> What specifically is the reason you consider those particular platforms to be unethical, and what is the solution.

These platforms are so large that they require hundreds of thousands of moderators in order to remove vile, illegal content, causing trauma for a vast underclass of foreign workers.

Here’s a few solutions:

Limit the number of people that a person can be friends with to 150, the Dunbar number.

Restrict the posting of photos to those which have been identified as having you or your friends in the picture, or no humans at all. Require permission from all human participants to post.

Charge a fee for access.

Why is size the determining factor, though?

Is it just that you're worried about the outsourcing of content moderation? Because other than than the problems are the same. Someone will always need to moderate the content.

Size is not the determining factor. It's a single factor that highly influences the value in posting damaging content. It's clear from the rise of influencers on YT, IG, Twitter, etc -- as well as the prolific use of these platforms by terrorists and other malefactors -- that being able to reach many people with a single post is a significant driver of people to post content.

My concern is not primarily with the outsourcing of moderation, but with the type of moderation that is required. There are ways to limit the kind of content that people post. Making things less sharable is one way of doing that. Creating barriers to entry is another. My list of suggestions encompasses both. Of course, these are two suggestions which are antithetical to the ad-riddle, growth-driven social network model, so there is no way they would ever be implemented.

I should add another solution to my wish-list: remove ads entirely.

> My concern is not primarily with the outsourcing of moderation, but with the type of moderation that is required.

But the problem doesn't go away when you shrink the size of the social media site. The same people will still try to post disturbing content. In fact, you're giving them more places to post that content, so potentially more people will have to moderate it.

> There are ways to limit the kind of content that people post. Making things less sharable is one way of doing that. Creating barriers to entry is another. My list of suggestions encompasses both.

Your suggestions can be implemented on smaller websites as well as larger ones.

It seems like your issue is with the ease of access to social media. Thus your solution is to limit access. However, I don't think there's a reasonable implementation of your idea that could work. Nor do I think any kind of social media is going to want to go that route. It doesn't matter if the site is funded by ads or is trying to grow. The point of these sites is to share content. People don't want to limit that.

Also, breaking large social media sites into smaller ones makes it much more difficult to deal with troublesome individuals. Right now, it only takes a few bans before you're blocked from most mainstream sites. If we had, say, 10× the number of sites, that's 10× the number of bans required to get these individuals out of the system and 10× the number of moderators who had to look at their content before banning them.

I'm not saying there's no solution here, but I think people are misidentifying the problem. We all want simple answers and simple solutions even when there aren't any.

> But the problem doesn't go away when you shrink the size of the social media site. The same people will still try to post disturbing content. In fact, you're giving them more places to post that content, so potentially more people will have to moderate it.

I’m not sure I follow. A site like Facebook already has mechanisms for detecting multiple accounts, and in any case, multiple accounts don’t mean that there are more “places” to post. It’s still Facebook.

I don’t propose breaking Facebook into smaller websites. I propose limiting the reach of a single individual on those sites. Basically, normalizing the localness of social media to be more meaningful.

As well, I think Facebook and other platforms need to reckon with the consent when it comes to posting images of people, in general. That’s why I suggested limiting the posts to only those of friends who consent.

I agree that no one wants this.

And again, you run into the problem where nobody wants their website to work like that. In fact, limiting the person's audience really only works with facebook's system where people post content specifically to their friends. Other sites like Hacker News, Reddit, youtube, and various other forums aren't even designed with the concept of friends that are the sole consumers of your content. You're specifically posting in a public space that everyone can see. That's not a social media thing. That's just an internet thing where most things are visible to everyone.

And again, people still post horrible content to small groups just like they post it in large ones. You've divided the problem up, but you haven't really solved anything. Someone has to moderate the content.

>And again, you run into the problem where nobody wants their website to work like that.

Cancer patients don't want chemo, but it's better than dying, some might say.

>Other sites like Hacker News, Reddit, youtube, and various other forums aren't even designed with the concept of friends that are the sole consumers of your content.

Right, which is why those sites (besides HackerNews) would require slightly different solutions.

Reddit: Limit subreddits to 500 participants at most. Eliminate the number next to upvotes. Verify accounts. Limit posting.

YouTube: Not sure. This one is video-forward, probably the most difficult problem in terms of bad content. Definitely remove the algorithm for targeting people based on interest, though.

>That's not a social media thing. That's just an internet thing where most things are visible to everyone.

This is not any feature inherent to the Web, it's a function of sites that purposefully link together and allow people to rapidly post information. Pre-social media, to get your idea out you had to build a website. There was friction. The earl y web had little moderation because you really had to go searching for bad stuff.

>And again, people still post horrible content to small groups just like they post it in large ones. You've divided the problem up, but you haven't really solved anything. Someone has to moderate the content.

Dividing the problem up is a strategy that I propose lessens the impact to both the users (because content can't spread as fast) and the moderators (because there will be less content to moderate).

Elimination of advertisers and the implementation of cost (as a form of friction), I think, would also go a long way. Cost per post would be ideal.

> Cancer patients don't want chemo, but it's better than dying, some might say.

What good is chemo if your patients refuse it?

> Reddit: Limit subreddits to 500 participants at most. Eliminate the number next to upvotes.

This doesn't stop people from posting disturbing content, and it destroys reddit's entire model. This solution doesn't work.

> Verify accounts.

In what way? Do you want to abolish anonymity? Because I can tell you right now that most of us aren't interested in such a solution.

> Limit posting.

In what way? Throttling posting speed? Sure if you just lessen the amount of content overall there will also be less disturbing content... but there's still disturbing content that needs to be moderated.

> This is not any feature inherent to the Web, it's a function of sites that purposefully link together and allow people to rapidly post information.

The default state of the internet is publicly viewable information. Thus it's an inherent feature that you can access almost anything out there.

> Pre-social media

As far as I'm aware, there was no such time. There have almost always been bulletin boards, forums, chat rooms, image/file sharing sites, and other forms of social media.

> there will be less content to moderate

Dividing up the content doesn't reduce the amount of it that needs to be moderated any more than cutting a cake reduces the amount of cake.

> Elimination of advertisers and the implementation of cost (as a form of friction), I think, would also go a long way. Cost per post would be ideal.

This just shuts people out according to income bracket. It reduces the total population, but I doubt it helps reduce the fraction of that population that are interested in posting and sharing disturbing content. It's just throwing the baby out with the bath water.