You would need to remove the profit motive.
It was called newspaper back in the day. Printing something was expensive so quality must have been good, that people were willing to read it. And social part was provided by posting letter to the newspaper adress with a hope to be printed.
As someone who has lived through some of the time with newspapers and without social media, no, quality was pretty bad back then too.
No, because a focus on quality would require defining quality and then curating the content through some kind of process that would not end up being ‘social media’.
Quality will never be defined by popularity, which is the entire focus of social apps.
But there are ways to better incentivse it.
Ie. the default lemmy sort “active” takes replies, upvotes, and downvotes as “activity” and promotes posts that get a lot of any of them. This tends to promote controversial content.
If you sort by top, its instead only based on upvotes and the sort promotes less divisive and controversial stuff and more “quality” stuff.
I wouldn’t say that upvotes always mean quality, they could also just indicate mass appeal while quality but niche content is hidden that way.
I never said they did. Just that they tended to be more correlated with quality than downvotes or replies.
Professional communities with invite-only registration, where invites are only distributed to people with high ratings. Also you can add higher barriers, like a requirement to write a valuable on-topic to get rating above a certain level, regardless of the comment rating level. Basically a self-moderated narrowly focused community with invite only registration.
What’s meritable often isn’t popular. By what metric should comments be rated?
Many will rate high. By what means can the set be further narrowed?
I wonder if that is one of the areas where AI might be useful in the future. LLMs could potentially be useful to identify non-trivial statements that are not just a rephrased version of statements that have already been made in other comments.
In the future?
Well, as far as I know it nobody has done that yet and current LLMs seem to focus more on general applications than on being efficient for specialized use cases like this.
An LLM?
Edit: Everything is of far less significance relative IRL relationships. The overriding goal of ML analysis model with a subordinated LLM hasn’t been to create a space for the best mental masturbation, instead to better focus subsequent human efforts in organizational recruitment for education and praxis.
Possible, but better not make it. When an algorithm has to promote something, there’s bias behind it, whether it’s a good intent or not. Even if it’s all good content, some other, also good content might be missed, because the algorithm or the authority behind the algorithm misses it.
In my opinion, Mastodon is perfect as it is. You see what you’re following. Or on the home page you see everything.
People should really really really learn to seek for quality content and develop a sense for quality and also to exercise critical thinking while trying to separate quality content from garbage. Pick what you wanna see and don’t let yourself be influenced by a stupid algorithm.
Just consuming whatever an app pushes into your face makes you a brainless zombie in the long term.
The Somethingawful forums did exactly this with a $9.95 one time membership fee.
How did it work out?
Check out the let’s play subforums, probably my favourite thing on there. The best ones get archived offsite
They ran for years with minimal shit content and trolls.
Some fedi services have blocklists that look for keywords to auto-block from your feed. Its pretty neat! Might be something to consider.
Yes, check out tildes.net.
I requested an invite and literally never heard back so. No.
That’s unfortunate but that’s not really a statement about the quality of Tildes.
My anecdotal experience has been that Tildes is slower paced but offers the highest quality interactions of all the online communities I’m a part of.
I am happy to invite you if you’re interested.
I would argue that the accessibility is both perhaps a statement about the quality of the site and about its users.
That’s not to say it’s a bad site or platform. But to say that if your platform is invite based only and you straight up ignore new users requests (even a form response sent out by bot saying they aren’t taking new signups or that the application has been reviewed and denied would be better (suggest that the team in charge of facilitating it aren’t up to keeping up with the rigors of running it. Their attention is apparently elsewhere, or their system is overrun with signups and there’s a significant backlog.
So suggesting it to people who cannot access it doesn’t do much good.
Additionally if the invite strategy has shifted to users providing invites and the place is slow because of the small user base it’s not likely to get many new users that way.
The point of user-based invite is that the user vets the new signups they’ve invited. But the actuality is very often there’s not a lot of getting involved because people will offer an invite to "people who are interested* that they don’t know outside that interaction.
It can only tell quality by community engagement and mod pruning.
What a community finds high quality tho is always going to be the lowest common denominator.
So the general path is small communities that have members in sync with each other.
But their quality of content attracts more people, which lowers the bar of the community.
Like, the lowest common denominator is the natural state of a community. To raise it you need to hold higher standards for the members of the community, which is going to get everyone excluded talking about elitism.
And they’d have a valid point.
For profit companies will always choose the one that comes with the most eyeballs. So unless you’re charging people a membership fee, you’ll never see a publicly traded company choose that, and when they do it’s not about quality, it’s about who’s willing to pay the entrance fee to the walled garden.
