[danielrhodes]

The reason Facebook is where it is now is that when it was novel there was a lot of engagement. But as the novelty wore off, it became clear that your friends were not going to be able to produce the amount of interesting content you’d need to stay engaged. Most people probably don’t have enough friends on FB making the problem worse. In addition, Facebook’s privacy model requiring a double opt-in friendship makes it hard to add more friends.

So they started to loosen things: you can follow others, posts can be public, your feed becomes a mix of posts in your network and friends posts, etc. Now it is resembling Reddit. Numbers go up!

That is to say: these pure friend social networks start off with the right intentions. But with a similar product and incentives, you’ll end up right around where Facebook is now. If you want a different outcome, you must start from a different place.

[ghssds]

Old Slashdot had the right ideas. You could mark anyone as friend or foe. If somone marked you as friend, it was your fan. If someone marked you as foe, it was your freak. Then you could make your friends', foes', fans' and freaks' posts more or less visible, as you wished.

There was no "like" for posts but a much more evolved system: you could brand posts as interresting, informative, insightful, funny, underrated, overrated, flamebait or troll.

Slashdot was never a social media, but it sure had a few features that could have been used to turn it into an interresting one.

[everybodyknows]

Did Slashdot reveal your identity to those whom you had "foe'd"? That's where the real-life trouble can start.

[amr_shawky]

I think your analysis about the feed is correct, but the intention isn't to create a traditional feed to scroll for hours, we have plenty of those that do a very good job already. Its more of a different interface for effectively a chat platform where you send links/posts from different parts of the internet directly to a few people you know. The purpose of the feed stops becoming something to scroll to discover new content and more like instagram chat in a unified place, but instead of memes it can be whatever you want.

[sharts]

The problem is when something that has some marginal utility to people becomes something that MBAs see as a tool to extract as much $$ from people. And then the enshitification begins.