We have that to a certain extent with Nextdoor. They take precautions on invites, neighborhoods you live in, and names. Yet, it's one of the messiest of clusterfucks.

That's a solid point and I wonder if the reason is simply because of the way its marketed and the initial userbase that sort of paved the way for the rest of the app. When I hear of nextdoor, I simply think of local Karens screaming about kids being too loud outside. Sure, there are some decent conversations happening too, but mostly its got that vibe. It's not really touted as a "lets chat about anything" tool, mostly just local neighborhood gossip (at least where I live, and I live in a "cool/hip" neighborhood, can't imagine how bad it is in the suburbs).

NextDoor is the way it is because they don't do any content moderation at NextDoor HQ - they depend on local "Leads" to do the work. Unfortunately, this model doesn't work. The same person that wants run your HOA and drive you crazy is the same person that becomes a Lead.

Once one Lead gets in, only they themselves can promote another person to Lead. In my neighborhood, we had one thoughtful Lead, and one insane Lead. The thoughtful lead carefully deliberated about adding more Leads, while the insane Lead picked her cronies - and then eventually "overthrew" the thoughtful Lead.

NextDoor has terrible content moderation and no penalties for infringing users. It's absolutely vile, amplifying the most minority of opinions with no consequences.

Huh, the moderation issues are one problem with it and now when you put it that way, sounds an awful lot like the moderation system of reddit. And we know how great that is. /s

Sure, but at least on reddit, if you don't like a moderation style, you can set up a competing sub-reddit r/fitness to r/advancedfitness, or r/weightlifting to r/powerbuilding to r/bodybuidling to r/naturalbodybuilding - the opportunities are endless.

No such alternative exists on NextDoor. Don't like the content or moderators? Your only choice is stop participating. I have no idea why NextDoor thinks that is good for their business model. Over time the site will just be populated with Karens.

It's terrible at least in my burbs.

The cynic in me thinks that Nextdoor is just proof that the fundamental thing that makes social media terrible - being a megaphone for egos, pettiness, and narcism - are not overcome by real identities and scope. In my group, there are people that like to stir the pot, and then there are people that love reacting to the stir.

It's always easier to destroy than to create, and computers are great amplifiers of ideas; it makes sense then that as ideas become more common, more of them would be destructive.

Nextdoor is one of the best things on the internet. Easily the most constructive large scale BBS type things I've seen since early craigslist. If yours is nuts: it's because the people around you suck. I'm as misanthropic as they come, but the people around me are fucking great.

I'll admit it was awful when I lived in Berkeley, but so were the people around me.

"It's because the people around you suck." Isn't that the core problem with all social media? If people didn't suck we wouldn't be having this discussion about facebook.

FB is terrible as it puts your aunt Mabel, your 3rd collitch GF, some guy you bought weed off of in HS, and some dude you met at an industry mixer together with 100 of your closest pals and lets them fling poop at each other. You can quit; I did. Don't miss it!

Nextdoor is great; lets me know what the neighbors are doing and helps me pick out great local services. Some dudes above pointed out you need some common interest for it to work: being a good neighbor counts as a common interest!

Same. My nextdoor is pretty chill. No one talks politics too busy saving lost pets, recommending handymen and landscapers, and such, I guess.

I was on the social networks before facebook, we called them bulletin boards, or IRC back then, and one of the things you didn't do was write your real name. You could be closer to people that way, you could share things you didn't want people to know about you, and it worked.

The reason it worked, was that you would gather based on your interests and there was no giant company optimizing things for clicks - that is also why the original reddit worked so well: there is a small space for your niche.

Also, you could easily sign up under a new name if need be to start over (e.g., when you lost an argument or overreacted or something). Snowden mentions his in "Permanent Record".

I was on usenet before then and you did use your own name

A better approach than frozen mini-nets is just to require any company above a certain number of users to open its protocol like email. You could then get your access to the system via any ISP, and you would be the one who decided what opinions were allowed to reach you by who you subscribed to without the mandatory "safety service" provided by a single party. They could still offer that service as an option but wouldn't be able to mandate it.

Interestingly, the GDPR comes close to the requirement you suggest. It defines a "right to data portability"[0] saying that users "shall have the right to have [their] personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible."

If this were interpreted by a court or regulator (perhaps as part of an EU anti-trust investigation) as a requirement to have new data automatically exported on an on-going basis, then that is very similar to requiring effectively federation between big services.

[0] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/

Huge fan of making utilities out of the most successful services as a default modus operandi.

Yes, and it should apply to all online systems as they grow into the millions of users, because not surprisingly, network effects are pervasive on the network. So not just communications but commerce such as Amazon should be forced to transition (in stages) or stop growing.

