We’ve seen our share of social media, and it’s downfalls, from the days of Orkut and MySpace to Facebook, to Reddit and Twitter.

All of these platforms of old eventually broke down into different user camps, lack of effective monetarisation, or they became tools for political manipulation. The latter works because all of them incentivize /engagement/, meaning that the more reactions a user causes, the better - and that leads to echo chambers and increasingly radicalized thoughts.

Satellite (https://satellite.earth) is a new social network experiment that uses data analytics to incentivize and promote content that has been starred by people that are as diverse as possible - the idea is that if a radical left-winger and a radical right-winger (or a vim user and an emacs user) like the same thing, that thing must be good. To identify which camp people are in, it analyzes clouds of what people like.

The whole thing is interesting both from a technological standpoint as well as a philosophical experiment - social media has divided us, can it unite us again?