Oh hi! That’s me! (And a bunch of other folks). Happy to answer any questions. I also really like this founders note that we wrote. It’s in our own words, etc: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter We are recruiting new members! If you work on integrity / trust and safety / antispam / content quality / etc, let’s talk.
Today all the major text-based social platforms work in about the same way: we type text into an empty little box that's threaded under another box. There are variations in ranking and flagging, but the basic mechanism is unchanged.
It is striking to me that, in all these years, we have explored only a tiny little corner of the design space. There are no mechanisms to lower the temperature when arguments get intense, for example. Nothing to help keep us from misconstruing comments out of context. Nothing to assist us in feeling compassion for the people we're talking to, or understanding their intent as they mean it to be understood. And so on. It's almost as though we sold millions of cars without brakes, everyone is crashing into things and hurting each other, and our response as a society is to throw up our hands and say "Welp, guess humans are just too stupid to drive cars safely."
Many people have suggested eliminating engagement as a metric and going back to purely chronological feeds. That sounds pretty reasonable given where "engagement" has gotten us so far.
But what if there were such a thing as "healthy engagement"?
The hypothesis is that healthy engagement is achievable. I don't know whether it is, but there's a huge range of design possibilities that we have yet to explore.
Do you know of anyone working on healthy engagement? Is it something you want to work on, or do you have any recommendations on starting an effort in this direction?