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I've got an idea to fix social media. No, seriously.
There's a concept of social capital, where your network of human connections is roughly analogous to financial capital. Some people have more, some people have less. And it's pretty clearly better to have more- whether it's finding a job, finding a romantic partner, or just finding someone to go bowling with, social connections matter a lot.
The only problem is, it's hard to measure it. How do you quantify how popular someone is? As that wiki article says, "There is no widely held consensus on how to measure social capital, which has become a debate in itself." But now, thanks to social media, now we know! You can just look at your social media accounts and it tells you exactly how many friends/followers/subscribers/whatever you have. (of course that leaves out a lot of info, like how many of those accounts are bots vs real people, and whether they really love you or just clicked the button on a whim. But it's a start). I'm going to focus on twitter for simplicity, but this is broadly true of any social media platform.
I was wondering if anyone had calculated a "gini index" to measure inequality in social media. I couldn't find anything, maybe because there were too many results about how social media distorts income inequality. But maybe this is new ground for economists to study? What I did find about Twitter:
Anecdotally, that seems to be how most people now use social media. They don't use it to connect to their real-life friends and family, they use it to follow big accounts. Either real-life celebrities like Elon Musk and Taylor Swift, or just an influencer who was lucky enough to go viral. Those people have a huge audience for every single shit they post, while most of us have barely anyone reacting to us. It's a weird dynamic where the big accounts get so many replies they can't possibly read them all, and most normal people are screaming into the void. Not very "social." . They used to say that "in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, " but that doesn't seem to be the case. Big celebrities just suck up all the attention.
My idea: redistribution! Put a progressive tax on followers, so that every big account loses a certain percentage each year, with the percentage going up with size. Maybe 10% per year for the top accounts. Those followers are reassigned to follow some random person at the bottom, just like how taxes take away rich people's money and give it to poor as welfare. We'd all get around 5-10 new followers randomly assigned to us each year, which isn't going to make us e-famous, but it's a lot if you think of them as real people actually becoming friends with you each year.
You might ask, what's to stop the reassigned from just going dropping their new follow and going back to Taylor Swift? Nothing. If they really want to follow her, and hate this new person they've been assigned, they're free to do that. But my sense is that most people are following a lot of accounts out of sheer inertia. I hardly ever curate my connection list, I just keep following the same people forever. I have a lot of Facebook "friends" who I went to high school with and now barely recognize. I have Youtube subs I never watch. If you took them away, I don't think I'd notice. And it would give me more of an incentive to post if I knew that someone was actually going to read it, without me having to "work the algorithm" to "build up a following."
To some extent Youtube seems to actually do this. I've noticed it randomly recommends me some very low-view videos sometimes, like double-digit views with no comments. One time I reached out to the creator, and they replied back, and they became one of my very few Twitter followers who isn't a bot. I think something like that, on a larger scale, would help Social Media become more "social" instead of mindless passive celebrity worship.
What does "fix" mean - what do you consider to be broken about it? What's the end-goal?
Of all of the things that people have ever said were bad about social media, I don't think the idea that a few people have tons of followers while most have few to none is on anyone's to 10 list.
Incidentally, I'm not sure the idea of specifically redistributing follows is meaningful, considering that basically every social media site pushes hard for you to use algorithmic feeds that show you a selection of things that an algorithm thinks you'll like or engage with rather than strictly people you follow. They can just as easily stick the random small-timers posts in more timelines and rate-limit the big accounts that you actually do follow, and probably nobody will really notice, aside from occasionally liking or following somebody they weren't already following.
Basically I think that social media does the opposite of what it's supposed to do. Instead of being social, it's anti-social. Instead of drawing us together by helping us connect, it forces us into either bitter arguments or monotonous echo chambers. Instead of getting regular people to post their own stuff ("you" tube), it encourages us to watch the viral videos from others. It's essentially just television now, but with no commercial breaks and an algorithm to make it more addictive. It makes us passive, alienated, and dissatisfied. We abandon our real social connections, feel lonely, and try to fix the loneliness through a parasocial pseudo-relationship with these influencers on social media who we can't interact with in any meaningful way.
One option might be to go even harder and have a social network where there's a hard limit on the number of people you can connect with. Myspace used to sort of do this with their "top ten friends" list back in the day. It could also require the relationship be two-way, so that I can't follow a celebrity unless they also follow me back. I'm just sick of our culture being more and more driven by celebrity worship.
Who decides what it's "supposed to do"? What gives any such person the right to dictate that?
For that matter, how do you know there aren't already sites that work exactly the way you think, but you don't know about them, because they aren't as popular or well-advertised? That would imply that the way all existing well-known sites work is exactly how their users and their owners think they should work. I think private chat groups, as exist in pretty much every messaging app, are much more like this, but by their nature aren't well-known.
So by saying you want a law, as an "interesting experiment". Laws mean people will be fined, potentially lose their livelihoods, get thrown in jail, etc. Somehow I don't think the people who would be affected by such a law will find this "experiment" quite so "interesting". Particular when you are forcing every site and all of the users to do things they actively dislike to satisfy your notions about how they "should" work, when there are already alternatives that work that way.
My response is going to sound kind of hostile, but that's just because I don't know how else to format it. You're asking me a lot of questions, and they're good questions, I just think they've been discussed enough already that I can short-circuit the answers.
me. Or: me as filtered through the democratic process.
The first amendment gives me the right to state my opinion about anything
I have searched and not found any
No, that would imply it's a market failure, where short-term profit incentives make everyone worse off. Just like how the prisoner's dilemma makes both prisoner's lose, no matter how smart they are. The market is not perfect.
Yes that is how laws work. Somehow I manage to live my life despite the dystopian hell of being forced to pay taxes, register my car, not steal stuff, etc. Somehow I make do.
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You're forgetting the part where there needs to be a reason for anyone to care if you expect them to participate. Exactly who do you think the audience is for a social media site that randomly deletes people from your friends list, spams it with total randos you don't give a shit about, and goes out of its way to avoid showing you videos anyone finds too interesting?
YouTube has been doing this thing where they throw random small creators into their suggestions and I hate it. It's gotten to the point where I just immediately block any channel in my feed if the video presented has under a thousand views, because so far they've been poorly produced dogshit 100% of the time.
My idea is this would be enacted by law, on every social media platform, or at least all the ones under US control. It would be exactly like a financial tax- no one likes paying them, but we recognize that it's kind of bad to let a handful of plutocrats control all of the money. In some ways social capital inequality is worse: I don't lose any money when Elon gets richer, but it makes it harder for me to get views on my tweets if everyone is focusing their limited attention span on him and a handful of other mega-influencers.
I don't think you fully appreciate what an unappealing product you're describing. Social media under US control would quickly become a derelict husk. You would need to either exert Chinese levels of authoritarianism over the internet in order to try and prop up your crummy domestic social media, or else watch American public discourse move under the control of other powers.
Oh, i know it would be unpopular. But it would be an interesting experiment, dont you think? Social media companies have a huge network effect and moat. People seem to just stick with the main player, no matter what.
We may actually get a test of this, if tiktok gets banned in the US. Will teens learn how to sideload it, or will they switch to a new app? I really dont know!
TikTok has competition that consists of viable social media platforms, not government-mandated crippleware, so I feel like comparisons are limited. If you're going to force Americans to use that crippleware at gunpoint in pursuit of nebulous social engineering goals, you may as well just ban everything and make them go outside.
I just found out that apparently Facebook has been doing something like this recently. They've rejiggered they're algorithm so that we now see more posts from just regular, random users. So uh, at least Mark Zuckerberg agrees with me... for whatever that's worth.
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