and therein lies the problem. The issue is the scale in the first place. Twitter et al produce so much garbage because they're designed towards virality outside of any human scale.
Bring social networks down to the size that a community can coherently operate in and you've diminished the problem.
HN arranges by popularity but actually in a fairly limited way. There's no scores shown and the downvotes are capped, and most threads you can actually read through because they've got less than 200 comments or so.
Do the same for Facebook or twitter. Limit connections, hide visible upvotes or likes, cap the number of people something can be shared with by one user, make people choose who they are in contact with, which immediately puts scarcity and value on connection and communication. Obviously there is no commercial incentive for these companies to do this, who live off the entropy they generate.
and therein lies the problem. The issue is the scale in the first place. Twitter et al produce so much garbage because they're designed towards virality outside of any human scale.
Bring social networks down to the size that a community can coherently operate in and you've diminished the problem.
HN arranges by popularity but actually in a fairly limited way. There's no scores shown and the downvotes are capped, and most threads you can actually read through because they've got less than 200 comments or so.
Do the same for Facebook or twitter. Limit connections, hide visible upvotes or likes, cap the number of people something can be shared with by one user, make people choose who they are in contact with, which immediately puts scarcity and value on connection and communication. Obviously there is no commercial incentive for these companies to do this, who live off the entropy they generate.