To me it's still unclear if having a message traverse the entire graph is good or bad. Something like this is required otherwise this will really just be a chat app, and probably not a very good one at that. What I mean is that if you can see only messages directly addressed or shared with you, well that's just Signal.
The current implementation traverses the graph of follows, which has some nice properties. Even if you had 10x as many bots as users on a platform, they can all post and share and like etc. But if no one from your social graph is following those bots, you won't see any of their content. Of course all it takes is one person in your network to follow a bot, and now you're exposed to all that spam. In that case you might want to unfollow this non-discerning friend. And the threat of being unfollowed will create incentives for people to make meaningful follows in the first place.
Some more granular tools will need to be built to help refine this. For example, you might not want to see things more than 3 steps away in your graph. There is also the concept of flagging messages which is not currently implemented, but will allow one user to stop a message from spreading to their followers.
As for the echo chambers, I'm not sure yet what this will look like. In the physical world there are soft echo chambers. People make like-minded friends and join like-minded organizations. To some extent this is good, when comparing to the alternative where everyone has to listen to anyone which would create a lot of conflict. Taken to the extreme though it does seem to make people intolerant to differing ideas.
The question I am asking myself (and for which I do not have an answer) is: will a platform like Chatter Net encourage people to progressively discover new ideas (the more people you follow, the more variety of content you will receive), or will it give the tools for people to lock out any competing views.
The current implementation traverses the graph of follows, which has some nice properties. Even if you had 10x as many bots as users on a platform, they can all post and share and like etc. But if no one from your social graph is following those bots, you won't see any of their content. Of course all it takes is one person in your network to follow a bot, and now you're exposed to all that spam. In that case you might want to unfollow this non-discerning friend. And the threat of being unfollowed will create incentives for people to make meaningful follows in the first place.
Some more granular tools will need to be built to help refine this. For example, you might not want to see things more than 3 steps away in your graph. There is also the concept of flagging messages which is not currently implemented, but will allow one user to stop a message from spreading to their followers.
As for the echo chambers, I'm not sure yet what this will look like. In the physical world there are soft echo chambers. People make like-minded friends and join like-minded organizations. To some extent this is good, when comparing to the alternative where everyone has to listen to anyone which would create a lot of conflict. Taken to the extreme though it does seem to make people intolerant to differing ideas.
The question I am asking myself (and for which I do not have an answer) is: will a platform like Chatter Net encourage people to progressively discover new ideas (the more people you follow, the more variety of content you will receive), or will it give the tools for people to lock out any competing views.