I feel like the one of the lowest level human internet problems we haven’t solved is how to be around millions of people, many of whom vocally disapprove of at least some of our thoughts and actions, without letting our hyper-social status-sensitive primate brains either melt or devote themselves to arguing that all our positions are the right positions for everyone.

Like yes, some algos are bad, but we also just built structures we can’t quite handle and are perma-mad at each other about it.

The deeply frustrating thing about this is that I also believe we have to be able to find our people in the big morass of the world, so I can’t accept that the Dark Forest/group chat model is the way forward, which is why I am spending all my available time and brain on this stuff. 🙃

@kissane Every time I think about this sort of thing, I keep returning to the model of an old Dutch social media site called Clubs.nl, from the pre-Facebook era.

It was run very poorly, but despite that it seemed to have more or less nailed the model: you had 'clubs', many of which were publicly indexed and joinable (with varying permission/invite/role settings), every club was its own little island, and all interactions happened within a club - it had a forum, photo gallery, news section, etc.

The only 'profile' you had was a username and, I believe, a list of the (public) clubs you were a part of, if you enabled that. No personal 'wall' or 'feed'. Private messages were limited to originating from within a club, IIRC.

It worked really well to find people with similar interests, even if you started without knowing anyone on the site, and clout-chasing was functionally impossible; there was no leaderboard to get on top of, no feed to have your posts show up on.

(Unlike eg. Reddit, there was no 'upvoting', no 'frontpage' with 'popular' posts, etc., and clubs had a fair amount of freedom in what the design looked like)