How to build better social media? | Hacker News Reader

How to build better social media?

yoyo-code.com

4 pointspanstromek4 comments

This is a topic which I've been thinking about a lot, and I think one problem is with the recommendation algorithm using likes/views/comments as a signal for what to propogate in people's feeds. This creates an incentive for controversial content and disinformation.

Another big problem is that a post has a lifetime of a few hours. Even if someone comments to point out a lie, or like twitter a "community review" is added noting disinformation, by that point a viral post has already potentially affected hundreds of thousands of people, who will never see the follow up. And this also means there are no repercussions for the poster, since people never see that their post was labelled as disinformation. I think a potential fix here is to have certain responses on posts one has interacted with/seen, appear in your feed. This way you get that follow-up and potentially also inspire more discussion.

The founder of a new social media site called Maven has a similar proposition. They removed all of these metrics to disincentivize competition and optimization of them and instead organize the site by topics. It's an interesting project, and I'm curious how it works out in the end.

There's great conversation about this with the founder on Machine Learning Street Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWIrXN-yy8g

I can't ise social media anymore. I just want to see what my connections are doing. Instead its all over produced garbage by people I don't know and ads from companies who will never receive my money for being spammy AF. All driven by a broken algorithm.

Yeah; it's a shame, cause at its core a lot of these platforms are meant to connect people who create things with people who might be interested in those creations. But it all hinges on the algorithm to make that connection, and that algorithm can be gamed, and it's further conflicted by incentives like ads, and incentives like creators getting paid by views!

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