That’s a nice idea, but needs just one step done before: moderation should be placed in the each user’s hands.
I need my own filter about what I see. Like:
1. I always want to read A.
2. I always want to read B, but not when he is talking to C.
3. Show me some random people from time to time, like 3 per day.
And we can share our own “filters”, that creates opt-in curation.
Echo-chamber is indeed a problem, hence rule 3. Also I hope for rule 1 to find people who talk to their opponents meaningfully. But if a person wants to stay in an echo-chamber - she can. I just to not want to be forced into someone else’s echo-chamber.
This sounds a lot like what I'm working on with Notado Feeds[1]. Users can curate feeds (with RSS subscriptions) on specific topics from their libraries that get automatically populated. I haven't published a dedicated article on this feature yet, but it's coming.
For an idea of what it looks like in practice, these are my feeds on software development[2] and capitalism[3]. Interested in one but not the other? No problem, ignore the capitalism feed and just sub to the software development feed; you don't have to be hit by a train of all of my thoughts on every little topic by subscribing to an all-encompassing feed.
I'm currently working on a piece around feed discoverability that will integrate RSS subscription stats in few interesting late 90s/early 00s-web ways.
If someone (or 10k someones) watches and compiles quality items of interest, maybe i want one of those feeds INSTEAD of Twitter’s ML algorithm.
Twitter can still monetize but now curations could monetize individually via including specific ad tweets.
And i want to subscribe to multiple curations, not just one.
Twitter could even have their own ML algorithm as a curation but I want it to be explicit opt in.
You could browse curations by popularity or topic and opt in to the ones you like, or opt out if you don’t like one anymore.
Trolls wouldn’t get included in curations that anyone cared about.
The down side is that it magnifies the social media echo chamber effect, but it also makes everyone’s feed more personally relevant.