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abzullahon Ask HN: If you paid for social media what would you expect in return?

From the user's perspective there could be a two tier system, one for close friends and family, one for the world.

You should be in complete control of your data.

I think it would be best if the company in charge of the social media wasn't venture backed, because of wrong incentives.

abzullahon Ask HN: If you paid for social media what would you expect in return?

I think being completely in control of what shows up on your dashboard is definitely important, I'm not sure how fine grained the controls could be made. All the way to the algorithm?

Another one I think is being able to control your data. Who sees it, which part of it, and so on. Being able to delete data you don't want to keep, etc.

One of the advantages of paid accounts is that it's quite pricy to pull off a lot of shady things that are currently prevalent, spreading fake news for example.

abzullahon Ask HN: If you paid for social media what would you expect in return?

I think the whole point of social media is to connect us to the wider world.

Definitely, you should connect to your family and friends, but there should also be a way to connect to strangers. I guess you would want to find people who shares your values, and maybe even those who don't. But if you are talking to strangers, you'd want to know that the normal decorum we keep in face to face conversations would be respected online.

But definitely no companies or bots or addictive feeds or status chasing.

I think numbers should be done away with when it comes to upvotes, it feeds the ego too much, and we judge too quickly. Instead maybe use concepts like hot and cold, or some other relative qualitative measure. The system could use numbers behind the scenes, but they shouldn't be visible to the user.