What makes a social network “work”?

Typically, we say that a social networking service works when it achieves some of these:

  • Community – gives users the ability to create communities they can feel a sense of belonging to.
  • Freedom of expression – expands people’s ability to speak their mind in a … umm… meaningful way ? (looking at 4chan’s /pol/).
  • Rich expression – actually offers tools to express yourself (presence of features like markup, formatting, embeds).
  • Constructive culture – becomes an environment where people learn and participate in constructive and fun activities — like university clubs. (Sorry for the example, but Reddit’s r/anime comes to mind.)
  • Privacy & safety – respects users’ privacy and safety.
  • Developer support – provides good developer tools.
    • Example: In Numbers: The Best Anime of the Decade from MyAnimeList — a huge data-driven article made possible by open tools and APIs. (also a huge web page, might take forever to load all figures)

Feel free to add more points, or challenge the ones I’ve listed.

It seems like a general consensus here on Lemmy that — no matter how many times you try — Reddit will always slip from Aaron Swartz to u/spez.
Why do you think that is?

Disclaimer: I wrote the post by myself, but used AI to refine my bad English and markdown,

  • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de
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    2 days ago

    Four panel webcomic by mrlovenstein. Panel 1: Person is trapped in a walled garden with an orb labeled "social media" and says "Dang, you trapped me in your walled garden". Panel 2: Person says "That's ok, I guess I like it here". Panel 3: The orb labeled "social media" has a lit match, about to set the garden on fire. The person nervously asks "What are you doing?". Panel 4: Close-up of the social media orb smiling with flames in the background, and the person repeating "What are you doing?!?!".

    Corporate social media requires making a profit to keep running. No matter how good it looks at the start, the main goal of a corporate social media is never to provide the best possible service to end users. The things you get to see and how you interact are not driven by interests and real friends, but by what gets the platform the most profit.

    Obligatory “AI bad”. You should post what you spent effort writing, instead of letting a large language model subtly change its meaning.

    • zaknenou@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      2 days ago

      Obligatory “AI bad”. You should post what you spent effort writing, instead of letting a large language model subtly change its meaning.

      I edited the AI’s edit though ~~.