how would jane jacobs design a social media platform? ✨

visibility and mobility on social media

"By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange." —Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

How would Jane Jacobs design a social media platform?



The honest answer is that she wouldn't—and there are a good number of urban purists who would come after me for suggesting such blasphemy in the first place (sorry!).



But I've already waxed lyrical on why we need real-life social infrastructure in today's digital world, which you can read here. Although we should invest more in physical places, much of our social life has migrated online, and won't come back. COVID-19 is the obvious accelerator, but the trend isn't new: families split apart by globalized labor and strict immigration laws; minorities facing isolation and persecution where they live; niche hobbyists seeking advice on bread-baking or learning to code—more and more people are relying on digital social infrastructure for social and economic resources.



The question instead becomes how to design online social experiences that provide users with diverse perspectives, accurate information, a sense of community participation, and more. We are no longer asking whether social media use trades off with offline interaction (it probably does), but why that's sometimes a bad thing—and how we can make platforms better.



The tech industry tends to exaggerate the novelty of this task. Everyone, after all, wants to make a dent in the universe, to be the chosen ones tasked with saving humankind. But these problems aren't new: instead, they're the same ones that mayors, school principals, and urban designers have reckoned with for centuries. These are the challenges inherent in any effort to manage human diversity.



Therefore, I'm interested in applying approaches from urbanist thinking toward the design of digital social infrastructure. In the rest of this essay, we can explore this framework:



1. How a city is like a platform
2. Case study: Reddit and the city > Communities and neighborhoods > Eyes on the feed > Contested spaces
3. How a platform is (not) like a city
4. Digital social futures



cities are platforms

“Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.”

What makes the city a good analogy for social media platforms?



The notion of the digital public square has been around since the inception of Facebook and Twitter. Ideally, friends, neighbors, and strangers would get a central gathering place to exchange information and promote civic discourse. When I saw Twitter play a central role in organizing the Arab Spring and watched thousands mark 'Going' to Women's Marches across the U.S., this hope felt the most alive—the digital square was bringing users into the literal city square, directly from online to off.



But we can and should think broader than the content stream. I won't be discussing the substance of sociopolitical discussions, but instead, focusing on how platforms shape the discussions we see and who we have them with.



That is, a core similarity between cities and social media platforms is the platform-content distinction. Because the content is user-generated, designers only have direct control over the infrastructure: the foundation on which everything else operates. Putting aside criminal law, a city can't tell people what to do in their parks, nor can Twitter orchestrate the kind of discourse that occurs.



But they can architect visibility and mobility in that space: How fast can we get from A to B? Who decides who can enter a space? What privacy are users offered, both from administrators and each other? What content should be broadcast, and what should be hidden?



Thus, infrastructure design requires a more subtle approach: creating the right incentives, environments, and dependencies to encourage well-being while preserving user autonomy. That autonomy is crucial—these spaces are only as good as the people who frequent them.



As a caveat, the comparison to a city is most useful in analyzing group and cluster behavior rather than individuals. Self-presentation actually looks very different in the digital world: there are so many more opportunities for curation, deception, and experimentation. I'll leave that topic for a deeper dive.



case study: reddit and the city

There are many more parallels, but they're probably best explored in context. I'll be using the social media site Reddit as a case study. It's an interesting platform because it provides user communities a relatively high level of autonomy in curating their rules, their feed, and their online identity.



Remember the array of web forums that characterized the 2000s Internet experience? Reddit is like a hub for thousands of forums called 'subreddits', on everything from fashion advice to memes to relationship drama. It's easy to create an account—nearly all users stay anonymous—and subscribe to any number of subreddits. Participation (via posts, up/downvotes, and comments) is voluntary. Active users in smaller subs might grow to know each other over time, while comment sections in the biggest subs are tens of thousands of comments long, with top-voted reactions floating to the top.



Then there's moderation. Reddit has an official content policy, but each subreddit's voluntary moderator team has major power to set rules, delete rule-breaking content, and tweak the default subreddit UI (e.g. displaying new vs. top comments first, filtering posts by category, pinning announcements, etc.). Many mods spend hours each day reviewing new posts, and some devise creative and elaborate systems of social credit to encourage good conduct. For example, in /r/Random_Acts_of_Pizza (a subreddit for gifting/receiving free pizza from strangers), mods apply a stringent rule system to verify real users and prevent gaming the system.





