We all know social media has some pretty severe issues. It's addictive and robs us of our attention and privacy. What's not often discussed is how we fix that. Here I would like to try to explain the root causes of these issues and how they can be addressed.
All of the main-stream social media platforms today are created for the same end goal: profit. Profit leads companies to design there platforms, so that users will spend as much time on them as possible. This encourages content creators to make their content as attention grabbing as possible, which often does not correlate with the actual value associated with consuming the content. It would be nice to see a social media company that doesn't care to make ever growing profits but simply seeks to cover it's costs. Unfortunately, even if we take away the profit expectation, platforms still need money to operate and cover there costs, but eliminating the profit incentive might help reduce those costs. There are also ways that it could improve the usefulness of these platforms.
The two major costs of operating a social media platform are labor and hardware. Hardware here includes servers as well as the infrastructure that gives us the internet. If we lived in a world where our resource abundance was actually used to provide people with free housing, food, and other necessities, that could help us on labor costs, but we don't yet, so we can think of something else. Eliminating the expectation for infinite growth might help because we can focus on building a platform to be sustainable, instead of trying to endlessly scale up and increase metrics that need to grow to increase profits.
One of the biggest issues I have with social media is poor moderation. Not only is it costly for a company to hire workers to check for rule violations, but they also do a terrible job. The number of times I've reported an obvious bot account and had the request denied is ridiculous. I think this can be solved by developing a system which empowers users to democratically decide which accounts to ban from the platform. If this can be done in a way that accurately factors in the trustworthiness of different users in how they cast their votes, it could both save cost and greatly improve the experience of using the platform. It's also important to note that the infinite growth expectation encourages companies to ban spam accounts very conservatively because it boosts their user numbers. This perfectly exemplifies why society needs to get beyond this infinite growth expectation.
We have been living in a tech bubble. Tech companies are currently valued far beyond their current profitability because investors have a high expectation of profit growth from these companies. These high valuations incentivize companies to hire far more engineers than they need in order to help them find ways to squeeze more and more profits every year. Changing the focus to sustainability would help but you would still need engineers to maintain the platform and add new features which would be valuable for users. If we can at least get one platform to a point where it is perfect as is, then that would greatly help but there will always be problems that arise. One could imaging leveraging open source but I would not advocate for that solution here since developers still need to get by. This would be feasible, however, if we did have basic necessities taken care of by society.
Likewise, servers cost money to add and replace every year. Without the need for infinite growth, we do get to save some money, assuming our new focus successfully encourages creators to focus on quality over quantity. Still, hard drives fail, and unless we make content ephemeral, our total storage space will need to grow. Web 3.0 could be the solution to this but I skeptical. Everything involving blockchain or decentralization seems to involve some major sacrifice that we would not want to make, but I think it's worth looking into. Ephemerality is also not out of the question, especially if we can just pass the buck along to someone else like archive.org to archive everything for the future.
There seem to be just a few options for making this sustainable. I haven't discussed advertisements yet but I dont' want to rule them out. I'm heavily biased against ads but I expect the above modifications to lead to huge decreases in cost that would allow for less invasive and annoying advertising. My preference would be no ads and users just pay a very small fee to use the service. This could come in the form of a monthly/yearly subscription or microtransaction approach where users pay for platform currency that allows them to pay for exactly how much they use the platform. The latter is also very similar to how a blockchain approach solution would work but that's even more difficult to get users on board with. Of course, there's also the possibility for the government to subsidize these costs on the basis that this platform would be providing positive value to society. Unfortunately we are way too far from that possibility at least in the United States.