It's so predictable that it's frustrating to see people who should know better falling for it. Of course it's a fresh feel without the trolls. It's not open to all yet, so of course it is.
I don't know why they expect it to turn out any differently, it's hard to take this tool seriously.
Facebook was fresh once too. It was invite only for elite universities so everyone had roughly the same expectations for where lines were (they were not in acceptable places, but homogeneity helps with that).
How about using a tree-like structure to track who invited whom to the platform. Offer a generous yet limited number of invites to users, potentially adjusting this amount based on their positive interactions within the network. Permanently ban accounts that violate the rules, and if the new accounts a user invites keep getting banned (automatically) investigate whether that user is using multiple accounts, which would also be against the rules.
I'm sure deciding where to draw the line and clearly defining rules, and then enforcing them is a complex task (same as in public policy or international relations) inherent to any social network, and it is unlikely that an optimal solution exists considering the difference of opinions. However, could this type of rule help mitigate the issues mentioned?
It's funny to see people advocate for a classist system of nobility hundreds of years later. Please, tell us more about how you'd like to restrict a social network to those who are, as they say, "well bred".
There was a post here about a year ago that summarizes this pretty well[1]; I've honestly gone back to read it a few times for my own projects as it offers some good perspective and framing.
> My take is, if a community is constrained by quality (eg moderation, self-selecting invite-only etc) then the only way it grows is by lowering the threshold. Inevitably that means lower quality content.
To some extent, more people can make up for it. Eg if I go from 10 excellent artists to 1000 good ones, chances are that the top 10% artwork created actually gets better.
> But eventually if you grow by lowering quality, then, well, quality drops.
> I suppose for very small societies, they may be limited by discoverability/cliquiness and not quality, so their growth doesn’t mesh with quality and so they could also get better with size.
> Note, “quality” doesn’t have to mean good/bad but also just “property”. When Facebook started, it was for kids from elite schools. It then gradually diluted that by lowering that particular bar. Then it was for kids from all schools. Then young people. Then their parents too. Clearly, it’s far from dying in absolute terms, but it’s certainly no longer what it initially was. To many initial users, it’s as good as dead though.
My attempt at a solution is to keep it in request-access beta and do targeted advertising only at people who share interests with high-quality subset(s) of discussion on the site, so the new users usually see and can learn what high quality discussion looks like on the site even if all areas aren't mature.
As the site matures you can naturally let more people in until a quite open beta, then full release trying to never take on more than say 10% of the daily active users in any given section/hashtag-cloud per year.
This is my “X can restrict who they deal with” (where X is school or church or business or group or whatever) “but the DMV and the police have to deal with everyone” rule.
