Reading this article about how the “short-term, dopamine driven feedback loops” created by social media giants are killing normal discourse, it makes me wonder how to fix it. Maybe if Facebook, Twitter, etc limited people to a maximum number of friends/followers, it would introduce a check in the system.
I normally use Twitter, so I’ll use their terminology for this. Let’s say everybody can only follow 500 people, and that they can only be followed by a maximum of 500 people. By limiting the number of people you follow, your diet of tweets is limited only to those Twitterers. That extra cute video of your kitten playing with a puppy can still go viral, but it’ll take longer to happen.
With a maximum limit on who we follow and who can follow us, we’re forced to do some picking and choosing. I think most people would follow close family members and allow the family members to follow them, and there would probably be something similar with coworkers (or maybe not). But for the rest, who would you follow? Politicians? Celebrities? Athletes? Artists? Conversely, who would you let follow you? Former classmates? Fellow hobbyists? Advertisers? Co-religionists?
Do you follow someone who seems to have gone off the rails and started relentlessly tweeting about pigeons? You can unfollow him. Do you follow an aunt who never tweets, ever? Unfollow her and follow someone more interesting.
Introducing maximum limits into social media would be an equalizer, since the cashier at the deli around the corner could have the same number of followers as the leader of the country.
Just a thought.