Spent most of my time today organizing reading on P2P systems, reputation/trust systems (heavy overlap with P2P as most of the digitized trust research is in this area), and historical posts from moderators (dang, cmdrtaco, kuro5hin members).
Which part? I'm definitely looking into decentralizing SN. The biggest unsolved part IMHO, the part that leads us to not have great decentralized social media, is incentives:
incentives to not spam
incentives to make data available (relay)
We already have a reputation system, e.g. a simple WoT system. I'm just looking for ways to continue to improve it.
As far as moderation, I'm mostly trying to figure out why these older communities introduced such heavy handed moderation and how they attempted to deal with it, etc ... all just research and intuition building.
I think notifications are a bit spammy right now. The answers to answers don't really increase my engagement since this is not a mobile app I don't get push notifications - and if SN was a mobile app and I would get notifications for answers to answers I would turn these notifications off.
I would rather have the option to disable replies to replies in my notifications in the settings.
Muting threads feels to me more like a feature in the blocking users/muting threads/ muting users etc. category. That's a whole other thing that probably needs more thought put into it (what should the side have, how should it be implemented etc.) Probably for another day!
I think Elon knows that twitter is captured by elite special interests (cough SA cough), and they are not interested in price, only influence on the global overton window.
He is exposing this to the shareholders, who majorly probably know this already, but he's also giving them an opportunity to seize twitter and turn it into an cash cow.
I believe if Elon takes twitter private, their valuation will double overnight. The only reason twitter loses market share is because of censorship and lack of innovation. Elon as CEO could flick a switch and both those problems would be gone.
He may also be secretly working with Dorsey, who has been working on a decentralized version of twitter for a while (project Bluesky). But it's really hard to get people to switch to a new social media platform.