> It would be a real service to society IMO if we could find a way to somehow generate enough engagement and energy to challenge the big players without the outrage culture.

I'm not being cheeky (see below), but this already exists. It's talking to one another, person to person. :)

Social media, at its core, targets the very primal part of our brain and bodies. This is my feeling and observation, and I would be very interested to see if there have been studies that show there are fundamental differences to how people communicate online, primarily via text, versus communicating in person. I would suspect there are differences in that our brain literally responds differently.

As I type this, you can't see me. You don't know me. And I can't see nor do I know you. We can't respond to facial expressions or hear the cadence and tone of voice. Many, many times on the Internet, conversations get sidetracked by someone making a joke and then someone taking it too seriously. That's a simple case of online social media interaction, and there are far more complex examples. It's the same thing as working at a company. Often times you hit this moment where you just stop typing a message or an e-mail and just call the other person or go over to their desk. Even with just voice-to-voice communication, things are communicated much faster, and in person is even faster.

A lot of this has to do with the process. Online, someone types something and then someone else types another thing in response and so on. In person, it's a more dynamic exchange.

So at the core, my hypothesis is that almost all media (such as news) and especially social media are doing nothing but bypassing our natural filters and sensors for understanding things and try to directly target our inner primal self. As we can see online, humans are innately primal, especially when you remove all of our other evolved methods of understanding and empathy. When people see someone online say something they vehemently disagree with, they immediately ignore all possibilities and empathetic responses. We go straight to the core of finding the thing we hate about what they just said and then let them know that. However, if a stranger on the train says something like this, we often let it go. If we do engage, we are much more empathetic about their feelings and thoughts, both for human and societal reasons.

Given this, I think it's essentially impossible to build an online community that is directly based upon this type of communication. It's tough enough to build one in person with people you know. And as we've all experienced over the past months, even digital face-to-face communication is hard. There's still dynamics missing like low-latency, body language, tone, hand motions, subtleties of voice, etc.

I view it as an API or architecture diagram. If one drew one out for human communication, there's a lot of abstraction built upon our inner primal workings. But modern media, the Internet, and now social media has given a way to bypass all of that. The inner core can be accessed directly via advertisements, news, social media, propaganda, forums, etc., and now the Internet is like a connection between all these primal cores. It's why it's so insane.

Adam Curtis' documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace covers this.