Yahoo Finance Overdue Idea: The Social Media Standards Algorithm
THE ISSUE: Your email prompts are backing up, so you log on to Facebook to see what you’ve missed.
You’re confronted with a picture of your sister’s infant son in a highchair, frowning through a Rorschach face splatter of what looks like mushed carrots. “Adorable!”, the top comment reads. “Beautiful!” says the second. You scan through 22 more identical displays of veneration, swallow hard and add your own “Cute!” just on the off chance someone’s checking.
Below that, your co-worker has yet another update on his training progress for the upcoming marathon. You briefly consider reciprocating with your 4k treadmill times, because clearly it’s share trivia day.
Over on Twitter, you wade through a forest of posts all making roughly the same comment on the big news event, then nearly choke on a fine piece of humblebrag from a coworker: “Tripped on the stairs accepting my top 40-under-40 award. #klutz”
Steaming, you log off and look for the courage to detach yourself from social media and find new friends that don’t have computers.
THE VICTIMS: Clearly we all have to be on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and all the rest, because once in a while we DO want to see family photos and clever Tweets and headhunter messages offering fame and fortune (please, someone, anyone?).
The problem is, there’s a 50-tonne crap sandwich stuffed in among the good stuff. If we’ve all friended 350 people on Facebook and we’re following 500 on Twitter, there’s no room for all those useless comments and messages that do nothing except say, “I’m here! Look, I’m online too! Remember me!” Please, people. Have some dignity.
The thing is, posting 18 beach shots from your trip to Cabos is just excessive, and it doesn’t take 38 one-word messages to establish a toddler’s cuteness.
THE FIX: It may seem like sacrilege to suggest policing social media, but we’re not here to censor ideas, just the insensitive, endless repetition of the same old stuff. And with algorithms now that can recognize facial expressions and track unending information, we have the means.
The Social Media Standards Algo would separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, trolling posts to eliminate annoying and repetitious posts, and gently indicating when the line is being approached.
If you get a bit too incessant about your upcoming marathon, the algo will spot that and take action, maybe tinting the post to indicate its skipworthiness and shame the poster. And the third picture of Costa Rican sunsets gets pixilated. Because we already know you’re in Costa Rica, we got it, okay? We’re jealous, so mission accomplished.
And if you’re the third person in to comment on the baby picture, you’d better come up with something better than “What a cutie!” cuz the algo won’t accept it. You want to post that it looks like Jean Chretien on a bad day, you probably get that through. In fact, maybe baby photos get two comments tops. If you really need to chime in on the kid, pick up a phone and make a call.
