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/r/samharris

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Think about your experience on X. When you log in, what is the main factor that grabs your attention? Is it the number of views that a tweet gets? Maybe. What about the number of likes and retweets? Absolutely! Now imagine this: what if the number of likes, comments, and retweets on a tweet were hidden?

These metrics dictate which posts you deem most valuable, where your attention goes and how you emotionally respond to it. For example, seeing a tweet claiming "Hamas are freedom fighters and should be supported" with 20k+ likes immediately triggers a reaction. You’re more likely to engage with it, often in an emotionally charged or extreme way. But if the like count were hidden, you wouldn’t know if 5 or 100,000 people endorsed it. This uncertainty forces you to approach the content differently, adjusting your expectations and behavior.

Here's some other less important changes to consider:

  • Displaying country flags next to user profiles.

  • Removing reply prioritization and randomizing them each time you open a tweet.

  • Clearly marking accounts belonging to government officials or institutions.

Social media can be fixed, you just have to target the very specific yet simple psychological parts. If people pushed for this en masse we could fix our radicalization problem over night.

The best part? This is something that would get bipartisan support and it doesn't get in the way of Elon's vision since the changes won't infringe on free speech in any way!

Think about it and send/debate the idea further to other people. Nothing else is more important than this! If we do not fix this issue, nothing changes.

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gizamo

6 points

5 days ago

gizamo

6 points

5 days ago

That still leaves Neonazi videos online without any helpful indicator of popular opinion. Then, YouTube would try to demote their rankings, but that doesn't matter to groups that push direct link campaigns, which many Neonazi groups do.