Arbour
Social Media is bad in many, many ways. From pushing cheap AI slop or hate-filled divisive content to get engagement to being full of a vast amount of bots, spam, and scams, there is a lot broken with modern social media.
Yet social media still brings benefits, such as community with people who are not local to you, informative or fun content, or networking opportunities.
It doesn't have to be this way. We can still get these benefits, and more, from social media, without all of these downsides.
We've been thinking about many of the failure modes of social media and how to address them, and are launching a landing page for a social media site we are calling Arbour.
An Arbour is "a shady garden alcove with the sides and roof formed by trees or climbing plants trained over a framework". We intend for our site to be just this : a sheltered area from all of the awfulness of existing social media. We envision Arbour as a subscription-based social media site similar to X or BlueSky , with strict moderation following a clear constitution outlining what is and is not allowed.
In this post , I will outline some of the failure modes of social media we are seeking to address with Arbour , and outline what Arbour is.
If you are interested , you can sign up for Arbour . Once we reach 1000 sign-ups , we will build and launch an MVP.
Flaws of Social Media
There are many flaws in existing social media , more by far than we can address with a simple MVP. One critical flaw is vulnerability to attacks like Russian psy-ops trying to sow chaos and division or corporations trying to manipulate public perceptions of specific issues. We do not try to address this in our MVP directly , but it is a problem we are aware of and thinking about.
Instead , we focus our MVP of Arbour on these key issues :
- Social media optimises their feeds for engagement.
- The quality of social media is often terrible.
- There is surprisingly low engagement on social media.
Firstly , social media optimises feeds and how they present information and content to you , increasing the amount of time you spend on social media. While ideally this would look like giving more high-quality content , in practice , increasing engagement is best done by providing a constant feed of dopamine hits.
This feed can look like presenting a series of outrageous partisan information designed to make you angry. It can also display short bursts of slop , optimised to capture your attention. At the very worst , building these feeds can look comically evil , such as when the YouTube for children company CocoMelon tests content on children , noting when they look away from the screen and are distracted , and optimises videos so children never look away.
The outcome of this optimisation process is quite bad : X is full of hatred , political and racial attacks , and outrage bait , while YouTube and TikTok are full of low-quality slop designed to make you watch for a few seconds , then scroll on.
Secondly , the quality of social media is often terrible. X comments are full of spam , crypto scams , and bots churning out AI slop. Many of these comments are extremely obvious , yet they are everywhere.
If you create a new YouTube Shorts account and scroll , you'll find a lot of bad content , such as AI voiceovers reading fake Reddit threads with random video game gameplay in the background. Many comments are insults or threats and have no value whatsoever.
Finally , there is surprisingly low engagement on social media. Often , posts with thousands of likes have only one or two spam comments below. Most users are passive consumers , and those who aren't are churning out slop , which isn't actually engaging with other people.
What does Arbour do to fix social media?
Arbour will start as a simple X or BlueSky lookalike designed to fix these problems.
A few simple methods should do a lot to fix these problems :
- A feed showing you posts from people you follow in reverse chronological order.
- A constitution that clearly outlines allowed and prohibited behaviour , with AI enforcement.
- A simple subscription model , where you pay $10 a month to join the network.
A simple feed removes the worst of black-box algorithms , optimising against you. AI systems are now good and cheap enough that we can remove the worst of social media , such as spam , insults , and scams , extremely cheaply. Finally , a subscription service increases the cost of making new accounts when you get banned for breaking the rules while selecting for an audience that is more engaged and bought into the network.
Rather than 1000 bots liking your post with one crypto spammer replying , you should get five human likes and a few high-quality responses.
Of course , we do not expect to get all of this correct at the beginning , and we may try to tackle other problems over time.
If you are interested , let us know!
Currently , Arbour is simply a landing page where you can register your interest. If we get a thousand emails , we will build and launch a full MVP.
Many people are sick of social media right now , seeing how broken it is and how much damage it causes to our social fabric.
If this is you , please leave your email and we will let you know when we go live!
If you have ideas or would be interested in being involved , please leave a comment or reach out to us :)