I use Facebook, and I don't like it. The feed overflows with ads. The design is using too many red dots to draw my attention.
If there is an alternative, I will use it. Most people would. But the competition starts from zero. As bad as it is, bad social media is better than being alone.
Current social media have all users and data. Getting users is expensive. Now, they have almost a monopoly.
Social media insert their political and cultural bias to your head. I don't want to get to it too deeply. If you do, watch Joe Rogan talking with Twitter execs here.
Social media and truth have a peculiar relationship. They are not responsible for the content, but they are still trying to police it. There are two approaches, either to fact-check by a bias or leave it be.
I want to chose the social media with the right approach. Now it means convincing everyone to switch.
We can view social media as providing two services: storing user data and creating the best feed. The division is arbitrary, but the cutting line makes sense.
The storer archives every post and gives access to the right people.
If you are bored and want to see news or your friend's activity, you fire a different app: feeder (yes, pun intended, and it creates a feed). Ok, maybe aggregator is better. There you get a personalized experience from your friends, news sources, and celebrities.
As an exercise, I'll describe how it will look. But if it happens, it happens differently.
Imagine you want to share something. First, you specify who can view it. For instance: friends, anyone, anyone who pays, a member of a group. Then you encrypt the post such that only specified people can decrypt it.
Finally, you send the metadata and the encrypted post to the storer. The storer stores the data. Because I'm modern, I say it will use blockchain or blockchain of metadata. (This has some advantages, nothing is easily erasable, and posts are verifiable.)
The storer provides the encrypted data to everyone (blockchain makes it easy). The data are encrypted, only authorized people can view them.
The aggregator decides what you see. It might resemble a Facebook feed or look like a frontpage of Youtube. It might feel like a Tiktok (yes, these three hours I had it on my phone were useless).
The point of it is that there will be a myriad of aggregators. Every tailored to different need or want. Do you need to know what your celebrity crush is doing 24/7? Do you want to reinforce any political view? Do you want a balanced argument from two sides? Do you want to motivate yourself? Everything will be there.
I'm not aware of technology that would forbid the aggregator to look at the post and not only on metadata, but if it exists, it's completely private. Even if this does not exist, the aggregator knows a lot less about you.
I'm not too optimistic. There still be a political divide, fake news, and data theft. But it will be less likely that one company gets the blame for the outcome of elections. It means that aggregators will be more free from regulation.
Everything you don't like about the social media vanishes, for instance, ads. There is a lot of them. The aggregator with half the ads has a comparative advantage.
I support the possibility of adding an advertisement to your post as on Youtube. If you create content, you can add an ad. These ads would promote the exchange of data between storers and aggregators because everyone gets a cut.
The future with such social media would be more private. Your data would be more secure while having more control over what others and the provider sees.
You would be more free. You could change the aggregator anytime you want. The political (or any) bias would be precisely how you want it.
The splitting of the services would break the oligopoly of the few social media companies.
I did not describe a utopia World would be just a bit better. The advantage is that it is doable. There might be a small aggregator company scouting Twitter and creating another feed. Then it can expand to also post on Twitter and Facebook for you. Then it recommends better videos than youtube. And since it does not have a monopoly yet, it agrees to share data with a similar company, and you can imagine the rest. For a sci-fi story, click here.