silly social media features i thought of
These aren’t genuine proposals to fix social media sites, but thought experiments that I wonder about in terms of how it would affect online discussion culture. Wouldn’t mind seeing it on alternative platforms that want to try out something new or weird, though.
Idea 1
Social media site where you can’t leave a comment on a link submission until 12h have passed.
- Arose out of the realization that the immediacy of being first to comment something ruins things.
- People wanna be the first one to get the highest visibility, upvotes and attention, but those who rush to be first are only reading the title or only skimming for 20 seconds at best, which creates confusion and misinformation. Lots of people’s arguments in comment sections are already refuted in the original post or link, or they would know if they clicked around on the linked site.
- A cooldown period would enable more deep reading and time to think about the contents before writing a hot take.
- I know it would cut down on comments and post engagement, but is that necessarily bad if you are trying to build a good site that doesn’t make money off of toxic engagement? If you really want to comment on something, you’ll go back to do so. On a slow site, which would be preferable anyway, it would still be on top 12h later.
- Maybe that mechanism would make people realize that 99% of stuff probably doesn’t warrant a comment from them (especially since so, so many online comments just reiterate what was already said!) and that they’re fine letting it go after sitting through the initial discomfort of not being able to comment.
- Problem: You might not have seen it 12h ago, and could immediately comment if you see it late enough. Wondered if it should be “12h after seeing a post” instead. Would unlock the post at different times for everyone though, and don’t know if that’s good.
Idea 2
Social media site where you only ever see one comment underneath a post that you can engage with, not all of them.
- Which one you see is random on first click, but then consistent for all other times you click on it as it is saved to your account.
- This ‘match’ stays until the post is archived. Then, everyone gets to see all comments and conversations.
- Logged out users get a random one each refresh.
- Reasoning: Big comment sections are overwhelming: You can get in there and beef with hundreds of people and have multiple conversations in different sub-threads and child comments at once, and I don’t think that’s good. Imagine in real life, just 100 people in the room all talking at each other at the same time. It’s too big, too much. No deep conversation possible because so many people quickly butt in with flippant short responses and will never fully read your comment or your replies.
- So, what about a link post on a Reddit/HN type of platform, and you see it got 1.300 comments, but when clicking on it, you get to make one top level comment, but also get matched with only one other top level comment? Means you’d have a conversation about the link content with two other people: One is responding to you (if you chose to comment and they chose to engage with you) and one is with another person that posted. There’s no huge sea of people, no people just butting in and derailing.
- Problem: Would probably feel like censorship to people if most others on the platform will never get to see their comment, as most won’t go back to an archived post to read it all. The interactions that do happen might feel more personal, but there will be less interaction overall.
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