[acituan]

> When looking at social media, it’s part public forum that needs some type of discovery/filter mechanism, and part a tool for individual users and community to communicate and collaborate.

> The barrier in current social media networks is largely skewed towards manipulative design that optimizes towards datamining and addictive gamified systems and interfaces.

I think you're spot on. Even at the level of individual we have to do heavy noise filtering to reach at the signals that matter to us. We have heuristics to go towards people that we find useful and stay away from those are mere nuisance. Social media is this one giant noise machine that actively throws bullshit at us, ads are 99.99% noise considering their usability/mental processing cost, ranking algorithms are optimized to make signals that get you stay engaged overly salient in comparison to their natural incidence rates, our self-association is heavily distorted; content of friends that rile us up are showed as often as the friends we like etc.

> Information needs to be discoverable, but people need to be free from propaganda.

I think the only solution to this is breaking away any recommendation engine from the rest of the product and make it available for competition. "Use Facebook with our RecommendSmart, scientifically proven to make you less depressed than the default one". "Me and my friends use Twitter with SocratesSort, has been great at starting deep conversations on topics we care about, totally troll free".