100% posters
Thought experiment: how could a social network be designed so that 100% of users create? Obviously it would be hard and limited in scale, but this is the metric to take seriously if we want a corner of the Internet to exist outside the television attractor.
Basic example: you open an app and there’s no feed. You have to post something first. Then, and only then, does it unlock a feed of things related to your post. So it’s not a popularity feed, but a semantic feed. It feels a lot less like American Idol (the stage, the voting, the ads, etc.).
Maybe it’s not feasible to build something like this today: if you’re building/maintaining a million/billion person network, the costs are real enough that you have no other option but to turn into reality TV and fund it all through commercials.
But, if the cost of software goes down significantly in the next 10 years (because AI), we could see smaller, less mercenary, more experimental networks, networks that diverge in form from the endless feed. Of course, AI will also make the mega/mono-TV unimaginably addicting, but that might spook people into seeking alternatives, to find places that ask “how do we connect in a place that is not reality TV?”
So instead of MAU (monthly active users), how could you maximize PMAP (percent of monthly active posters)?