They could do whatever they wanted with their customers (pricing, who and how to serve, terms of service, etc.) when they were small enough that users could in practice leave them for a competitor just as easily as they could cut off service.

But if they allowed themselves to grow to into the millions of users, they would have to gradually transition to purely uninvolved, invisible infrastructure, like an underground water pipe. Their users would deal with smaller middlemen instead of the background infrastructure provider. The infrastructure provider would have no way to impose terms of service or philosophical opinions or pricing controls or whatever, which only the middlemen would be allowed, and if the middlemen all conspire, the infrastructure provider wouldn't be able to deny service to a new middleman who offered an alternative.

Basically, the small players deal freely with small players, and the biggest players, instead of gaining leverage, would have to serve them more and control or compete less (or remain small and retain the full freedom of a small player).

If you want to fix most of the garbage of social media, and actually turn it into a marketplace of ideas, slow the speed at which information spreads through it.

Put a hard cap on a post's re-tweets/shares, and aggressively ban bots that try to copy&paste to circumvent this.

This is one of those ideas that sound good in theory but then immediately causes bad effects.

The problem with cutting and pasting isn't bots, it's people. Uncle Joe posting 5 links a day from <bad news source> is completely allowed under your system, and yet if there are a million Uncle Joes on your network (and there definitely is a large portion of the population like that), then you'd just be back to square one.

Uncle Joe is unlikely to have thousands of followers. And if he does, those followers are again, unlikely to each have thousands of followers.

Remember spam chain e-mails back in the 0's? There were a lot of stupid viral ideas going around in them, but their reach was rather limited, and they were, generally speaking, not very successful in breaking into the social zeitgeist.

"15 million people liked this" is a lot of social proof. "Uncle Joe + a few dozen other people liked this" is not nearly as much social proof... And viral ideas live and die by the amount of social proof they have.

It's quite possible that what I suggest may not be the best possible fix. In fact, I'll go so far to say that it's not. But I have a hard time imagining that we currently live in the best possible world, such that no amount of tweaking the parameters of these sites will result in improvement. The current outcomes are horrible.

I think some version of this idea has promise. It's kind of like social distancing and COVID-19.

Everyone wants to limit what other people can read and write because they want to impose their beliefs onto the rest of the world. No. Your ideas aren't the "correct" ones. Just censor your personal information instead. Stop looking at all the crap and it'll be as if it doesn't exist. Almost everything I see on Twitter or Facebook is either interesting technical things, advertising, real people's daily lives, and the odd cat video.

This is wrong on so many levels.

1. Bad ideas spreading does, in fact, harm me. For instance, bad ideas, in the vein of 'COVID is a hoax created by Bill Gates and Soros' and 'Wearing masks is tyrrany' are currently killing people, and are causing economic damage.

2. If speech is so meaningless that ignoring it makes it's impact on my life go away, why do people care about having free speech? How can it both be so meaningless, and so important at the same time?

3. It takes an incredible amount of privilege to ignore politics. Even if you don't care for it, politics cares deeply about you. When politics stops caring about me, I'll stop looking at 'the crap'.

This is easily one my favorite arguments against 5G. Why exactly do we need more mobile bandwidth? Is anyone doing anything useful with it?

Watching movies

Talking face to face with friends and family

That is anti-free speech. Not that social networks are bound by the First Amendment, but it's literally preventing me from saying something freely by my own volition if too many people before me already said the exact same thing. Hard pass.

It is my understanding that Telegram and Whatsapp are currently actively doing this kind of thing, to stop the spread of misinformation and disinformation, according to the companies. I still disagree with this practice on principle. The effects of free speech on free people is increased freedom. If those using free speech are not themselves free, less optimal results may occur; freedom is an inherent good; free actions are judged on their merits and their effects.

If you go to a bar or a park and play loud music over everyone, or amplify your voice loudly enough to try to have a conversation with everyone simultaneously, then they can kick you out. These locations can define their range of acceptable behavior, and that usually includes a lot of norms about socializing and letting people in their own subgroups be free from egregious distractions. Social media can similarly construct and define its own norms. No single location or specific social media site has a monopoly on speech. We have a large choice between them, and especially online, the barriers to creating your own space are low.

Already on Facebook, I generally can't make a post that's shown to other people automatically who are disconnected from my friend group. Is Facebook limiting my free speech by doing that already? Hypothetically, if Facebook did stuff like decreasing the volume, er, show rate, to far-away people if my post is re-shared from my friends and so-on to very far outside of my immediate friend group, is that then censorship?

On social media, people choose who to listen to so nobody can "play loud music" to those who don't want to hear it. Censorship is to protect people from wrong-think that they want to hear, not to protect them from what they don't want to hear.

We could have both. Opt in social networks with real ids for serious stuff and entertainment Social media Free for all Slike we have now for uhhh entertainment.