Can We Imagine a Better Social Media?

Many people blame social media for the present state of our world. I also think they have a point. I mean, smartphones became ubiquitous some time around the early to mid 2010s, and ever since then, political polarization, tribalism, fake news and misinformation have all become major problems, and people’s general mental health and wellbeing have declined. As a result of these negative developments, more and more people are calling for everyone to use social media less, and go out and touch grass more. Some people are even hoping that the next decade will see a rise of anti-tech luddites, so that social media could fade away once and for all.

However, there is another, perhaps more realistic, way to solve this problem too: by imagining a better social media. I mean, social media doesn’t have to be this way. Social media is only the way it is because the companies are making money from the current model, in turn because people accept things the way they are currently. If there is demand for something different, the nature of capitalism means that things will change to meet that demand eventually. So, the important question is, can we imagine a better social media? I think we can. Especially with some help from the experiences of the early internet, back in the 90s and the aughts.

The first thing I would like to change about social media is its obsession with popularity, and metrics about popularity. Every social media platform displays metrics like followers, subscribers, views and likes very prominently, and there is generally no way to turn these off. In fact, things are getting worse: for example, YouTube used to have an option to not display subscriber numbers but that was disabled a few years ago. On the other hand, when X was Twitter, it didn’t display the number of views for every Tweet, but now it does. The trend sadly is towards displaying more, not less, of these popularity metrics, and ending the choice of letting users opt out. All this encourages people to chase popularity, at the expense of everything else. In turn, this encourages tribalism, echo chamber effects, and ultimately political polarization, because it is easier to be popular by sticking to one tribe than by being in the no-mans-land in the middle. Thus social media that rewards popularity inevitably encourages tribalism and polarization.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Remember the early internet, which was much more decentralized? There weren’t popularity stats in your face everywhere, simply because there was no way to centrally generate such stats in a way that was applicable to everyone. Some website owners did put a counter on their homepage to show how many people had ever visited their page, but those counters were not only optional, they were non-standardized and tended to be non-prominently displayed at the bottom of pages, meaning that nobody really cared about them. This, I think, is one of the biggest reasons why the early internet was more about self expression and sharing interesting ideas, and less about chasing popularity. This, in turn, meant that people were more genuine, and more interesting. This was what made the internet a fun place back then. If we want that internet back, then the pointless popularity metrics really have to go. I mean, popularity stats really are pointless. It’s not like I’m going to make myself watch a video I’m not interested in just because it has a million views! It’s not even like it’s valid ‘social proof’ anymore, because, as everyone knows, these stats can be gamed by botting and other deceptive marketing practices, and are hence unreliable anyway.

The second thing that I would like to change is the dominance of clickbait. Clickbait, which really didn’t exist in the early internet, has seriously degraded the internet, and I actually think it should be a practice that we collectively shun socially. One day clickbaiting will hopefully be taboo the way selling a fake product is today. But before we get there, social media platforms can still do something about clickbait. You see, I’m the kind of person who generally avoids clicking on clickbait. In fact, the sight of clearly clickbaity titles gives me a headache. However, due to the way algorithms prioritize popularity above all else, sometimes I’m presented with nothing but clickbait to choose from. I think there should be a way to mute the clickbait, so that the algorithm can recognize that you are a user who doesn’t like this kind of content. In other words, a mechanism to allow us to opt out of all clickbait, or at least as much of it as the algorithm can catch. I seriously don’t think it’s that hard to do, especially now that we have AI.

The final thing that I would like to change is the dominance and normalization of over-polished content. This is particularly relevant to video platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Very polished content is likely to come from a production team that can afford to spend thousands of dollars on every video. Which means such content is likely to be either corporate produced for commercial purposes, or political propaganda pushed by rich donors. Either way, it’s likely to be bad content that I don’t like, and many other people also don’t like. Moreover, the normalization of over-polished content could create a prohibitive effect on everyday people who can only afford to record using an average webcam at home, without good lighting or post-production. The normalization of over-polished content would make some people think that their home-made video is not worthy enough. Thus we get more corporate content and paid political propaganda, and less homemade content, which I think is a bad thing. In this day and age of AI, I think there should be an option to choose to see more non-polished videos, so that those of us who want more homemade, organic content can have this choice.

Here are just some of my ideas about how social media can be reimagined. As to how they can get implemented, I think perhaps if we make our demands heard loud and clear enough, a new startup or two would eventually arrive and cater to our demands. If these startups then prove popular, the legacy platforms would probably copy them too, just like how the rise of TikTok led to YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. Therefore, I think the first step is just to talk about the ideas we have, and to get the ball rolling. As with everything, getting the ball rolling in some way is perhaps the most important step.