We need Channels on Social Networks for each Friend we have

One of your friends on Facebook or Twitter may have a great sense of humor. Also first one to share very important news bits.

At the same time, he may also be obsessed with his baby.

You like guy a lot, you like some of what he shares, but, do you HAVE to regularly see news about his baby’s diaper change or what he ate in that great restaurant last evening?

You think you can just ignore these posts and skip by them and all will be ok. But it doesn’t work that way.

Facebook and some other social networks decide whose posts to show you and actually what to show you by looking at which posts you interact with. The less you interact with someone’s posts (share, like, comment) the less they show his/her posts to you.

So, if you skip 5-6 of your friend’s posts and just interact with one post, the interaction score for that friend goes down according to whatever weight that social network’s algorithm calculates. But it does go down.

Same goes for news channels’ pages/profiles, activism pages, community pages, hobby pages – any kind of contact you have. In some social networks like Facebook, this happens despite you set Facebook to always show updates from that friend or page.

So, you either have to endure crap you don’t like for keeping being able to see what you like, or let it all go haywire.

That doesn’t need to be that way. If we had something like ‘Channels’ on social networks for everyone, people could be able to decide what they would like to see from other people.

How will Channels Work then?

In such a format, any post/update/share would have to be selected to go through a channel you created in your settings.

Like, say, you have a ‘News’ channel added. Any news you share would be shared from that channel.

Or, say, you have modeling hobby. Any stuff you post about modeling would go through that channel.

Stuff related to family from ‘Family’ channel (notice how you can avoid the diaper changes here), stuff related to crap to ‘Crapshooting’ channel and so on.

This way you not only add someone as a contact, but also can choose what to see from them. Great feature for following news outlets too – you may not be interested in sports news, so despite you follow a news outlet, you can spare yourself from seeing what they post about sports too.

Its basically choosing to follow ‘aspects’ of a person or a profile.

Google has circles, Diaspora has aspects – this is not new

Not the same. You choose which circle to share that post with, when you are posting something. You don’t classify your own post as belonging to a particular aspect or circle.

And mostly when sharing people naturally choose to share with all of their circles/aspects, further invalidating any tailoring you may have had in your post.

Channels need to be active for posts/shares, and they need to be mandatory.

So when you are sharing something, you would have to choose which channel you are going to share that post with. This way all shares will go to the proper channels.

And there shouldn’t be a ‘general’ channel as default either, because a lot of people would just push their posts to the same channel all the time. That would invalidate the point.

Yeah, you could say that this would introduce a hassle to sharing.

But truly, it seems to be the best way for you to avoid seeing about your uncle’s last dinner and him avoiding your political posts…