Open Design Questions

See folder README for orientation.

• How does discovery work without either algorithmic personalisation or status-display proxies for quality? “Curator picks” pushes the question one level up: how are curators selected, and how is curator quality measured without the things we just removed?
• Can the platform have any synchronous feedback (like-equivalents, immediate-response indicators) without sliding into engagement-driven dynamics? The slow-feedback purist version may be too austere even for the audience that wants this.
• What is the failure mode of communicative-action affordances? In practice, structured-argument tools attract a particular demographic and exclude others. Does the deliberation infrastructure itself produce a counterpublic that excludes the people Fraser was concerned about?
• The honest hard one: is a Habermas-inspired social media app a category mistake? Habermas’s framework is about the conditions for opinion-formation, not for all human social interaction. Most of what people do on social platforms — share photos, joke, flirt, organise small-group plans, perform identity — is not opinion-formation in his sense and is not improved by being treated as if it were. The honest move may be to not build a social platform but a deliberative-publication-and-discussion platform, smaller in scope, that explicitly disclaims being the place for all online sociality. Less ambitious. More honest.