The Ten Commandments of Responsible Social App Design

What if social apps appealed to our angels, rather than our demons?

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Psychologists have long-known of the Michelangelo phenomenon, which describes how, in a healthy romantic relationship, your partner’s influence helps you achieve your ideal self.

But the effect only works when the individual’s vision of their partner aligns with the partner’s own vision of their ideal self.

It doesn’t work if you want your partner to become someone they’re not.

So what happens when the Michelangelo phenomenon meets social media? Imagine a social platform designed from the ground up to encourage each of us to achieve our vision of our ideal selves. Rather than the “here we are now, entertain us” stance of TikTok, where a notoriously good algorithm combines with easy-swiping to erode intentionality, there is an emerging trend toward more purposeful social media startups.

They have names like Peanut, Longwalks, Quilt, Mywave, Afterglow, and Queer Spaces. As an app founder myself, I have thought long and hard about how modern apps might not repeat the excesses of the current leading social networks, and I’ve come up with these 10 principles that I modestly put forth as …

DALL·E

The 10 Commandments of Responsible Social App Design:

1. The brand must stand for something other than content agnosticism: it must have state-able, non-generic values. It is no longer ethical to be all things to all people. Content agnosticism ends in a race to the bottom in which societal narratives are frayed and each of us hunker down in our silos.
2. The social capital, the followers and attention, must flow to people creating content aligned with the brand’s values. A network with values must not allow Creators who contradict those values to accrue the social capital.
3. Free speech must mean something. What is said in personal spaces, like the profile, should be subject to normal laws and limits on speech. The startups’ values cannot mean a silencing of speech in the member’s own private spaces.
4. Easy content creation must be combined with a high bar to trend. Social apps must make it difficult for content that does not align with its values to trend, while making it easy to create such content. It must be easy to create content but difficult to get widespread content distribution.
5. The startup must foster an equitable creator economy. The broader economy is fraught with systemic inequities like the gender-pay gap, but Big Tech built the creator economy from the ground up, so there is no excuse for the widely differing approaches exhibited where Twitter’s Jack Dorsey stated Black Twitter ‘does drive culture’ and TikTok’s culture of blaxploitation where black creators do not trend until a white creator copies their dance. Startups have an opportunity and responsibility to create a more level playing field for all creators — who knows what bounds of creativity this could surface?
6. Startups must support a rewrite of Section 230. Section 230 grants broad immunity to platforms no matter what its users do. The problem here is the platforms are now “publishers.” The moment an algorithm decides to feature a piece of content, it is the equivalent of a headline in a newspaper. Platforms must take responsibility to benefit from immunity protection.
7. Startups will mind that the medium is the message and choose the medium that best expresses the startup’s values. Sometimes this may mean choosing text, other times video, other times photos, and other times audio, but this choice of medium must be the result of diligent study and intentionality to align with the values of the startup.
8. The startup’s content discovery algorithm must be tuned to reflect the values of the company and avoid confirmation bias. Humans have long been known to have a “bug” in their operating system, a tendency towards confirmation bias, which today’s dominant social media and its algorithms do everything possible to feed. The goal of BigTech is not to make you challenge your beliefs, but to tell you what you want to hear so as to keep you on the app longer.
9. The lowest common denominator UGC must be solved for and made to be consistent with the brand’s values. Responsible startups will add friction and processes to ensure that the lowest common denominator use of the product is still consistent with the brand’s values. If content is being algorithmically distributed that is not aligned with the brand’s values, then by definition the lowest common denominator is too low. All social apps converge to their lowest common denominator content, and responsible startups will mind that even this content reflects its values.
10. The responsible startup will not empower trolls or encourage online harm. So many comment boxes have become social cesspools. A startup should adopt safety-by-design principles from day one. Trolls will always exist, and a responsible startup must devote not only moderation resources to stop them but also question if, knowing all we know, whether we really need another text comment box on another app. The ideal next-generation social app will make the people in the network feel as if they are in the same room, so as to discourage trolling.

That’s my modest proposal. 🙂 We live in a fast-paced world, awash with information. It is time to slow down, to insist on social media options that reflect who we want to be, to stand up to the distraction and endless context-switching, and to demand deeper connections over superficial swiping.

Dayo is the founder of the Wisdom app.