If we could redesign social media, what would it look like?

Social media is extremely powerful and we spend so much time on it.

The problem of social media and news is that it is designed to grab your attention and alarm you and it is designed to be addictive.

What’s the purpose of social media? It might differ for each person. For me, I would like to use social media to learn about the world and what is going on and what other people think.

Learning is extremely important. It’s important to have a good stream of quality content to learn from.

When you know what you want to learn it’s pretty easy to make a plan and then find resources, but how about if you don’t know what it is you want to learn?

If we could design our own social media, what would it look like?

The goals would be to: educate, and inspire you, and to make yourself aware of what’s going on in the world.

The social media can be full of:

• Recommendations to biographies of interesting people
• Curated videos of CEOs interviews on Youtube
• Highly curated articles

It would need to be highly curated and designed to put the user firmly in control, and making the user more conscious about what it is they’re trying to achieve by going on social media.

Redesigning the Algorithm

Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome

As Charlie Munger mentions, the incentives are really important

The algorithm would be redesigned so it’s not optimised to grab your attention, but it’s optimised to make you smarter, wealthier or more successful. It would therefore be optimised by how little time you spend on it, and how much value you get in a short amount of time. It would then need to know more about your career goals, and what the valuable things you need to learn are, and it can also know your net worth, health, and relationships.

How to redesign it

People would need to be educated by how social media is designed to grab your attention.

We would need to start by the users paying for the product. It would need to be a subscription service per month, and then bring up a curated feed.

We would also need to penalise things that attract attention but bring no value to our lives.

Social media should tell you sometimes to turn itself off.

This is important

News is incredible powerful, and this is an important topic for humanity. If the way we consume information changes, it could give us an advantage compared to others, and if we all change how we consume information online, it can also become an incredibly powerful learning tool for humanity and for us to collectively get smarter and progress as a civilisation. If we could hack this tool, we could discover new inventions and progress faster and better as a species.

Social Media could be the Ultimate Learning Tool

There are things we know we don’t know, but there is much more that we don’t know we don’t know.

Where do you find resources where you just want to be open to new high quality ideas that you wouldn’t normally come across. Social media could be the ultimate learning tool to make us smarter, wealthier and more successful.