What does the online / social media world look like to you, what would you want?

If the current social media landscape were a real one, I'd say it is something like Ypres 1917. Dehumanizing and grotesque.

I distinguish between the worlds of "online" and "social media". The key differences as I see them:

1. One's online identity is separate from the real-life identity. Disclosing the real-life identity is an act of intimacy, doing so without permission is a violation, perhaps the digital equivalent of rape. Social media attempts to break down this taboo and commit an act of mass "rape".
2. Online experiences are explicitly voluntary and discrete. The client can be closed, the game shut down, you can go outside and be entirely separate from the world of online. Social media experiences are omnipresent, intrusive, and insidious.
3. Online experiences promote relatively small subcultures that establish their own norms. These subcultures are, by nature, fractious and promote diverse experiences. The users can empower themselves, becoming an administrator of their own private corner of the net. Social media is homogenizing, imposes norms from above, and dis-empowers the individual user.

I can't answer all your questions, and won't even try. Here are some responses from me, inspired by a few of your questions.

For starters, my definition of "social media" is simple and vague: it's a website designed for people to interact with each other publicly (as opposed to private communications). It doesn't have to be based around user-created content. It doesn't have to include a feature whereby you follow other users' activity. It just has to have a mechanism whereby users can publicly converse with each other - to be social, in other words.

Yes, there's an implication of content in the "media" part of "social media", but I'm not going to let some silly old etymological fallacy hold me back! Anyway, "media" could also refer to a medium of communication (like telephones, emails, fax machines, and the telegraph). So, if you can post something on the internet, and someone can reply to you, and you can reply back to them... you're probably on a social media website. This includes Discord, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, StackExchange, 4chan - and, of course, Tildes.

There is nothing inherently good or bad about any particular social media website. They just emphasise different aspects of being social on the internet. Facebook isn't inherently evil, and Tildes isn't inherently virtuous. The problems with all social media come down to the rules of behaviour on each platform, and the enforcement of those rules. Any social media platform could be improved by changing its rules and by consistent enforcement of those rules.

Scale is a twofold problem. When an online group is small, people recognise each other's usernames, and get to know a little bit about the personality behind each username. Even if there isn't a formal reputation/karma system in place, people will remember their interactions with some usernames and will build up an image in their mind about the personalities behind them. This leads to a Prisoner's Dilemma kind of situation, as demonstrated in this cute little game of trust that someone posted in the /r/Tildes subreddit on Reddit. There's reputation and community. There are consequences to your actions, as people decide how to treat you based on your past treatment of them.

As more and more people join the online group, that sense of name recognition is greatly diluted in many cases and even disappears in some. You can't remember all the usernames you're seeing and interacting with. There's a lot less sense of knowing who's who. A lot of the interactions therefore become one-off, rather than part of an ongoing series. Consequences become less immediate when you think you may never interact with this particular person again, rather than knowing you could bump into them again tomorrow. It's a lot harder for individual users to be held to account. Behaviour can therefore devolve into incivility and negativity without some other mechanism to keep people in line.

On the other hand, having more people can make it easier to find other people with similar interests to you. It's a bit hard to be social if there are only 3 people on the site who want to talk about your favourite topic. If there are 300 or 3,000 of you, on the other hand, things become more lively and interesting. That's when groupings of discussions around topics become necessary: you create forums for particular topics, where people interested in those topics can find each other and congregate.

The best online community experience I've had started on, of all places, a spelling and grammar page on Facebook. Back in the day, you could like pages that were about a topic rather than for a commercial brand. This page was about spelling and grammar. For the vast majority of people who liked the page, it was just a way of signalling to their Facebook friends that they liked proper spelling and grammar. However, some people dug under the surface and started talking to each other in comments on posts by the page's administrator.

We had a ball! We exchanged witticisms, word play, and cleverness, and generally just enjoyed the company of other people who liked such things. The topics of conversation often veered far from spelling and grammar - so much so that we decided to create our own private Facebook group just so we could be free to chat about whatever we wanted without having to be limited by the page administrator's posts, and without feeling guilty about going off-topic. We recruited some people who all felt the same way... and it was just lovely. We were a hand-picked group of intelligent and witty people chosen to a great degree for our love of language and wordplay, let loose in our own private playground. It was so much fun.

