
Social Networking and Ethics (2015) - lainon
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-social-networking/
======
raleighm
Great article. If I could request an additional section, it would be "Business
Ethics and the Design of Social Networking Services" or something like that.
The article focuses on impact of consumption, which is important. We should
also talk about how to construct these systems.

We know that design encourages behavior. Twitter's design, for example,
incentivizes attainment/maintenance of status over truth-seeking/fairness[1].
If you were to design a site to promote argumentative virtues, you would
design it quite differently[2].

But how much should any site care about the virtues/vices that users tend to
practice when using the site - assuming for argument's sake such care would
have no impact on user "delight" or profitability? My view is "a lot" but I
don't expect everyone would agree.

If you do think that social sites (or any business) should be serious about
user betterment - not only user delight - then I think that has significant
implications for how to run/grow the site. It should be grow slowly,
watchfully; and it would need to prioritize considerations that might not
maximize shareholder return. Both seem inconsistent w/ a venture-backed
startup, especially where the user is the product. Users paying membership
fees into a cooperative would be an interesting model. Nonprofit also of
course possible.

[1] See e.g., this paper:
[https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1410/1410.0610.pdf](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1410/1410.0610.pdf)

[2] An impressive bibliography of research on argumentative virtues:
[http://my.fit.edu/~aberdein/VirtueBiblio.pdf](http://my.fit.edu/~aberdein/VirtueBiblio.pdf)

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davnicwil
I'm experimenting with building the social network I want to see at
[https://postbelt.com](https://postbelt.com)

It's designed to be a place where discussion within your network is front and
center, with distractions kept to a minimum.

This means no ads, no images or video, no upvoting of posts, no rearranging of
your feed based on what you may find more instantly appealing or to see
certain people's posts more frequently, complete control over your own data
and the ability to silently edit and delete posts even at the expense of
others' UX, and privacy focused rather than the alternative broadcast-focused
behaviour being encouraged.

The problem, as you say, is really in the business model. There are two
confounding factors that make it almost impossible to implement a free social
network in this style: growth, and profit from advertising by having control
over what a lot of people are exposed to. They feed into each other in a
positive feedback loop, and implementing any of the features I mentioned above
will hinder you where the competition won't be.

A way to short circuit this is to charge a small subscription fee for a
centralised service, free up to a certain number of connections to bootstrap
the growth of the network into something populated enough to be interesting.
With the subscription, you have a very clear incentive structure and people
can trust that you can prioritise the user's (customer's) interests above all
else.

That's what I'm trying with postbelt to see if there's any appetite for it. If
it sounds interesting to you please check it out. Thanks by the way for the
very interesting links.

~~~
raleighm
Very interesting - thanks for sharing. I'm checking it out.

