This is a continuation of my #post Limited Social Networks
Let the AI Help You Post
When companies talk about using AI, it’s usually regarding finding good content to show or censoring content that is offensive or tracking visitors. But why not get AI more involved in the conversation?
Perhaps the system does something to the posts. The AI will judge what needs adjusted from your post and it will adjust it. Maybe you worded it poorly. The AI will change it. Or maybe the AI will encourage posters to try harder, work smarter, or be more creative – while they are in the middle of creating their post. If we’re talking about the emoticon-only social network we know the visitors are being creative. Why not cheer them on?
Opt-Out Comments
Maybe instead of opt-in comments the comments are opt-out. By that I mean, the system generates a comment for you on each post. (Imagine here, the emoticon-only social network). Perhaps a list of emoticons it thinks you will share. And you can hit the button to accept the emoticons or you can edit them. But editing takes more work so you will accept them more often.
Perhaps anything you look at for more than a few seconds will generate the response comment. This way more people get the comments (or likes if we use a similar opt-out mechanism) and it’s less work for the likers to make the likes. No one knows the better and everyone feels good that they get so many comments.
Let the AI Join the Conversation
Maybe it’s not just about impressing your friends and followers. Maybe you also want to impress the AI. You get creative with your post and see what compliments and feedback you get from friends and followers – and the AI.
Maybe the system gives out stars or money for your comments, based on what it thinks are good. That way we build up the system with lots of good comments. Or at least just lots of comments because everyone is trying to make money and get stars from commenting.
A Combination of Methods
Maybe the social network is a combination of some of these ideas.
Two Symbiotic Social Networks in Parallel
So let’s assume you have a social network where you can only post things from a set list of items. And that set list of items are the audio comments from a second standalone network. The networks look different. One is more free-wheeling and one is more controlled. Maybe we even do the same for the emoticons and (assuming we use the variability idea from my other post) weekly sets of emoticons. People can create them over in the wild west network where they are upvoted for attention, but then they are hand-picked for the other network. Or maybe the AI picks them.
This is pretty much how the internet works already – many social networks going at the same time and sharing content back and forth. But if these were made to be symbiotic by design then we’d have more opportunities to do interesting and useful things.
User-Based Variations and Other Ideas
What if the set of emoticons or ways you could communicate varied not just week to week, but person to person? So you get a better set if you did better the previous day. For the record, I hate this idea. It discourages newbies from joining.
What if it instead emoticons only popped up at certain times and you had to jump on them quickly? Or there was a set amount of them? Or you could only post so much per day? Twitter allows just 280 characters per post. But what if you were only allowed a certain number of posts or emoticons per day?