I think we can all agree that social media has its warts but that it also brings, or at times has brought, people together in ways that are hard to ignore. Social media is often lauded but it is often the subject of fierce criticism. What would you like in a social media website? There’s a poll at the end!

Motivation

Complaints about social media include:

• Overly political
• Promotion of hate and violence
• Engagement as a generalised metric
• Promotion of unhealthy beliefs and habits
• Addictiveness
• Difficulty of finding quality content
• Bullying
• Susceptibility to disingenuous influence and misinformation

I would also add to it the following bug bears:

• It has become increasingly hard to discover non-commercial hobby and project related works
• Websites feel less like ‘communities’ than they used to
• It’s sometimes hard to control the nature of what appears on your feed
  • maybe you want to see more subjects that relate to your interests and hobbies but you find your feed dominated by political opinions, ‘bait’, hot takes, memes, etc.

Of social media websites, probably the one that comes closest to resolving these questions is a toss-up between Reddit and wordpress.com.

The main drawbacks of Reddit are:

• Its voting system still seems to promote trolling comments
• While it has come down on ‘hate groups’, its culture is still strongly influenced by their historical presence
• Its home page by default promotes a lot of crap
• It is not a good website for primary content creators in general, being mostly focused on news aggregation – there is a general cultural bias against ‘self promotion’ which in turn I think hinders creativity
• Its volunteer moderator arrangement seems to invite abuse of power

And while of course I am typing this on wordpress.com, I would say its main drawbacks are:

• Its monetisation scheme also seems be geared against content creation, you have to go through paywalls to host e.g. videos which may not be accessible to everyone.
• The emphasis is strongly on blogging as such more than being a social media platform (this is both a pro and a con, really)
• Finding compelling content is sometimes challenging as it involves sifting through an array of tags, etc.

So what features might we put in a social media website that remediate some of these challenges?

Possible features and design choices

Configurable Topics

Configurable Topics would be a consumer feature. A configurable topic would be a way of configuring a users newsfeed and giving them direct, clear control over ‘the algorithm’ and what they see. They may see something like the following on an easy to access configuration panel:

• Arts
  [————||————]
• Technology
  [————||————]
• News
  [————||————]
• Politics
  [————||————]
• Celebrities
  [————||————]
• …

And like with wordpress you would have the option to add and remove new topics, as well as configuring how frequently you see this kind of information. The topic search should also be a combobox to make it easy to find topics, maybe there would be a modal UI that gives you a preview of that content as you adjust it or a preview of how that would affect your feed. This may help users to find content that is relevant to them and of higher quality.

Tag moderation

The site would be moderated to ensure that posts which are tagged a certain way do actually pertain to the tag itself. The post may not be entirely removed if in breach of this but the tag in question may be removed if it receives accurate reports to that effect. This should empower users to avoid topics they don’t want to deal with and be able to control the levels of that content with relative accuracy in combination with the Configurable Topics laid out above. In some ways we should be able to more-or-less isolate problematic behaviour to a handful of topics if people do not want to be involved which can either be totally frozen out or even shadow banned from promotion in the wider community (similar to how reddit dealt with some subs).

Heat preference

How spicy would you like your soup social media? Another adjustable slider. It would just look like:

Heat
[————||————]

The Heat slider would essentially correspond with how strong the engagement is for the posts that you receive on your main feed. On the low end of the scale, you would mostly get posts that nobody has engaged with at all – in some ways this would be similar to what you get in ‘new’ on reddit, but you might get some older content as well. If you turn it all the way up, you would get a more ‘normal’ social media discourse where the items with the most views are promoted to you. Having this slider in the middle would give you something of a mixture, where most of the content would be stuff with some engagement but not anything that has been totally ignored.

The heat preference slider would help users to avoid inflammatory content for the most part if they wish. It may also disincentivise creating inflammatory content in the first place because it would be less likely to get the traction it wants in the first place.

This heat preference may also work to make the site less addictive, should it be configured appropriately.

These are just some ideas I’ve had, maybe I have others as well. What features would you like in a social media website?