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Notes -
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.
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.
Link? All I can find are an instance where they were friending random people and it turned out to be a bug they apologized for, and various complaints about the algorithm filling feeds up with suggestions people don't care about. Nothing on the order of "it keeps unfollowing Taylor Swift because something something celebrity worship."
More to the point, whatever they're doing, it's not because "Zuckerberg agrees" with you. Firstly because there's no way Zuck gives a shit about redistribution of social capital as a goal, and secondly because there's no reason to imagine that trying to force people to read one another's unwanted spam would generate social capital in the first place.
You seem to have this naive conception that people sit down and say "Time to use social media to find common ground with the rest of humanity!" It's so out of touch that someone in this thread actually had to take more than one post to explain to you why he wants to read about his local football team and not random teams he doesn't give a fuck about. Like... what? I don't think you understand why people use these things.
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