Ideas to improve social media w/ Alyssa

Make Facebook have certification for approved accounts so no fakes or duplicates could be made

Get rid of the Connect button for Facebook that is on other sites, such as connecting or logging in on other sites with your facebook, or connecting your facebook contacts with other accounts

Higher crackdown on bots, fake accounts, and accounts that steal information.  There should be report buttons for accounts that users believe are fake so that such accounts can be manually reviewed and taken care of.

Support content creators more, either monetarily or through marketing, content creators are the one’s who get many new people to want to join a platform, if other platforms support their creators better those creators would rather be there then someplace they and their work is ignored or used for the benefit of the company over themselves.  A platform without good content creators will not attract more users.

Separate newsfeeds, have one just for friends, and another for news and other sources you’re interested in.  This way, you can focus more on content you care about, such as what your friends are posting, over what Facebook wants you to care about.

Make deleting accounts easier – Numerous sites, social media or not, make it incredibly difficult to delete the account, have rules like the account will be totally deleted after 30 days of not using as opposed to immediately.  With the 30 day rule it is especially annoying because if you accidently click on a notification, the app button, an email, etc, you could accidently reactivate account and start the deactivation process all over again.

Make it easier to report stolen work – This is more so to help with copyright issues, but there are numerous problems on platforms like Instagram of people stealing artists work and claiming them as their own.  It should be easy to get these deleted, especially if it’s something stolen from Instagram, as all that would be needed is the date posted, though may not always be the case most likely first person to post the artwork is the one who made it.

Be able to organize how you view your newsfeed – give users choice of seeing their feed in chronological order or perhaps most controversial or highest liked/upvoted, this way viewers can see what they want to see first

So Kathleen and I have been talking bout things, and it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the best solution for social media would be to delete all of it. Personally, I’ve sort of had distinct phases of interaction with social media — in high school and undergrad (the early days of FB), facebook was still mostly the students-only, friends-as-people-you-know world, where it was really useful for getting the word out on events and sharing photos, etc. and hadn’t been bombarded with advertising or excessive algorithms or otherwise monetized devices (at least that’s my recollection). After school, social media became part of my job description (literally, at Elsewhere), and I was almost on the other side of things, trying to capitalize on the value of those relationships, obsessing over metrics, etc. Now I barely participate and recognize that omitting myself doesn’t solve any problems, just because “deactivation is the opposite of activism” doesn’t necessarily mean that staying active is activism, either. Activism is activism. So,

1 – somehow tax social media, like cigarettes. fund critical print/web operations
2 – yes definitely bring back some trust-busting, all around
3 – no more algorithmic timelines, go chronological.
4 – removing ads would be nice
5 – locals-only networks (in addition to the current global ones) so that IRL communities can get better? i don’t know
6 – reimburse users for data breaches