Software

Stopping someone from posting about their suicidal thoughts doesn’t make them go away. Hiding comments in a celebrity’s post about their body does not stop people from dissecting it in other platforms. But, content moderation also gives these platforms a chance to deploy their answer to a question everyone is asking. What is a content generation platform’s responsibility to the greater world it exists in?

Searches for people are about time and how to best manage it: it’s not only the search process itself, but the passing of information, onboarding people, admin of social media, and so on. It’s a job on top of a job managing an incredibly stressful situation. But, there’s unique pieces of this puzzle that have yet to be meaningfully solved.

“Back in the 2000’s, the internet stood for freedom of movement, speech, information, and access. Everything could be changed because everything on the internet was available. You wouldn’t have to go to school, or memorize multiplications tables, you would just simply learn things on the internet or go to it for answers. It’s 2024, so how is the dream of internet intellectual freedom holding up? Uh. Well, about that.”

In the heat of the moment, we fail to properly compute information, forget critical things, or have a delayed reaction time that computers just don’t have. And the results can be deadly: plane crashes, car crashes, and more. All symptoms of an inability to make sense of the data, or being forced to be an actor in a system that previously automated your job away.

People do not download apps for the features, they do it for the cultural relevance: to themselves, to others, to major events, or to patterns they may not themselves recognize. Anyone can create a generic social media app. Very few can create a product that enables the community who uses it to create part of their identity. That identity with the product brings cultural relevance.