I like the idea that you don't want to moderate content, but behavior. And it let me to these thoughts. I'm curious about your additions to these thoughts.
Supply moderation of psychoactive agents never worked. People have a demand to alter the state of their consciousness, and we should try to moderate demand in effective ways. The problem is not the use of psychoactive agents, it is the abuse. And the same applies to social media interaction which is a very strong psychoactive agent [1]. Nevertheless it can be useful. Therefore we want to fight abuse, not use.
I would like to put up to discussion the usage and extension of techniques for demand moderation in the context of social media interactions which we know to somewhat work already in other psychoactive agents. Think something like drugs education in schools, fasting rituals, warning labels on cigarettes, limited selling hours for alcohol, trading food stamps for drug addicts etc.
For example, assuming the platform could somehow identify abusive patterns in the user, it could
- show up warning labels that their behavior might be abusive in the sense of social media interaction abuse
- give them mandatory cool-down periods
- trick the allostasis principle of their dopamine reward system by doing things intermittently, e.g. by only randomly letting their posts to go through to other users, or only randomly allow them to continue reading the conversation (maybe only for some time), or only randomly shadow ban some posts
- make them read documents about harmful social media interaction abuse
- hint to them how abusive patterns in other people look like
- give limited reading or posting credits (e.g. "Should I continue posting in this flamewar thread and then not post somewhere else where I find it more meaningful at another time?")
- etc.
I would like to hear your opinions about this in a sensible discussion.
_________
[1] Yes, social media interaction is a psychoactive and addictive agent, just like any other drug or your common addiction like overworking yourself, but I digress. People use social media interactions to among others raise their anger, to feed their addiction to complaining, to feel a high of "being right"/owning it up to the libs/nazis/bigots/idiots etc., to feel like they learned something useful, to entertain themselves, to escape from reality etc. Many people suffer from compulsively or at least habitual abuse of social media interactions, which has been shown by numerous studies (Sorry, to lazy to find a paper now to cite). Moreover the societal effects of abuse of social media interactions and their dynamics and influence on democratic politics are obviously detrimental.