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.