Most People on Reddit and Slashdot do not use Markdown

In urging people to use Markdown format when it is available I must admit that only about 1% of people have ever used it. It is there but not a prominent feature of the experience on these sites. I think this is the case because most people who post nowadays are used to mobile devices whose designers have simply not chosen to make advanced features available.  Maybe when mobile device begin to look more like desktops of old and something like  a 40 line X 80 character text area becomes more common they will begin to realize that they have more choices.

But clearly most people don't know any better. Is the reason that the business model for social media sites as marketing platforms is intentionally designed to restrict what people can effectively say? Oh, I know that people will assert that social media does not practice censorship, but I think otherwise. If people whose main goal with their on-line presence is to market themselves, they are not looking to be engaged in political debates, and because of the limitations of the usual blog format, they react badly to distractions like that. The designers of the sites they use, such as Google+, know that and that is intentional.

I don't trust business people to protect my right to free speech, especially when they cater to people who not only don't care about it, but who want the one-way channel of a marketing scheme.

Social Media Needs a Formal Topic Hierarchy

I have analyzed how the blog restricts discussion, how a discussion forum and something like the original USENET is a much better way to hold a discussion on-line than any blog.

But there is another element which gets to the keystone of social media theory in its anthesis. It is the stupidity of crowds, and the failure of the ad hoc social promotion of topics.

Reddit and Slashdot have many of the discussion features the rest of social media needs, the use of Markdown format at least inside a textarea. That should be adopted as a standard for all blog software. But Reddit especially suffers from a useful structure. The top-most breakdown of topics is too broad to be useful and the subreddit is too specific and not intuitive enough.

There needs to be topic hierarchy. And it must be orderly. There is another lie in social media that some orderly structure of knowledge is not needed, it is. There is a reason knowledge is broken down into sections. It is because the structure can be taught and it has some logic. That is lacking from sites like Reddit and Slashdot who are otherwise tending to discussion forums. Even if the flash-in-the-pan structure is useful to topical "hot", read impressionistic topics, a relative static topic structure should exist along side. This change and discussion forum features in blogs would go a long way to repairing the failings of Social Media as a medium for discussion.

Social Media is the ruin of Civil Discourse and Debate

And the people who run social media want it that way.

I began considering the effects of social media by complaining about the things sites like Facebook and Google+ do not allow, like quoting from one another's posts and sustaining long and involved and possibly contentious conversations. This is also related to the poor handling of bullying and trolling in Social Media and how, because of the lack of features to control conversations, people who run blogs resort to self-policing and other social pressure, their trolls, to police their sites.

This is a damper on healthy discussions and leads to Political Correctness, and censorship.

But, this is what the business people who run and profit the most from social media want. It is also one of the factors in the poisoned and dysfunctional political system in the United States and to poor political dialogue and problem solving in the rest of the world. The people who invest in social media for a marketplace full of nice-nice do not realize how much they are playing with fire and how it could blow up in their faces.

Greed in fueling a political reaction, and it is in addition to the failings of the world economy and finance, it is discontent with the quality of the discussion and the lack of opportunity for it to really solve problems. There are many who disagree with me, but they too often don't know any better as their platform to communicate has been restricted to the blog.

The biggest offender is Mark Zuckerberg, by Google is not far behind, trading effective communication for marketing opportunities. Even though Facebook looks like it is still growing as it expands into "emerging markets", one's experience on the website is one of diminishing returns as the urge to turn everybody into a marketer begins to down everybody out. People will use it less and less as it goes the same way of broadcast and increasing on-line media drowning us in advertising. The idea of a Facebook share is the abused feature that turns everyone into a marketer and given that people often don't write anything original in their shares and many shares don't allow for reply; Facebook is like every other one way marketing scheme. In that one choice not to allow for wiode open reply to shares, Facebook is a censor.