[guygurari]

I’m rooting for you. Here’s a thought about a possible trade off between radicalization and engagement. When social media platforms optimize for growth, it makes sense for them to make it as easy as possible for users to share/retweet. It lowers “amplification friction” and allows messages to go viral. The most successful platforms have very low amplification friction, which suggests that low friction is an important ingredient.

What we are learning is that making it trivially easy to amplify anyone’s message enables cancel culture and (I believe) leads to radicalization.

If this is correct, then increasing amplification friction on your platform will lead to less radicalization, at the cost of lowering engagement. My guess is that for this to be successful requires a careful balance of where you land on the higher/lower friction spectrum. Too much friction leads to low engagement which leads to failure. Too little friction leads to uncontrolled amplification which leads to radicalization. So a balance is needed.

Either that, or a totally new idea is needed that turns existing platforms on their head.

[marchdown]

Unethical Thought Experiments: what if Twitter shrank the retweet button or hid it under the fold to but the brakes on the viral spread?

Put amplification behind a trivial inconvenience that would make knee-jerk retweets less frequent and allow the whole chain reaction to cool down.

[dropofwill]

Instagram doesn’t have a share/repost feature, but people still do it a lot, either manually or through 3rd part integrations.

This leads to other problems like blocking someone, but still seeing their content because it gets reposted a lot.

[meheleventyone]

Twitter didn’t either in the beginning.

[chiefmcloud]

Thanks. I think another key part is that social networks get huge. They get thousands of employees, billions in investment, etc. This makes them fragile, and forces them down certain paths. If I stay small then I’m not handicapped by forced expectation of user engagement or growth.

I agree with you about the danger of low friction amplification of messages. My hope is that if users can amplify messages but they get no social credit for it, it will dampen down this behavior.