Thanks for your kind words and continued support. It's just frustrating that some are wilfully ignorant and condescending about things they don't understand. Don't worry, I won't let it get to me

Unfortunately true

My takeaway? If the platform owners do not take responsibility in regulating and moderating content, then you can guess where the content will gradually grow towards. Private companies have a civic duty for the betterment of society, not just profit.

It takes away the expertise and due diligence of fact checking and opens it up to the same unregulated, unmoderated masses. Nothing wrong with the masses, it's just that not all of them have science-based opinions or conclusions to counter misinformation.

Community Notes, while useful at face value, still does not really provide a mechanism where science-based conventions (better known as "facts") have more weight than some dude throwing darts at the science wall claiming first principles.

With social media, the assumption is the right to free speech is that all opinions are valuable and deserve airtime (and get them instantly), and hence all opinions are of the same level. But it is not, as we have seen with pandemic misinformation.

Before social media, everything was moderated - anything that went on media usually went through some sort of committee or process like editors. That wasn't the silencing of free speech. It was just good media practice, as the right to free speech did not equal the right to be amplified by media.

People have always posted shit online almost without personal consequence (many outlier cases prevail though). Unmoderated and unchecked, this will only get worse as there is no more filters towards the, let's call it alt content that people will subconsciously gravitate towards.

The owner of the user-generated content needs to make a conscious decision in what kind of content, creators and users it wants to attract and moderate in that direction, or else content that serves deeper desires - for some, porn, for others, maybe hate - will always find its way to the top.

Take Onlyfans - it's a creator-first platform, but eventually became a top porn site because it does minimum moderation on porn. I have nothing against porn, but depending on where you look at it, Onlyfans today has difficulty pivoting away from porn because it's so dominant on the site.

I feel you

So is this what the “digital transformation” guys are doing? I’m thinking we need an additional framework for this step, rather than it be a very customised approach (and probably expensive). I guess the campus is the best place to figure this out.

The problem is that “lean” works fine in most cases when you’re building from zero, but not so much for legacy companies with assets, experiences and customer bases. It provides a great framework to reassess the business, but doesn’t really help in optimising existing assets or processes.