Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

It's as simple as toning down the virulance and addiction potential that has been baked into social media over the years. Revert to chronological feeds based on timestamp alone, and not sorting based on how many inflammatory comments and shares they have. Ban more pages that produce and share these misinformed posts. These are problems that these engagement algorithms themselves created, and social media companies are too timid to actually solve for fear of affecting stock price.

Right, the actual fix is to change their core business model which they'll never do.

I don't think reverting to chrono content makes sense. If popularity doesn't influence what's top-of-feed, then we'll just be flooded with un-interesting content.

Imagine if HN or Reddit didn't sort by popularity? Everyone would need to sort through /new. ...that's not scalable.

What would be better would be to reward controversial content. If lots of people downvote something, and also lots of people upvote, then maybe it needs more attention, not less?

So that rather than creating ever-more-extremist bubbles, people are more likely to see opinions that make them force them to appreciate other points of view.

> toning down the [...] addiction potential that has been baked into social media over the years

That hurts the bottom line so the social media companies won't do it unless they are forced to.

> Revert to chronological feeds based on timestamp alone

At the very least this should be an option (and not one that is automatically reset every time you view a page -- I'm looking at you facebook).

> Imagine if HN or Reddit didn't sort by popularity? Everyone would need to sort through /new. ...that's not scalable.

Reddit gives people the choice, so you can sort by new if you want to.

Choice is good, right?

>that's not scalable

and therein lies the problem. The issue is the scale in the first place. Twitter et al produce so much garbage because they're designed towards virality outside of any human scale.

Bring social networks down to the size that a community can coherently operate in and you've diminished the problem.

HN arranges by popularity but actually in a fairly limited way. There's no scores shown and the downvotes are capped, and most threads you can actually read through because they've got less than 200 comments or so.

Do the same for Facebook or twitter. Limit connections, hide visible upvotes or likes, cap the number of people something can be shared with by one user, make people choose who they are in contact with, which immediately puts scarcity and value on connection and communication. Obviously there is no commercial incentive for these companies to do this, who live off the entropy they generate.

I think hn is an exception because the raw feed is a firehose, and votes serve to filter it (I actually follow hn chronologically via RSS, but with a vote threshold as a filter), but most people aren't following 1000s of accounts posting to their timeline at once. Networks like facebook and twitter used to be chronological, you could scroll through in 10 minutes and catch up on all new content for the day if you were in a rush akin to RSS, and one day that changed.