Short post and I don't have the math background to go into this more rigorously, but just going based off intuition.
Media platforms that create a single giant graph with tons of nodes and edges give rise to emergent dynamics that humans did not evolve to deal with. The worst voices get elevated, polarization increases, and we get phenomena like memes and virality. I think these create misaligned incentivizes.
Humans do best in strongly connected networks of up to a few hundred. The networks are then loosely connected to each other. There is high trust within each cluster because everyone knows everyone, which significantly reduces the risk of polarization, and also moderates the most extreme voices and egregious behaviors. Members of different clusters can interact with other clusters, but not arbitrarily: there is a time and protocol for doing so.
This is how tribes, villages, and towns interacted with each other for thousands of years - not one massive public square. I think a digital network organized like this would be much healthier than modern social networks.
I am currently finishing a PhD in network physics and have been thinking about this exact topic for a while. It seems reasonable to me that the way we handle inter-individual cooperation is cognitively limited in some way by the Dunbar number. Moreover, some other topological constraints could also occur. In their 1998 milestone paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/30918), Watts and Strogatz basically explained that in a multi-player Prisoner’s Dilemma, the higher the number of shortcuts, the less likely the emergence of cooperation. These shortcuts are randomly connected "long-range" edges, differing from the regular "friend-of-friend" edges. Such long-range edges are omnipresent in online social networks. I think it could be highly beneficial for society to get used to defining the processes where human-scale mechanisms are "overwhelmed", leading to strong biases and unexpected behaviors. Online social life, I believe, is one of the most prominent examples of this phenomenon.
Short post and I don't have the math background to go into this more rigorously, but just going based off intuition.
Media platforms that create a single giant graph with tons of nodes and edges give rise to emergent dynamics that humans did not evolve to deal with. The worst voices get elevated, polarization increases, and we get phenomena like memes and virality. I think these create misaligned incentivizes.
Humans do best in strongly connected networks of up to a few hundred. The networks are then loosely connected to each other. There is high trust within each cluster because everyone knows everyone, which significantly reduces the risk of polarization, and also moderates the most extreme voices and egregious behaviors. Members of different clusters can interact with other clusters, but not arbitrarily: there is a time and protocol for doing so.
This is how tribes, villages, and towns interacted with each other for thousands of years - not one massive public square. I think a digital network organized like this would be much healthier than modern social networks.