Can social media be saved?

I don't need to tell you that something is wrong with social media.

You've probably experienced it yourself. Maybe it's the way you feel while scrolling through your Twitter feed — anxious, twitchy, a little world weary — or your unease when you see a child watching YouTube videos, knowing she's just a few algorithmic nudges away from a rabbit hole filled with lunatic conspiracies and gore. Or maybe it was this month's Facebook privacy scandal, which reminded you that you've entrusted the most intimate parts of your digital life to a profit-maximizing surveillance machine.

Our growing discomfort with our largest social platforms is reflected in polls. One recently conducted by Axios and SurveyMonkey found that all three of the major social media companies — Facebook, Twitter and Google, which shares a parent company with YouTube — are significantly less popular with Americans than they were five months ago. (And Americans might be the lucky ones. Outside the United States, social media is fueling real-world violence and empowering autocrats, often with much less oversight.)

More from the New York Times:
Facebook's Zuckerberg Said to Agree to Testify Before Congress Over Data Privacy
Covering Disasters With 2 Phones, in Case One Falls in the Mud
Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

But it would be a mistake to throw up our hands and assume that it has to be this way. The original dream of social media — producing healthy discussions, unlocking new forms of creativity, connecting people to others with similar interests — shouldn't be discarded because of the failures of the current market leaders. And lots of important things still happen on even the most flawed networks. The West Virginia teachers' strike and last weekend's March for Our Lives, for example, were largely organized on Facebook and Twitter.

The primary problem with today's social networks is that they're already too big, and are trapped inside a market-based system that forces them to keep growing. Facebook can't stop monetizing our personal data for the same reason that Starbucks can't stop selling coffee — it's the heart of the enterprise.

Many of the fixes being proposed involve regulation. The Honest Ads Act, a bill in the Senate, would require greater transparency for online political ads. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, which goes into effect in May, aims to give users greater control of their digital information trails.

But these efforts don't touch the underlying problems, and in fact could make it harder for start-ups to compete with the giants.

If we're really serious about changing how social networks operate, far more radical interventions are required. Here are three possible ways to rescue social media from the market-based pressures that got us here.

In their book "New Power," which comes out next week, Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms write about the struggle between centralized, top-down institutions, which represent "old power," and decentralized, bottom-up movements, which represent "new power."

Facebook, they write, is an example of a new power institution that serves old power interests. It harvests the creative output of billions of people and turns it into a giant, centralized enterprise, with most users sharing none of the economic value they create and getting no say in the platform's governance.

Instead, the authors ask, what if a social network was truly run by its users?

"If you're contributing economic value to something of this much social consequence, you should share in the value you're creating," Mr. Heimans told me.

Nathan Schneider, a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado, had a similar idea in 2016, when he proposed that Twitter users band together to buy the platform from its shareholders and convert it into a user-run collective, similar to the way a local credit union is run. People who made valuable contributions to the network, such as employees and power users, would receive bigger stakes and more voting power. And users would have a seat at the table for major decisions about the platform's operations.

It's exceedingly unlikely that Mark Zuckerberg, who has fought hard to keep control of Facebook, will ever convert the company into a user-owned and run collective. But Mr. Schneider believes that giving more control to responsible users could help restore trust in the network, and signal the kind of values Mr. Zuckerberg says he wants Facebook to represent.

"He could show that he takes democracy seriously enough to start with his own baby," Mr. Schneider said.

Another radical approach would be to make social networks work more like email — so that independent apps could seamlessly work together with one another, across a common protocol.

Instead of one big Facebook, a federated social network would look like clusters of independent nodes — Mombook and Athletebook and Gamerbook — all of which could be plugged into the umbrella network when it made sense. Rather than requiring a one-size-fits-all set of policies that apply to billions of users, these nodes could be designed to reflect users' priorities. (A network for privacy hawks and one for open-sharing maximalists could have different data-retention rules, and a network for L.G.B.T. users and one for evangelical pastors could have different hate speech rules.) If a node became too toxic, it could be removed without shutting down the entire network.

"Email is the most resilient social network on the internet," Mr. Schneider said, "and the thing that allows it to adapt is that it's an open protocol, and people build apps on top of it, and we evolve how we use it."

Versions of this kind of network already exist. Mastodon, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, has gotten more than a million registered users since its debut in 2016. And various social networks based on the blockchain — the ledger system that underlies virtual currencies like Bitcoin — have sprung up in recent months.

To be sure, decentralized networks have their own problems. They're messy to administer, and they can still be gamed by bad actors. They can also fall prey to the same kind of privacy issues that Facebook is being criticized for. (In fact, part of the reason users are angry at Facebook right now is that the company's data infrastructure was too open, and made it overly simple for third-party app developers to take user information outside Facebook.)

None of this is a panacea. But experimenting with more decentralized models could give social media users a sense that platforms represented their interests, rather than those of a faceless corporation.