v_london's comments

Problem with government-run alcohol shops is how they reduce available selection of drinks. I'm an avid whisky drinker (though in moderation of course), and being able to buy rarer bottles from specialist shops adds a lot to the experience. It also helps small producers since they don't have to negotiate with a behemoth of a stockist (imagine if the only way to sell whisky would be to negotiate a deal with the state to stock the entire UK's alcohol shops). The ABV limit has also caused trouble in the beer industry where types of beers that require higher ABV aren't produced.

I think the minimum pricing law of Scotland is the way to go when regulating alcohol. When I was living there, the system seemed to work well and incentivised buying higher quality drinks as well. I guess the problem is populist politicians who could easily brand it as limiting poor people's drinking, instead of posh ones.

I think your observations are accurate. I've also noticed the problem, and that private-ish group conversations like WhatsApp groups and small Discord servers are so much better than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and co. The only problem is discoverability -- because groups like these are private, it's very hard to discover the ones you'd like to join.

I'm currently working on an early-stage startup on this space, and we're specifically trying to solve the discoverability problem while keeping the group chats themselves small and private (or at least private enough). Do you think you could see yourself using something like this?

Do you feel this way about all kinds of online interactions? Or are Zoom calls or group chats better than, lets say, your Twitter feed or Reddit threads?

This is very interesting and insightful. I 100% agree with the notion that small communities require an organiser to keep things going.

I personally believe social media can be a positive force in building better human connections online. Because I think none of the existing platforms are optimising for this (better connections and discussions), I've been working on it myself. I believe group chats with a small circle of friends are the rare form of social media that actually works well today, so we're trying to build something where you could be connected to group chats with people you may not know in advance. In this way, the social media app would act as the "organiser" of these micro-communities, which would hopefully grow into real friendships.

Thoughts? We're looking to launch a landing page next month, and the app itself (which will run on the web browser) in a couple months.

It's a law that's either written by media lobbyists or people unfamiliar with technology. Potentially both at the same time.

If the news organisations want people to pay for news, they can change to a subscription model and put their content behind a pay wall. Many companies already to this: I myself pay over a hundred pounds a year for the Economist for their excellent reporting. The old establishment needs to understand they're not special, and if they want people to pay for news they need to provide content that's worth paying for, just like everyone else.

I believe the biggest problem is virality. What you see is determined by what captured the attention of other users, or what algorithms think would keep you on the site so they can serve more ads to your hungry eyeballs. As it turns out, divisive and emotional content (whether it's politics, pop culture flame wars or YouTube drama) is great at capturing that attention.

It's a problem I've recognized, and we're currently working on a new kind of social network that aims to promote better discussion on the internet. One of our methods is removing the concept of "virality" and having the discussions happen in small groups instead of on public forums. After all, your group chats with friends still have good discussions, that's what we're trying to replicate on a wider scale. We don't yet have a website to show unfortunately :(