Can Social Media Be Fixed?

In a terrific essay earlier this month entitled Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, Jonathan Haidt writes how social media has led us to “the fragmentation of everything.”

Haidt writes:

Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.

He continues:

This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”

The past ten years have been marked by intense fragmentation and polarization throughout out culture — with the culmination (thus far) of course being the election of a president whose singular focus was of course the key to every viral post: cultivating outrage.

Haidt does an excellent job of describing they why of how we got here, but he is somewhat less effective at describing solutions. He puts forth three worthwhile but pretty vague solutions: harden democratic institutions, reform social media, and prepare the next generation.

These are all well and good, but the question I would propose is: is it even possible to “reform” media platforms which are explicitly designed to amplify the most provocative content, regardless of its basis in fact? Or are we facing a point in which the existing platforms will need to fall, with a new model in its place?

I believe the most likely scenario is the latter. The trouble is, what are the steps that need to occur before that transition to take place? There are, of course, so many people with so much invested in making sure the existing platforms continue — and so the goliath will not fall easily. Then again, history has shown that the lifespan of both companies and products (especially in the tech sector) tends to shorten with each generation. From RCA to Atari to AOL to MySpace to Yahoo, time and again high-flyers tend to be brought down more quickly than one would typically think.

But what would it take for that to occur? Presumably there would need to be demand for a platform that isn’t based on outrage — but yet is more compelling. Are there any examples of that in the world?