All about social networks

Speaking towards this goal, the next lesson I’ve come to learn is that imagining the New Internet is not the same as building it. In my time around the archipelago of internet reform there have been no shortage of ambitious ideas. In the process of implementing said ideas, it was revealed time and time again that ambitiousness does not equal... See more

To optimize for viral growth, today’s social platforms are designed to feature entertainers and sensationalized content in a one-to-many fashion to generate more ad impressions... this is inducing divisiveness and reducing human interaction to just tapping on a like button.

A crucial element to lowering the stakes of any particular moderation decision is the knowledge that the user has the genuine option to go to another community or start his own. The same applies to moderators: The ultimate check on a moderator’s power is that if most users start to believe he is using it poorly, users can either protest until a new... See more

Zuckerberg’s social-media-shaped public does not turn around Zuckerberg in the same way. But even so, Zuckerberg is reshaping the algorithms so that some aspects of the public - in particular hostility to immigration, to women and to sexual minorities - will likely come to the fore, while others will recede. The extent to which this reflects his... See more

We can immediately rule out reproducing the current system in which a tiny number of companies govern permissible speech and what safety means for billions of people. We don't want social media that's like Twitter except without a demented owner. You cannot fix social media by having a non-profit run it or by guiding it with some ethical principles... See more