was buried by the mountains of irrelevant spam.

I'd totally pay for a service that's limited to only people I care about and know. I can get my outside engagement elsewhere. I want an intimate space, not a town square.

* generated audio that would summarize what had happened since last I logged in. Perhaps more details on family and close friends, and less on acquaintances.

* maybe along same lines, a dashboard with summarized text version of updates. Updates that we should respond to. Etc.

* automatic muting or removal of political, religious, news posts. Basically, anything that is not personal, just don’t show it.

* everyone is verified. No bots or scammers should be able to get through. If everybody is paying then maybe easy to keep scammers and bots out.

I think being completely in control of what shows up on your dashboard is definitely important, I'm not sure how fine grained the controls could be made. All the way to the algorithm?

Another one I think is being able to control your data. Who sees it, which part of it, and so on. Being able to delete data you don't want to keep, etc.

One of the advantages of paid accounts is that it's quite pricy to pull off a lot of shady things that are currently prevalent, spreading fake news for example.

Privacy is probably the biggest realistic expectation for a paid service. Have correct privacy defaults. Don't make the privacy settings confusing. Don't sell user data. Don't insert or use tracking information.

I think companies + commerce can have a big role to play on some hypothetical paid social media, but there should be a clear separation between interaction with friends/family and any interaction with businesses.

From the user's perspective there could be a two tier system, one for close friends and family, one for the world.

You should be in complete control of your data.

I think it would be best if the company in charge of the social media wasn't venture backed, because of wrong incentives.

I pay (voluntarily) for social media in the form of sending regular donations to a certain Mastodon instance.

What I expect in return: Reasonable moderation, i.e. don’t allow nazis, basically.

I also “expect” (wish for) reasonable uptime, and in practice it works very well in that regard too.

Commercial content should be flagged and filterable by the user if desired. Anyone posting commercial for-profit content and doesn't flag it accordingly should be banned.

Other than that, non-user-hostile client apps and an open API.

I would like them to offer some kind of "hackable" feed what i could design my own algorithm. I do not know if you can make it with current technology. But effectively i would like to train my own algorithm or even different algorithms.

I do not trust those companies not to game the algorithm for maximum engagement. The more i have control over the feed the more agency i have to not over indulge.

Maybe you could even add built in feed size limits into the algorithm.

1. No ads 2. Punishing bad behaviour over perma-banning profiles. 3. Unbiased moderation 4. No adult content 5. No alt or bot accounts 6. Some puzzles/activities. Engaging content without sensational news 7. Should have healthy mixture of text content(more) and short videos

Don't game the algorithm, just make it relevant & in order

Don't show me ads

Don't autoplay videos for any reason

Don't try to capture my attention

Protect my data. Never have a breach

Expire my data

Don't track me

I'm not gonna pay, though. I would pay for a place like this--a smaller community. I'm not paying a company like Meta.

Lot of things are mentioned that are valid but personally those are secondary I would pay for a good community of a specific topic I'm interested in where the content to noise ratio is great and the community is friendly and helpful.

All content posted being keworded. So a user can block keywords and never see that shite. Not the backwards facebook style where you have to see it before you can say don't show me anymore of that shite.

This is actually pretty useful. I can see myself using this type of feature to remove videos or content I really am tired of seeing despite constantly & actively telling the algorithm not to send me these type of content anymore.

I’d be happy with nitter as a paid platform with pre musk moderation

No regrets here on my investment of :10bux:

i would delete it off the face of the earth

You guys want more of this crap?

I’m quite happy with the enshittification of Twitter — I used to waste 10 minutes a day on it, and now I’m down to 5 minutes a day.

Privacy, no ads, open source algo (now what X did, better, CURRENT updated version that I can believe runs, they just dumped the algo and then let it rot on Github, we have no clue what they currently run and what changes they made since they "open sourced" it.)

Even better they should just let people run and at least tune the algo to their preferences with a few switches. This stupid idea of ONE algo that serves everyone ...

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