Of course, over time, things changed. People left, people joined. Even more people joined. And, after a couple of years, the original impetus wore off. We'd talked about everything we would talk about, and we knew everything about each other that we were willing to share. It got a little repetitive and predictable. A descendant of that original group still exists (it went through a few iterations and splits), and I'm still a member of it, but I don't visit it as much these days as I used to.

Rambling here. I think the terms 'Social Media' and 'Social Network' are themselves misleading and confining. Never mind that this terminology has ascended along with Facebook. I was on Google+ for a couple years and saw how it slowly degraded into a sort of Geocities of many networks. It had some great features, like hangouts and advanced media postings, many of which have since become mainstream.

I see a natural generational grouping that networks are set up around, especially as younger generations want their own age-exclusive spaces. This is to be expected, but it's annoying to see commercial ventures trying to capitalize off of this.

The worst aspect of social media is the exploitation of people it makes possible, at all age levels. In that respect, social media seems able to embody the worst of the internet. At the same time, social networks are helping to accelerate the changing aspect of modern society, bringing us further along the 'singularity' curve of change.

I have a special notebook called HiveMind which I started years ago. Conforming to public standards is nothing new, humans seem to be really adept at it, whether they are Facebook's, the Quran,'s or the Department of Transportation's. For a conscientious outsider like myself, the online hives afford a trove of interesting phenomena that act as entertainment, enlightenment, and inspiration for creative endeavors. But everything is temporary, and I see social media easily devolving into a controlling rather than liberating factor in our culture, especially as the Wellsian Morlocks become more differentiated from their Eloi counterparts.

One of the aspects I really dislike with facbook/twitter/reddit is they all to some extent place emphasis on this idea of 'followers', karm or what have you; inevitably it becomes a contest. Then you get this weird behaviour where posts have a double duty, both garnering popularity and expressing an opinion. These too are more often than not at odds with each other. And on the other side I'm not interested in becoming someone's 'follower', part of their personality cult .. yuch.

Aside from Tildes, I also really like Mastodon, and also Tumblr as a platform (but not society's view of it, or how blasted some of the mess-ups have been)((I don't personally use Tumblr but feel an exact clone with a new identity could easily make a dent in the Facebook space)).

Privacy by default. No bullshit bait and switch.

...

Actually, let me just shorten it. Nothing that Facebook does.

I'm sad to see G+ get shut down, if only because I use Hangouts at least twice a week to interact with my subscribers. Shouldn't be too hard to find a free videoconference alternative, right?

It may just be my age showing, but my favorite iteration of "The Internet" was the forums of the early 2000s. Just the right amount of community and interaction for my tastes. I was dialing into BBSes with my Amiga in the mid-90s, and forums felt like a natural extension of that. It was a smaller, more decentralized set of communities that made for more honest interaction.

I'm not a fan of FB, Twitter, and those platforms because they're all trying to be the Alpha and Omega of "The Internet" for everyone and everything, and it just isn't working. It's a big gatekeeping mess of privacy violations, ad-serving metrics and overall nonsense that's just a fucked-up funhouse of what online communities should be.

I'd like to see more decentralized sites; maybe even a return to forums in one form or another. I'd like to see more transparency and an adoption of open-source frameworks (and attitude), if only for some peace of mind when using someone's site.

And, as is always the case, less corporate control over any gates that companies feel need to be kept. So to speak.

Is social networking as exemplified by Facebook or Twitter net good or bad? Why? If bad, how might you fix it? Or is it time to simply retreat?

The benefits of global connection has done a lot of good for the world. Unfortunately I don't think we had the collective wisdom to know how to avoid the consequences right out of the gate. We had to and are still adapting to this technology. The progress is slow but I think we've finally reached a point where diversity of platforms is now a compelling goal. In this case I think the shift from a few platforms to many is a healthy sign for our relationship with social media.

I learned and grew as a person so much by the wisdom, experiences, and controversy of strangers with different lives on Reddit. I value that immensely but realize that I can still get that without the damaging consequences of a format like Reddits current state by making better choices in platforms to support.