Tim Berners-Lee: Stop Foaming At the Mouth, Twitter

nk497 writes "Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web, has challenged users to improve social networks. He describes Twitter users as 'foaming at the mouth' and unwilling to retweet any update that wasn't offering an extreme opinion. 'How do you design a form of Twitter, how do you change the retweet system, so that Twitter will end up gathering a body of reasoned debate?' he asked. He noted that Facebook-style networks kept users within their existing friend groups, and didn't 'stretch' them to meet new people. Berners-Lee asked how can we 'make use of the web so it connects people together and breaks down barriers more than it builds them up.' Any ideas?"

Breaking down barriers ...

[damn_registrars]

Isn't nearly as easy to do as it is to say. The human race has sought out barriers to erect for as long as humans have been around. Even when people can't see one another physically, they will still seek out people with similar ideas and personality characteristics. You can force them into a large group of vary dissimilar people and in the end you'll find that group will still tend to segregate on some metric you didn't consider before.

I'm not endorsing that kind of action, but it is how we behave as a species.

Re:Slashdot comment system

[inputdev]

And it's clearly not keeping users within their existing friend groups, since the number of posters vastly outnumbers the number of friends. :) In all seriousness, I find the comments on slashdot to be at least as informational as the news sources themselves, even if it is only one or two posts out of hundreds, I'm often able to find them, since they are appropriately modded up.

USENET

[JoeRandomHacker]

Anyone interested in designing a peer-to-peer analogue of USENET News?