I worry that such projects can never make a dent in Facebook because from their very premise they embody moral zealotry.
You can't have an app comparably or more habit-forming for our reptile brains than Facebook without engaging in more than a few of what was relegated to be called "dark patterns".
It has to bother us many times per day, at random but somewhat consistent intervals, with random reward.
Further than than, it may even have to give us the fear of missing out to engage people in a timely manner and not in batch fashion at our leisure.
It has to convert focused passing visits into longer bouts of mindless consumption.
The content has to engage users emotionally, not just intellectually. In addition to anger, lust and gluttony are pretty effective.
It has to appeal to the users' self-esteem, with meaningless non-constructive popularity metrics.
Should it refuse to do any of these, it is losing further footing against a platform that everyone is already on. The absolute majority of people have no conscious control over their habits, and ain't nobody on a global scale using a Pavlok or other shock collar to get them off Facebook and onto a competing platform.
What CAN be improved, to give it an advantage, is twofold:
1. Politics and censorship
The censorship is straightforward: Facebook's deletion or shadow-banning(hiding) of content is done to cover Facebook's ass legally. If it was for a more pleasant experience for the viewers, there would be options to view this content, hide it until clicked on, or hide it entirely. Furthermore, the posters of the "offensive" content would be catered to, not banned from liking posts and even messaging their consenting long-time friends(and businesses, too) for several days at a time with extreme prejudice. A most ridiculous policy.
The other component is the echo chamber effect, the siloing of opinions. Of course deeply unethical, it may be percieved to improve user experience by presenting content users agree with. I feel like that is a deception, caused by a misoptimisation - Just because we didn't like something or comment on something doesn't mean we didn't have a visceral reaction. Clicking on links and sharing links to posts in messenger should definitely affect post relevance.
Maybe also throw in a popular post from an opposing demographic.
2. Technical aspect
There is a lot of low hanging fruit here.
From performance, feature parity between platforms, and data usage, to features like corellating multiple uploads of the same image, including screenshots and better search.
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I worry that such projects can never make a dent in Facebook because from their very premise they embody moral zealotry.
You can't have an app comparably or more habit-forming for our reptile brains than Facebook without engaging in more than a few of what was relegated to be called "dark patterns".
Should it refuse to do any of these, it is losing further footing against a platform that everyone is already on. The absolute majority of people have no conscious control over their habits, and ain't nobody on a global scale using a Pavlok or other shock collar to get them off Facebook and onto a competing platform.
What CAN be improved, to give it an advantage, is twofold:
1. Politics and censorship
The censorship is straightforward: Facebook's deletion or shadow-banning(hiding) of content is done to cover Facebook's ass legally. If it was for a more pleasant experience for the viewers, there would be options to view this content, hide it until clicked on, or hide it entirely. Furthermore, the posters of the "offensive" content would be catered to, not banned from liking posts and even messaging their consenting long-time friends(and businesses, too) for several days at a time with extreme prejudice. A most ridiculous policy.
The other component is the echo chamber effect, the siloing of opinions. Of course deeply unethical, it may be percieved to improve user experience by presenting content users agree with. I feel like that is a deception, caused by a misoptimisation - Just because we didn't like something or comment on something doesn't mean we didn't have a visceral reaction. Clicking on links and sharing links to posts in messenger should definitely affect post relevance.
Maybe also throw in a popular post from an opposing demographic.
2. Technical aspect
There is a lot of low hanging fruit here.
From performance, feature parity between platforms, and data usage, to features like corellating multiple uploads of the same image, including screenshots and better search.