Let’s try to frame this with as little politics as possible...
You build a medium where people can exchange content. Your original goal is to make money, so you want to make it as popular as possible—in perfect case, the Schelling point for anyone debating anything.
But you notice that certain messages, optimized for virality, make a disproportional fraction of your content. You don’t like this… either because you realize you actually have values beyond “making money”… or because you realize that in long term this could have a negative impact on your medium if people start to associate it with low-quality viral messages—you aim to be a king of all content, not only yellow journalism. There is a risk your competitor would make a competing medium that it more pleasant to read, at least at the beginning, and gradually take over your readers.
Some quick ideas:
a) censor specific ideas a.1) completely, e.g. all kitten videos get deleted a.2) penalize kitten videos in content aggregation
Problem: This will get noticed, and people who love kitten videos will move to your competitors.
b) target virality itself b.1) make it more difficult to share content
This goes too strongly against your goal be being an addictive website for simpletons.
b.2) penalize mindless sharing
For example, you have one-click-sharing functionality, but you can optionally add your own comment. Shares with hand-written comments will get much higher priority than shares without ones. The easier to share, the faster to disappear.
b.3) penalize articles with too much shares (globally)
Your advantage, as a huge website, is that you know which articles are popular worldwide. Unfortuately, soon there will be SEO techniques to circumvent any action you take, such as showing the same content to different users under different URLs (or whatever will make your system believe it is different content.)
c) distributed “censorship”
You could make functionality of voluntary “content rating” or “content filtering”, where anyone can register as a rating/filtering authority, and people can voluntarily subscribe to them. The authorities will flag the content, and you can choose to either see the content flagged, or have it automatically removed. Important: make the user interface really simple (for the subscribers).
But I guess most people wouldn’t use this anyway.
d) allow different “profiles” or “channels” for users
Not sure about details, but suppose there are different channels for politics, kitten videos, programming, etc… and you can turn them on and off. Many people would not turn on the politics channel, making the political news less viral.
Potential problems, such as “JavaScript inventor fired for political donation” does belong under “programming” or “politics”? Who defines the ontology. Etc.
Let’s try to frame this with as little politics as possible...
You build a medium where people can exchange content. Your original goal is to make money, so you want to make it as popular as possible—in perfect case, the Schelling point for anyone debating anything.
But you notice that certain messages, optimized for virality, make a disproportional fraction of your content. You don’t like this… either because you realize you actually have values beyond “making money”… or because you realize that in long term this could have a negative impact on your medium if people start to associate it with low-quality viral messages—you aim to be a king of all content, not only yellow journalism. There is a risk your competitor would make a competing medium that it more pleasant to read, at least at the beginning, and gradually take over your readers.
Some quick ideas:
a) censor specific ideas
a.1) completely, e.g. all kitten videos get deleted
a.2) penalize kitten videos in content aggregation
Problem: This will get noticed, and people who love kitten videos will move to your competitors.
b) target virality itself
b.1) make it more difficult to share content
This goes too strongly against your goal be being an addictive website for simpletons.
b.2) penalize mindless sharing
For example, you have one-click-sharing functionality, but you can optionally add your own comment. Shares with hand-written comments will get much higher priority than shares without ones. The easier to share, the faster to disappear.
b.3) penalize articles with too much shares (globally)
Your advantage, as a huge website, is that you know which articles are popular worldwide. Unfortuately, soon there will be SEO techniques to circumvent any action you take, such as showing the same content to different users under different URLs (or whatever will make your system believe it is different content.)
c) distributed “censorship”
You could make functionality of voluntary “content rating” or “content filtering”, where anyone can register as a rating/filtering authority, and people can voluntarily subscribe to them. The authorities will flag the content, and you can choose to either see the content flagged, or have it automatically removed. Important: make the user interface really simple (for the subscribers).
But I guess most people wouldn’t use this anyway.
d) allow different “profiles” or “channels” for users
Not sure about details, but suppose there are different channels for politics, kitten videos, programming, etc… and you can turn them on and off. Many people would not turn on the politics channel, making the political news less viral.
Potential problems, such as “JavaScript inventor fired for political donation” does belong under “programming” or “politics”? Who defines the ontology. Etc.
Relevant: today’s discussion on HN of how Facebook shapes the feeds on its platform and what do various people think about it.