I've come to feel that a crucial feature missing from online discourse is the influence of third parties to the conversation.
If you have a conversation in meatspace, sufficiently nearby third parties send signals, because they cannot help but hear you (setting aside headphones or the like). Without entering the conversation, they can communicate by means like a change in stance, a muffled laugh, a roll of the eyes. If those signals are noticed, they provide feedback on the words exchanged and moderate the conversation when it grows heated or extreme. Social media doesn't well allow for these signals: the input interface doesn't allow for them without conscious effort to translate.
In the absence of those signals, any outrageous speaker on the internet can mistake the silence of our lossy input interface for silent approval. If they were wrong, someone would say something, surely? But no, there's just too much effort required to tell every damned fool they're an idiot. Even when one person speaks up, there's no apparent audience to serve as jury, and the fool can go on believing themself in the right.
In short: I think "audience feedback" is a necessity.
In effect: I think the concept of a "timeline", as a presentation of user-generated content, is socially broken. Every posting must be weighed, none should be allowed silence.
Up/downvotes on Reddit/HN/etc. are, I think, supposed to be this. Even if Reddit users stuck to the guidance that the downvote button is to hide disruption rather than to disagree, saying nutty stuff "loudly" would count as disruption.
The flaw in HN/reddit votes, Twitter faves, FB likes, etc is that not all persons who see a submission will use them. Every silent observer contributes to that illusion of assent that helps entrench deviant behavior.
Timelines are great tools for skimming content, but while we can aggregate content easily enough ("scan the room"), we have no tech solution for returning the social feedback that meatspace society relies on ("the room fell silent"). You could force that feedback by turning the timeline into merely a historical lookup, and delivering new posts to the user individually and not letting them return to the rest of the app without interacting with it in some way. Also, block unregistered users entirely, unless they can be locked into the same use pattern by some means that escapes me at the moment.
(If we split off into sci-fi dystopia land, measure the user's emotional state as they scan each post and accumulate those scores back to the author. This is terrible, please no one ever implement it.)
If you have a conversation in meatspace, sufficiently nearby third parties send signals, because they cannot help but hear you (setting aside headphones or the like). Without entering the conversation, they can communicate by means like a change in stance, a muffled laugh, a roll of the eyes. If those signals are noticed, they provide feedback on the words exchanged and moderate the conversation when it grows heated or extreme. Social media doesn't well allow for these signals: the input interface doesn't allow for them without conscious effort to translate.
In the absence of those signals, any outrageous speaker on the internet can mistake the silence of our lossy input interface for silent approval. If they were wrong, someone would say something, surely? But no, there's just too much effort required to tell every damned fool they're an idiot. Even when one person speaks up, there's no apparent audience to serve as jury, and the fool can go on believing themself in the right.
In short: I think "audience feedback" is a necessity.
In effect: I think the concept of a "timeline", as a presentation of user-generated content, is socially broken. Every posting must be weighed, none should be allowed silence.