Draft idea for better public social media
Appendix (at the top, what?): I often use the distinction between public and private information, since I believe it is highly significant in deciding what social media platform should be used for either. e.g. if I want to become a musician, I want maximum public reach and am not as worried about privacy, so (ignoring ethical dilemmas of using Zuck's products) Instagram is a great option. While, if I wanted to share information and my life with friends and family, I'd much rather be using privacy-friendly and perhaps decentralized open-source tools.
Now that that's out of the way, one of the issues I encountered when I was on twitter was that people have a lot of views on different topics, and as a follower I may be interested in certain topics and their views on it, and not so much in others. As an example, let's say I am really interested in the book recommendations from Elon Musk. But do I care about his BS with Tesla or cryptocurrency and him exploiting his fanboys? Nopeeee. Or another one could be is that someone is interested in my music-related or CS career-related tweets, but not my political or religious views. The issue with not having that distinction imo is:
| I am a | I don't agree with | Experience |
|---|---|---|
| Creator | I don't tweet topical views my followers wouldn't be interested in | I am taking away from people who would benefit from those views or information |
| Creator | I tweet topical views my followers wouldn't be interested in | I add noise to and might lose audience |
| Consumer | I stop following someone who tweets topical views I am not interested in | I lose the value their other tweets provided me |
| Consumer | I keep following someone who tweets topical views I am not interested in | I have noise in my feed |
My very draft thoughts on a possible solution is that creators should have the option to post to channels. Currently the process for a creator is to have multiple accounts, which is pretty bad. The concept of channels should be an evolved form of hashtags, where creators can post to multiple channels (at the same time), and consumers can follow one or more channels from any creators.
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