A look at some radical proposals for creating better social networks, from establishing sites as nonprofits to restrictions on data collection
An offhand tweet sparked an outpouring of ideas to fix what's broken about Facebook and Twitter — Welcome back to Pattern Matching …
OneZeroWill Oremus
Context & Ripple Effects
An offhand tweet drew a wave of redesign proposals — converting sites into nonprofits, capping what they can collect — aimed squarely at Facebook and Twitter. The impulse isn't new: Ben Thompson argued back when Zuckerberg published his mission-restatement manifesto that Facebook's concentrated power needed checking, and these structural proposals are a more radical answer to the same problem than content moderation tweaks.
What makes the moment interesting is that alternatives were already forming on other axes. Days later came proposals for conflict-de-escalation mechanics like a self-applied "I was wrong" label (de-escalation tools for viral posts), then Thompson's framing of today's networks as "v1" copies of the analog world, then Twitter's Super Follows experiment, and by 2023 analysts pointed to federated networks like Mastodon and growing willingness to pay for content as the real escape hatch.
First-order effects
Nonprofit conversion and data-collection restrictions attack the advertising-funded engine both Facebook and Twitter run on; either change forces the two companies to replace targeted-ad revenue with something else or accept smaller margins.
Second-order effects
Twitter's own move toward Super Follows and low-volume, high-attention relationships shows the industry already hedging against the feed-and-data model — paid user relationships become the fallback revenue if collection is curtailed.
If governance reform stalls at the big platforms, federated alternatives capture the users who care most about discourse quality, siphoning the most engaged participants from Facebook and Twitter.
Third-order effects
If nonprofit or restricted-data structures ever take hold, the fight over platform power shifts from regulating what networks publish to regulating what they are owned as — ownership structure becoming the lever instead of moderation policy.
The combination of federation, direct payment, and smaller high-attention communities points toward social media fragmenting from two scale giants into many purpose-built networks, with the ad-supported mega-feed as one option among several rather than the default.
The trend: Social networking is slowly trading scale-driven, ad-funded feeds for structural alternatives — paid relationships, federation, and new governance models — with each proposal a test of how far users will actually migrate.
A reporter's casual tweet sparked an outpouring of ideas to fix what's broken about social media. I wrote about some of the most interesting ones in this week's Pattern Matching newsletter: https://onezero.medium.com/...
An offhand tweet sparked an outpouring of ideas to fix what's broken about Facebook and Twitter. Read this week's “Pattern Matching” from @WillOremus in @ozm: https://read.medium.com/blsDe2U
This week's Pattern Matching features ideas from @cwarzel, @sivavaid, @shaneferro, @wongmjane, @markhurst, @profcarroll, @ekp, @CaseyNewton, @anildash, @alexismadrigal & @elizabeth_joh. Thx to all. https://onezero.medium.com/...
Five ideas to start fixing social media: - Make social networks nonprofits - Ban algorithmic amplification - Restrict data collection & behavioral advertising - Stop putting white men in charge - Break up Facebook & let smaller networks flourish https://onezero.medium.com/...
interesting ideas. appreciate being included. I can't speak for @profcarroll but there this a nuance to my point in that it only involves forcing Facebook to stop tracking - collecting/using data across other contexts (across its apps and the web) - as Germany has ordered. https:…
I have read a lot of columns about the problems caused by Facebook, and even written a few. This is the best one I have read. https://www.nytimes.com/... “Facebook Can't Be Reformed.”
“The way you allocate your media spend, where you put your ads, talks about your company,” he said. “We moved from brand safety to, I think, societal safety.” Been waiting for this for almost 4 years. 🔥🔥🔥 #StopHateForProfit https://www.cnbc.com/...
""I don't see those big brands come back if there hasn't been structural change," Loerke said in an interview with CNBC. “That's my take on the basis of my conversations with them."" https://www.cnbc.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@santarchy @cwarzel @sivavaid @shaneferro @wongmjane @markhurst @profcarroll @ekp @CaseyNewton @anildash @alexismadrigal @elizabeth_joh my followers are faithless and shiftless (or have better things to do on a holiday weekend, i guess) but there was tons of engagement on the ori…
Is the @Facebook ad boycott making a dent? Apparently not: “the loss of annual Facebook rev from the boycott might be as low as 5%. Every Fortune 500 advertiser on Facebook could plummet into a volcanic fissure & the company would still be minting gold.” https://www.politico.com/…