I would have thought this is already a solved problem.
If you model social networks like a graph, then you can measure certain properties. One property that’s very important for social networks is the “small world index”. The small world index is a ratio of (how many of your friends know about each other(clustering coefficient))/(how many people on average to connect with anyone in the world (average path length)). Basically, in tribal communities, it used to be that everyone knew one another, AND if you really needed to send a message to another community then it would take only a few intermediate people. The former gives you a sense of safety, and the latter gives you the sense of being able to change the world.
With the advent of social media and other things, the small world index has gone way down. The amount of your friends that your friends know on average is gone down, aka, everyone is very fragmented and the clustering index has gone down. This number has gone down faster than the average path length, because the average path length was surprisingly low to begin with. The net effect is that people feel less like they are part of a community.
Social networks always try to tune their algorithms to encourage interactions to raise the small world index in this direction, but it’s very hard. For one, only few percent of users actually generate any content, the rest are lurkers. You can’t have a high clustering if your “potential friends” never talk to each other, if you can call them that.
Another reason is that enabling small worlds inside social networks is sometimes at odds with revenue generation. In general, consuming content/having para-social interactions online is much easier than before the modern social networks. Thus, people have gotten much more picky with their time and interactions, and now the type of content that people expect to see online now must be of the highest quality. High quality content is easier to monetize, but it’s also harder to create. So this puts an artificial floor on who creates content (only people who are in it for the money), and thus we have fewer people who spread/share ideas. This decreases the clustering coefficient. Thus, paid social networks are against small worlds.
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RabbitBBQ@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Only from the perspective of being able to monetize and control communications among large numbers of people.
For more than just angry X type reactions, the standard forum format is really a solved problem and has worked well for a long time. It’s only when these companies want to control what you see and sell the ability to do that do we get the news feeds. Even Reddit limits your direct message counts until you pay money for it.
The old internet was so much better
green@feddit.nl 4 weeks ago
The problem is engagement - which in turn means building a community.
If someone goes to your forum, hijacks your posts, and them puts them on Reddit; there is no incentive to use your platform, which stifles and dies since no one is communicating on it. This is also part of the tyranny, as people can figuratively walk into your house, eat all your food, and then expect you to restock.
On the old internet, this was not really an issue since there was a better culture. But if all your friends use Reddit, and all the content is reposted there, why use the internet forum?
tfm@europe.pub 4 weeks ago
So let’s repost all of the popular Reddit content here ;D