When trying to find an analogy for the current state of social media discourse, I can’t help but fall back to the experience I had as a kid playing an online game called RuneScape (yes I played RuneScape…). RuneScape is an online role-playing game where you can build up your character in a number of different ways. Ultimately though, most users were focused on building up their fighting attributes and, more importantly, their in-game fortune.

That being said, there would be a town centre within each village where users would go to trade with each other. Whether it was coal that you were trying to buy or some fancy armour, you would go to this location, type out what you were looking for and hope that someone would see your message and approach you with a trade.

Your messages would appear in two places; one above your head and one in the stream of messages that included everyone else’s messages. You could compare it to a live stream to a certain extent. And, as with any live stream, whenever there are too many users trying to participate you have what can only be described as an onslaught of messages. These messages are almost impossible to catch and differentiate from one another. This was exactly the same on RuneScape; so, I devised a strategy to tackle it. I would double team (it was that serious…). My job would be to frantically type out the same message over and over again, “Looking to buy coal £££”, while a friend would sit and watch to see if anyone was trying to trade with me because it was practically impossible to type, send and repeat, nonstop, while still trying to look at the screen. This approach would flood the stream of messages, therefore increasing my chances of catching other players’ attention and finding a coal seller…while simultaneously ruining the whole experience for other, less annoying, users.

I find this to be a fitting comparison; although it is based on a game that I played 15 years ago, it accurately represents and exhibits much of the behaviour on display in modern-day social media platforms. The town centre is representative of many aspects of social media; the news feed, replies to a trending tweet, comments on a viral piece of content on Facebook, etc.

Your average user may try to participate, perhaps naively, with a reasonable message. Querying about coal sellers outside the town hall or, alternatively, a natural, inquisitive message on a social media platform, to quickly find that they are being drowned out and swallowed up by the attention-craving algorithms.

In my last post, I discussed the kind of patterns this creates for users who do end up commenting and participating in social media discourse. I also discussed the binary like approaches that they have available to them to guarantee attention, so I won’t go into that here.

Instead, I want to propose a different question, instead of focusing on the algorithm or a way to police comments etc., why don’t we focus on the town square itself? Surely, there is a way to organise that traffic into a more organised environment. One that allows us to communicate without shouting or having to resort to extreme dialogue to garner ourselves attention. And perhaps most importantly, there should be a way to reduce the stakes. Users should be able to engage in discourse without the pressure of being on such a public stage and fearing public ridicule or embarrassment for making a mistake in their comment.

The solution? Let’s take that town square and organise it into stalls based on subject matter. Let’s group the coal traders together at one stall, the gold traders together at another stall and the iron ore traders together at another. Let’s then take that group of coal traders lined up in front of their stall and put them into groups of up to 10. Same for gold and iron ore.

What are we left with? You no longer need to shout, attention seek and flood everyone’s feed. The pace has slowed, and the pressure has been released. Now try to picture modern day social media through this lens. Polarising dialogue makes way for natural and nuanced conversation. Long, definitive statements have now become short, inquisitive and conversational messages.

Suddenly with 1 simple design change, the whole behavioural dynamic has been altered and the way users interact has shifted in a way that shines a light on the majority rather than the minority. All the while, giving users more validation for their input through the implementation of a micro feedback loop through these small groups.

I would challenge the readers to try and put this into practice. Try to have a conversation with a room full of people, then take those same people and put them into rooms of between 5–10. You will see how the dynamic changes.

It’s a simple solution but one that has escaped social media companies thus far. The main issue, however, is that it is something that cannot be resolved after the fact. This is an approach that must be implemented and baked in from inception and designed into the platform.

At Springchat we see the intimate grouping of users as 1 of the 3 founding pillars of our ‘Instant Chat’ feature as we strive to create a platform that represents the more conversational next iteration of social discourse.

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First posted on the common sense network.

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