Thoughful Media

Social media is getting increasingly bad reputation. It is associated with short attention spans, shallow content and false information. I believe this is because we get what we measure. Measure money: Get greed. Measure likes: Get cat videos. Measure retweets: Get Donald Trump. Measure delta-V: get moon landing. Measure weight: get diets.

What if we measured thoughtfulness of content? This new media platform would work pretty much like facebook, twitter, reddit etc. But instead of giving thumbs up, likes followers and retweets, content would be ranked by thoughtfulness.

Thoughtfulness would be rated by participants on the platform. Giving a + would signify the content I read made me think new thoughts. Giving a - would signify the opposite.

To avoid the scourge of inevitable "thought bots" and "thought farms" designed to artificially boost an content's ranking, we could also design it in such a way that the feedback itself had to be thoughtful. Instead of just mashing the thumbs up/down button all day, what if the feedback had to be thoughtful comment in itself? - sort of like a peer review. Instead of social capital, participants would have to start accumulating thoughtfulness capital instead. Participants would also create a thoughtfulness graph, based on their impact and relation to each other. Thoughtfulness graph would capture inspiration by others rather than friendship.

Why thoughtfulness? As a human civilization we can easily handle well thought out opposing ideas. In fact we benefit from such situations. But our civilization will crumble if we only consider the first shallow thought that pops into our minds. Since AI and bots are not yet capable of being very thoughtful, it also serves as an effective CAPTCHA mechanism without the associated annoyance and spying that's involved.