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,
As the other commenter mentioned, it will always go that way for profit.
With social media, the users aren’t the customers–the advertisers (and whoever is buying the data) are. Social media platforms often start out with a focus on the users, because they can’t be profitable without a large user base. But once that point is reached, everything is subject to the will of the customers. At that point, your experience doesn’t matter anymore. And it will always go this way.
There are a handful of ways to avoid this trend. One way is to ensure there is always a breadth of competition–that way, providers have to focus on a good user experience, otherwise their users will switch to a competitor. But this is nearly impossible with social media, because it’s non-trivial to “move” to another service.
Another way is to remove the profit motive. But the challenge then is finding some way to fund and build something like a social media platform. The Fediverse does this by distributing the cost and work among thousands of volunteers. In theory, a non-profit organization could do something similar, if they could secure funding, but even those are subject to shittifying themselves (see recent developments with Mozilla).
The distributed model has its challenges–one of the big ones is resisting those who would try to take the space and exploit it for those profits (for example, read about XMPP and Google Chat, and the “embrace, expand, extinguish” strategy). But it seems to have a very good chance to avoid those pitfalls–largely because running your own instance of these services is relatively accessible to many.