Using Reddit as a case study, I will explore several dimensions where urban governance and site managers face similar challenges. The goal is not to identify exact comparisons, but to show how this frame of thinking might reveal new possibilities for ethical and effective social media design.



communities and neighborhoods

“Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence.”

Thriving cities have neighborhoods with various purposes and cultures: financial districts, historically gay districts, tourist-filled waterfronts. While most residents identify most with the neighborhood they live in, the average city-dweller traverses multiple neighborhoods through the course of an ordinary week. A core challenge of city planning is using investment and zoning to preserve each neighborhood's unique culture for their residents, while also making them attractive places to move or shop in for outsiders.



How might we analogize the city neighborhood to the online community? What are the advantages of keeping online communities open versus gated? How easy or difficult should it be for users to discover new digital places?



In a subreddit, moderators and active users play the roles of local residents and institutions, establishing the culture and creating content to sustain the community. Other users might browse the subreddit frequently, but lay low beyond the occasional vote. Additionally, subreddit communities are porous: dissatisfied users can unsubscribe, and non-subscribers who stumble in can view content or join the discourse at any time.



But what happens when new users cause the "character" of a subreddit to change?



In April 2014, Reddit administrators made their largest women's subreddit /r/TwoXChromosomes (2X) a "default." From that point on, new Reddit users were automatically subscribed to 2X along with longtime defaults such as /r/news and /r/pics. That massively drove up traffic to the community, especially among non-women. This was controversial: some longtime 2X users criticized Reddit for destroying a safe space on a male-dominated website and sending waves of anti-feminist trolls to the subreddit. When 2X mods hit back with new rules, including banning "not all men"-style comments on certain posts, they were harangued for being dogmatic "SJWs," or "social justice warriors."



The 2X debacle seems like classically petty Internet drama. But it also echoes urban debates over investment and gentrification. When neighborhoods that used to be relative havens for ethnic, religious, and gender/sexual minorities receive sudden attention from developers and culture critics, original residents are often displaced directly (through rising rents) or indirectly (through cultural erosion).



In the Reddit context, administrators could have taken some inspiration from anti-displacement efforts. They could have preemptively worked with 2X users and moderators to assess the impact of becoming a default sub, restrict the pace of change, and/or provide technical tools for managing harassment. For instance, for the first month of defaulting a subreddit, admins could prevent users from commenting until they had been subscribers for more than a week.



Whichever side you're on, the conclusion is clear. Platforms must be more transparent about major changes to sites. They need to communicate with key community stakeholders—not just shareholders—before changes are solidified, and incorporate their concerns. Finally, once rollouts happen, administrators must plan to respond to backlash with empathy, educate users, and provide multiple effective channels for dissent.



eyes on the feed

"The public peace... is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves."

One of Jane Jacobs' most well-known contributions to urbanism is the concept of "eyes on the street." She suggests that parts of cities which lie empty for several hours a day are more likely to become hotspots for bad behavior, while busy streets naturally discourage crime through the shopkeepers, residents, and walkers who watch the street. Thus, she encourages neighborhoods to foster vibrant sidewalk lives, with diverse storefronts such as apartments, cafes, and laundromats. These resources provide a street with the means of maintaining a constant stream of store staff and passers-by to monitor the surrounding area.



Jacobs' "eyes on the street" concept leverages humans' situational awareness and norm-following nature to devise an informal, non-hierarchical citizen surveillance network. Rather than appointing designated watchdogs or sending the cops in for constant monitoring, all city inhabitants are empowered with a sense of common participation in community safety and governance. In fact, this monitoring is rarely conscious: instead, it results naturally from voluntary participation in public space.



Social media users' concerns, while lesser in degree and impact, aren't so different from those that residents wager against their local police forces. Many social media users have tense relationships with content moderators; they might feel that takedowns and bans are applied arbitrarily or enacting bans without explanation. Other users attempt to report harassment, yet receive no response. Today, both the political right and left insist that Facebook discriminates against their side.



