I had an idea a while ago on how you could lightly regulate social media platforms.

Require them to:

• Group users into cohorts of a size greater than X. ie, individual level targeting isn’t allowed. The higher this number the better.
• make available to users the cohort they are in
• publish openly every single cohort and their size
• make it possible to view feeds as if you were in a specific cohort.

Will this stop them funnelling customers into rabbit holes? No, probably not.

But it would make “targeted indoctrination” harder as they would have to try and indoctrinate multiple people at once. And it would make it more transparent just how many people are being fed propaganda or whatever you want to call it.

Ah silly us.

We spent a decade hating on IE, it’s slowness, poor support for any standards, plugins that fuck your shit up, etc.

But it was obviously the best because it had that huge market share.