2016-01-24

How can we make the quality of social media's article higher?

It's been long time since I left a social media. The reason was I could not use my time well on the social media. I think there could be a good way to use my time on it. Today, I watch the following TED talk, and think about other aspect of the social media.

Wael Ghonim: Let's design social media that drives real change
http://www.ted.com/talks/wael_ghonim_let_s_design_social_media_that_drives_real_change
I also felt ``polarization of people'' when I used the social media. People gathered on a theme/page. Most of the people already like. interested in, or know the subject. They are not completely stranger. If people feel this page is not exactly they ware looking for, they would just leave the page. In the end, I am more interested in a talk with friends at a cafe. Usually I and my friends have some different opinions and I could found something new. Even we found a different opinions, we usually continue to talk and both try to know and understand the difference. But on the social media, some can just logged out or go to somewhere else where no different opinions. That is easy, but no learning, no understanding.

Most of social media has only like/dislike evaluation of an article. With such evaluation criterion, more sensational words or hate speech tend to have higher number of clicks, that results higher score of the article. Because for example, you can easily found like/dislike on a hate speech. This kind of article doesn't help for understanding. One typical such hate speech example is `Do not let in a specific religious people in the country'. If this article was evaluated by number of both like and dislike clicks, this could have a high score. That kind of article considered as people are reading the article. This attracts the advertisement market. It's a typical Yellow Journalism strategy.

It is hard to find ``learning new'' component with like/dislike evaluation. If someone has already liked it, they click `like', and not liked it, they click `dislike'. If I wrote more sensational lie, populism article, I could got more like/dislike than an article I thoroughly researched. But at the end, I stop reading such articles. This is usually only a short time boom. The left behind is a small specific group of people.

Can we have more quality oriented criterion of an article? Ghonim proposed a criterion, ``I change my mind a bit/no affect my mind'' instead of like/dislike criterion. According to this criterion, he expects that authors would write more higher quality articles. This criterion is based on what the readers learn. If you change your world a bit, especially you expand your own view of the world, it is leaning. If people learn a new idea, expands to the new area, that would be a high quality article. I can also imagine, ``I learn something new by this article'' is another criterion.

There is no problem for like/dislike criterion when the subject is a hobby. However, if we need to talk about social problems, this criterion may harm the society. Ghonim talked about this based on his experience in Egypt, 2011. I found this talk so interesting and it surely changed my mind about like/dislike criterion.

I also wish that the social media will use a new criterion, that is based on understandings and conversation among people who have different opinions.

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