I think that platform is called "the rest of the human experience outside of the Internet".
Invite some friends over, hang out at a park, go to a bar, throw a party, attend church, join a club, play a sport.
Invite some friends over, hang out at a park, go to a bar, throw a party, attend church, join a club, play a sport.
Influencer culture is something that emerges on a particular sort of internet communication; mostly on the commercial platforms that specialize in asymmetric communication (where a few people produce and the majority consume.) To keep the consuming majority engaged, these platforms constantly recommend they follow the producing minority. Influencer culture is an inevitable consequence of this dynamic.
I suspect that we ourselves are partially to blame here.
Influencer culture isn't a problem on email, IRC, etc. because when we use those we expect ourselves to be active participants. We take for granted that we have to show up and provide something of interest to the others in the forum.
But when we go on Twitter, YouTube, etc. we expect to just mindlessly consume content without giving anything back. That creates an attentional vacuum where everyone wants to consume and no one wants to produce. Influencers fill that vacuum because no one else does.
In other words, email is like a potluck dinner and we would feel rude walking in without a dish. Other asymmetric social media is like a free picnic where everyone shows up empty handed and ends up eating from the giant tub of fries that McDonald's brought as a marketing campaign because, well, what else is there?
So maybe the trick is to avoid communities that you don't contribute to.
Like, at a bar, club, or sporting event in "real life", you might occasionally run into a finbro trying to talk to you about crypto, but it's not the dominant experience.
But is there no way to do the equivalent things online (and there's no obvious reason there shouldn't be an online equivalent to a party or club or even sports league) without it being taken over by people who are there only to build their hustle?
"Real life" doesn't have an algorithm that is so easily gamed, but there are still ways to "game" it. Going to popular locations (e.g. bars), looking presentable/knowledgeable, social engineering, buying advertisements, setting up seminars, etc. But in real life a lot of these are much easier to avoid because there's simply so much more to life that drowns them out. Real life doesn't have a front page that tells you what the most popular person said today -- that is the function of social media (or newspapers).
Of course, social media platforms could be built that don't prioritize content this way, either by using more complicated algorithms that are less easily gameified, or simpler algorithms that cannot be gamified (e.g. simple chronological ranking), or letting the user have more control over the ranking algorithm. But there is currently no simple market incentive for doing so.
That said, I could totally see that shifting even in the coming decade. I think people are getting tired of being advertised to, and transparently being treated as second-class citizen on these platforms. I could see a "premium" alternative to Facebook/Twitter becoming popular, with a small monthly subscription fee in exchange for much more user control and user-centric design.
Of course, more user control means more opportunities for filter bubbles and cultural fragmentation, which as we've seen are pretty bad for democracy. I suppose there is no easy solution to anything.