Is it possible to design a social media app or service that rather than focuses on farming engagement, it tries to promote quality content?
No, because a focus on quality would require defining quality and then curating the content through some kind of process that would not end up being 'social media'.
Quality will never be defined by popularity, which is the entire focus of social apps.
But there are ways to better incentivse it.
Ie. the default lemmy sort “active” takes replies, upvotes, and downvotes as “activity” and promotes posts that get a lot of any of them. This tends to promote controversial content.
If you sort by top, its instead only based on upvotes and the sort promotes less divisive and controversial stuff and more “quality” stuff.
You're on it right now.
Professional communities with invite-only registration, where invites are only distributed to people with high ratings. Also you can add higher barriers, like a requirement to write a valuable on-topic to get rating above a certain level, regardless of the comment rating level. Basically a self-moderated narrowly focused community with invite only registration.
What's meritable often isn't popular. By what metric should comments be rated?
Many will rate high. By what means can the set be further narrowed?
Sure. But will it be profitable and will enough people want to use it? I think most likely the answer is no.
It was called newspaper back in the day. Printing something was expensive so quality must have been good, that people were willing to read it. And social part was provided by posting letter to the newspaper adress with a hope to be printed.
As someone who has lived through some of the time with newspapers and without social media, no, quality was pretty bad back then too.
You would need to remove the profit motive.
Possible, but better not make it. When an algorithm has to promote something, there's bias behind it, whether it's a good intent or not. Even if it's all good content, some other, also good content might be missed, because the algorithm or the authority behind the algorithm misses it.
In my opinion, Mastodon is perfect as it is. You see what you're following. Or on the home page you see everything.
People should really really really learn to seek for quality content and develop a sense for quality and also to exercise critical thinking while trying to separate quality content from garbage. Pick what you wanna see and don't let yourself be influenced by a stupid algorithm.
Just consuming whatever an app pushes into your face makes you a brainless zombie in the long term.
I must add to this the individual needs to filter. I always find the block bad thing as silly. subscribe to what you like and block what you don't. Its something everyone does in everyday life. Go to things you like and avoid things you don't.
The Somethingawful forums did exactly this with a $9.95 one time membership fee.
How did it work out?
They ran for years with minimal shit content and trolls.
Check out the let's play subforums, probably my favourite thing on there. The best ones get archived offsite
Of course it is (as long as it's "tries to promote", with no expectation it will always succeed). But no one's interested because it won't make as much money as the current outrage farming.
Some fedi services have blocklists that look for keywords to auto-block from your feed. Its pretty neat! Might be something to consider.
I think it's possible, but it needs to strike lightning to be at the right place and the right time in a proverbial sense, for it to be successful longer term. Everybody's trying to meet a metric in this world where clicks and views and conversions are easy to measure but something like quality is difficult to define at its best and impossibly subjective at its worst.
It can only tell quality by community engagement and mod pruning.
What a community finds high quality tho is always going to be the lowest common denominator.
So the general path is small communities that have members in sync with each other.
But their quality of content attracts more people, which lowers the bar of the community.
Like, the lowest common denominator is the natural state of a community. To raise it you need to hold higher standards for the members of the community, which is going to get everyone excluded talking about elitism.
And they'd have a valid point.
For profit companies will always choose the one that comes with the most eyeballs. So unless you're charging people a membership fee, you'll never see a publicly traded company choose that, and when they do it's not about quality, it's about who's willing to pay the entrance fee to the walled garden.
Yes, check out tildes.net.
I requested an invite and literally never heard back so. No.
Maybe you're just not quality content.
That’s unfortunate but that’s not really a statement about the quality of Tildes.
My anecdotal experience has been that Tildes is slower paced but offers the highest quality interactions of all the online communities I’m a part of.
I am happy to invite you if you’re interested.
Define quality.
I'm trying to build such a thing as well, but it always comes down to this. Options:
I think the first is the best option, so I'm looking at algorithmic solutions based on user behavior, but it's likely to end up in the same spot.
I think you are not seeing the whole scope of the problem. Echo chambers are only one of the problems, lowest common denominator posts are another issue of self-moderation/voting.