While I agree with your overall outline that „something“ is lost from current social media, I would argue that analytics or more specifically analtical mindset in general should not be blamed for this. Analytics is simply a tool that can be used for good and for bad. The real problem are bad overall societal incentives and ideals (i.e., focus on profits and other narrow/short term metrics) which lead to missuse of these powerful and potentially highly useful/benefical tools.
So I don‘t think we necessarily need to resort to an complete change of the tech stack (i.e., web 3), but should simply try to support projects focused on better incentieves and ideals (e.g., Mastodon over Facebook/Twitter) no matter the technology stack. Nevertheless, I agree that web 3 may enable more idealistic/well aligned business models in the long run.
Another thing to push for may be more end user friendly legislation such as GDPR. While it may stiffle innovation by small companies in the short run, having long term standardization around good practices will hopefully create better and enable easier scale up of organizations in the future. Hope some researchers are coming up with good designs to investigate the effects of such legislation on the internet landscape. (On that note, can someone tell me again why impact evaluation of laws is not a standard practice, yet?! How much grieve could be spared if we decided to use evidence and facts to ground legislation...)
While I agree with your overall outline that „something“ is lost from current social media, I would argue that analytics or more specifically analtical mindset in general should not be blamed for this. Analytics is simply a tool that can be used for good and for bad. The real problem are bad overall societal incentives and ideals (i.e., focus on profits and other narrow/short term metrics) which lead to missuse of these powerful and potentially highly useful/benefical tools.
So I don‘t think we necessarily need to resort to an complete change of the tech stack (i.e., web 3), but should simply try to support projects focused on better incentieves and ideals (e.g., Mastodon over Facebook/Twitter) no matter the technology stack. Nevertheless, I agree that web 3 may enable more idealistic/well aligned business models in the long run.
Another thing to push for may be more end user friendly legislation such as GDPR. While it may stiffle innovation by small companies in the short run, having long term standardization around good practices will hopefully create better and enable easier scale up of organizations in the future. Hope some researchers are coming up with good designs to investigate the effects of such legislation on the internet landscape. (On that note, can someone tell me again why impact evaluation of laws is not a standard practice, yet?! How much grieve could be spared if we decided to use evidence and facts to ground legislation...)