I worry that using link aggregators and micro blogging for news is not a form that is conducive to positive outcomes. I don’t remember where, but it might have been on the Center for Humane Technology’s podcast where I found out about a team of engineers who recommended the separation of community and news consumption.

When reading a traditional newspaper or news feed the reader consumes the news alone, and they have time to process what they have read and form their own opinions. When consuming news from social media sources the reader will usually be heavily influenced by the dominate opinions in the comments section, and they are less likely to form their own opinions.

In other words, the structure of a Reddit, Lemmy, Twitter, or Facebook is fundamentally geared toward eroding civic discourse and critical thought while fostering mob-mentality.

Some of the proposed engineering fixes were to disallow posting to comments sections until the reader passed some check that verified they read an entire article, and only allowing the user to read others comments after the user had either posted their own comment, or enough time (hours or days) had lapsed so that the user would likely have formed their own opinions and would be less likely to engage in emotional group-think.

Verifying commenters read an entire article would be challenging and annoying, and a time-delay before posting would undermine the appeal of current social media, however, so these ideas haven’t been explored.

Edit: Change pronouns to be more inclusive.