What in your opinion would that look like? It's very hard to put off 20 years of dark patterns all at once, especially when some (likes, notification badges) are so useful. I want to experiment with something like Spring '83, which had sort of a newspaper format.
Discussion
Less built around engagement, more built around ideas. Formatted for quick consumption, not continuous consumption. Less built around links and lots of good exit points so I can do other stuff. Make it easy for me to save long-form stuff for me to read later.
Basically, more contemplation, less reaction.
I feel like this has been done many times for content that takes a lot of effort to produce (e.g. podcasts and long-form content), but not for short-form low effort content. Which may be just the nature of the thing, participation is kind of the point for GM posts. But there's a dead zone between the two types of content, like when someone sends a really good tweet. But then that probably relies both on other people engaging to demonstrate signal, and algorithms to pick that stuff out. I like your reply though, I think it distills the problem well.
Spring 83 seems interesting. I’m going to read about the experiments. Though I would be remiss in not mentioning to the remake generation the continuing existence of RSS
I thought of the same thing ages ago! It’s been done on urbit and other protocols, but it doesn’t have the stickiness. Maybe simple notifications when someone updates their box thing?
I would say that in general, I’m shocked at how much I would rather just post stories on instagram more than anything else. Ephemerality is the future (and the past).