Digital town squares

One of the arguments you hear back and forth regarding Elon Musk's takeover and consequent stewardship of Twitter, is that his involvement in the company is either good or bad for what people refer to as the "digital global town square" or some variant of that. Underpinning these arguments in one direction or the other is the assumption that indeed, Twitter serves some sort of "town square" role. This means that it serves some kind of vital service to the community since it is a place where anyone can come and share and debate ideas.

Really only recently you are starting to hear more voices questioning this assumption and asking whether Twitter is really a town square or even if it serves any function whatsoever. For example, Ezra Klein and Jon Haidt recently wrote about Twitter with the former questioning the need for a global town square at all and the latter comparing Twitter to a global coliseum of some sort instead. I think that both points are valid and boiled down to their essence, the common thread is that when you have a space that is so massively open where you lose any sort of human guard rails that govern behavior, people just end up performing in transactional ways to garner the most short-term value they can out of the platform. In other words, if you never meet anyone from the platform in real life, what do I care if I troll them or spam them with worthless threads selling my online Twitter course if I'm never going to meet them in person?

An alternative model that I think works closer to the ideal of the digital town square, is the idea of community hubs connected to local news publications. It would be a sort of social media platform with some commenting and discussion around stories and events going on in the local area, but it could also be a space to discuss broader topics but with the guardrails of knowing these are people you might actually meet in real life. The warning story here though is Nextdoor, which from my little understanding of it, has in many ways suffered from similar issues as Twitter. So maybe the biggest issue is getting people to interact with each other in person first, before taking the conversation online. That problem requires more than some new tech platform to solve though.