Reminding Americans that there's more to The Americas than just the USA is a surefire way to trigger another Jan 6th riot from the Gravy Seals.

I suppose it's not that it would require a subscription necessarily, just that you would need to find a way to make the income stream align with positive end user outcomes.

At the end of the day, money runs companies, and keeps employees well, employed. If their month-to-month goals and KPIs internally revolve around "how do we make the most money via ads and selling user data"... that's what got us here. It's a very "road to hell is paved with good intentions" situation. The individual contributors, the actual coders, didn't sit down to architect this exploitative mental health mess that social media became. It got built slowly commit by commit, due to the profit focus being what it is.

Change to goals, change to outcome. Make the money come from delivering a superior customer experience, and the app will trend in that direction.

This may be on to something, though Wikipedia has its own issues with some of the page curators behavior and power.

I think this could work in theory though.

:shrug: I don't know how to fix it then. If the company lifeblood comes from adverts, then eventually the system will optimize in this direction.

Make it tax-funded?

Grandma ain't gonna host a server.

So, not necessarily.

The problem is "perverse incentives" (aka the Cobra effect)

Social Media is free. This means it needs to be paid by ads. This means that the algorithm, the service, and all the content is designed ground-up to further that objective. Keep people doomscrolling, sell ads, make money.

If there were a subscription based model, the algorithm could be engineered to... respect your time, deliver you content quickly, and fact check the content.