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.
I'm experimenting with building the social network I want to see at 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.
Now that they are monopolies all they need to do is remove the numbers next to the like/retweet/view counter. This is what gives ppl the false high, that trains them live pavlovian dogs to produce reward(count) maximizing behaviour. There is no sane reason to have these counts associated with every sentence someone types/photo they take/video they record other than providing advertisers useful data.
They can still provide that data to advertisors without giving their users the instant gratification high. It's not complicated for anyone with a little imagination. Delay displaying the numbers, display the numbers as temperature gradients etc. As soon as these suggestions are made someone will jump up to say but then some other social network will start peddling the drug. But who believes this is going to happen to YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
The competition is just going to get swallowed up or dismantled before they can pose a threat.
I think the 'sane' reason here is that seeing these numbers encourages users to use the website more. In a world were more time-on-site is correlated with increased advertising revenue I don't think these numbers are going to disappear so easily.
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
[2] An impressive bibliography of research on argumentative virtues: http://my.fit.edu/~aberdein/VirtueBiblio.pdf