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I think social media designed like "Reddit" is just THE logical way to structure social media. That's why I think there is just an inherent demand for a platform like Reddit. Because of the network effect, social media platforms strongly tend to centralize. More users > more content > more users > more content > ... it is a self-reinforcing cycle favoring centralization. So that is the reason why reddit is popular, it was "the first", it is big. The only reason why people would ever leave is if Reddit themselves screw themselves over. Luckily for us, they do all the time.
Where Reddit really fails is how powerful admins and mods are, and regularly abusing that power. To fix this, you need to change the incentive structure so that power goes to the users themselves. Lemmy is already better at this because of its federated structure.
But I would go a step further and make communities work more like git. Anyone can fork any communities, meaning they create a new copy of a community but under their management. If enough people switch over to that fork, they get to keep the name of the sub.
That way mods and admins are incentivized to act in the best interest of users at all time, because if they don't, they are easily deposed.
As a bonus it would also result in making new communities from two groups who shouldn't have been together in the first place. Essentially creating more and more specialized communities more closely matching the wants of the users.
This is different to Lemmy or Reddit where you would have to create a new sub, with zero content to depose a mod/split the community.
You essentially make the process to switch out mods as low cost as possible for users. Thereby massively increasing competition, increasing quality and user satisfaction.
Ideally this would all be built on top of some base data storage layer like IPFS or something, so you don't have to literally copy over all the content any time you fork a community, but you just copy the references to where the content is stored.
Also hosting should be as simple as possible, ideally on some decentralized hosting service, like some of these crypto solutions.
This would basically remove all barriers to creating and maintining your own communities, except for hosting cost and moderation.
If you had to design the perfect social media platform, I think that would be it.
Not sure about the new sub if the existing users have migrated to the new sub thing.
'front page' feeds would need to change as well with this because a lot of the time people are upcoting stuff they agree with or find funny without looking at the sub it's been posted on.
This means a lot of subs could be deposed for generic meme subs just because they popular.
Yeah that is a good point. I think it would need some permissions managment, like "only community members can vote" or "only community members can see posts". And those might be attached to every post or not depending on how the community is configured.
You also have the ability to restrict users based on certain rules or roles. Like on Reddit, no posting if your account is less than X days old, etc.. Certain members may be allowed to upvote but not post etc..
You may set it so new users can only see any posts made after they joined or not. And then they are also exempted from forking those posts.
Automatic timeouts for when posts should be deleted would also be nice. Also togglable community wise.
Basically setting the platform up to be as public or as private as the community wants.
Would be pretty complex though and not that essential. And might break the whole fork model.
Reddit basically put a near optimum UI (video wtf?) on the message board and forum concepts.
Ofc reddit made the interface worse over time, but they basically took a few quantum leaps.
Yeah, the nested comments section with up/downvotes is the most efficient way to structure a discussion. Infinitely better than the old forums.
There are a few issues with how up/downvotes can be undesirably distributed (like brigading), but the core concept is good.
It would make sense to have different filters on top of that.
Like rewarding high-quality comments (based on some metric like lexical complexity). Or maximizing diversity of opinion, like by rewarding comments that are different from all the others, would help with the circle jerking and brigading. Or categorizing comments as serious, joke, insult, by political leaning, etc.
Also with these LLMs, it would be interesting to try and summarize the entire comments section, giving you briefly the most brought up points or most interesting points.
Or by rewarding comments that have been made by people like you. Like if you are a nuclear physicist, you will preferentially see comments by other nuclear physicists.
And you can toggle between all of them like new, hot, too all, etc.
Perhaps you would even have a marketplace for these filters where anyone can post new ones, like an app store. Give users maximum control over their experienve.