Like police in the city, the formal report-and-ban process online should be a last resort after prevention (incentives for good behavior) and de-escalation (through community actors).These latter tactics take advantage of social pressure and users' drive to uphold their online reputation. But they also require strong community norms—"eyes on the feed," one might call it. In a healthy online community, in-group peers conduct onboardings and call each other in for violating rules first. Pinned guidelines and FAQs help, but I'm in favor of an even higher-touch approach. For new subscribers, consider a pop-up welcome slideshow and "new user" tags to encourage older members to direct them toward relevant rules. Values such as helpfulness, kindness, and leadership can even be integrated into the reputation system, whether formally (e.g. Reddit karma, gold/silver coins) or informally (e.g. badges, tags, community awards).



Community policing is not without its limits, however. Just as in real life, digital mobility is regulated by social norms and hierarchies such as race, gender, and age. Male users and moderators may be unsympathetic to women facing harassment from community members—"tits or gtfo" is a common virtual catcall—especially if the women are perceived as newcomers to the space. Likewise, a majority-white subreddit may hesitate to crack down on racism without anyone to call them out for it.



Therefore, for an "eyes on the feed" system to counteract prejudice, the online community must start out with a critical mass of users from minority backgrounds. A social platform's initial user base will always have an outsized influence in norms-setting, especially regarding safety.



contested spaces

"There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans."

So far, we've compared neighborhoods to subreddits and policing to community norms. But governance is never as simple as written rules and official titles. In this section, let's consider how struggles over space—who occupies it, who can be seen—occur in the city and the platform.



In the context of social media, the platform-content distinction is both a distinction and a hierarchy—revealing the power differential between the platform owner and its users, between the city and its residents. Although governments retain ultimate authority over the city, ordinary citizens have shaped the urban landscape in dramatic ways, both intentionally and incidentally. This relationship between the built environment and its inhabitants has been described as a Hegelian dialectic. The characteristics of a place arise from ongoing struggle, reinforcement, and negotiation between contested groups.



Consider the skateboarder. Cities across the globe have waged ongoing wars against skateboarders, who are portrayed as public nuisances for racing up and down sidewalks and leaping off guardrails. Skateboarders play with the designer's intentions, envisioning and producing alternative affordances in everyday infrastructure. They are young; they dress in casual street clothing and don tattoos; they laugh and play loud music. The skating subculture rejects the aesthetic of white-collar professionalism that defines modern city centers.



This movement, despite not having an explicitly political character, has been a surprisingly effective one. Cities first responded by building skate parks to contain skaters to designated areas where they wouldn't disrupt pedestrian traffic. Yet the skate park is already a victory in itself: it affirms the skateboarders' presence and power, establishing a (literal) concrete mark on the city. Once a culture has visibly and semi-permanently materialized itself, it becomes far more difficult to destroy. For instance, when a large London shopping mall announced plans to replace a popular riverside skate park with a retail pavilion, over 27,000 Londoners mobilized to save the park. Today, thousands of tourists and locals who stroll along Southbank every day eagerly stop to watch the skateboarders.





From skateboarders zipping down steps to protesters who shut down streets, the users of public space have leveraged their numbers against official ordinances. Now we can ask: how can social media users establish their right to the platform? How can marginalized cultures insist on visibility when their visibility is mediated by black box algorithms? What happens when guerrilla urbanism makes spaces less safe—for example, when public art becomes pollution?



Reddit is better known for memes and men's rights activists than for safe spaces, so it provides an interesting perspective on the dialectic between administrators and users. The following anecdote demonstrates how safety and autonomy can come into tension when an especially unruly community—a hub for Donald Trump supporters—demands to be seen.



On Reddit, the popular page /r/all collates the most popular posts across the website, although certain content categories, like pornography, are blocked from showing up. While some subreddits resent /r/all for sending newcomers into their community, others take more activist stances. Among the latter, the most well-known is /r/The_Donald, or T_D. As the name might reveal, T_D began in 2015 as a fan forum for Donald Trump. Since its inception, the subreddit has evolved into a general hub for the alt-right political community on Reddit. T_D has engaged in guerrilla tactics to promote their visibility on the site—for example, pushing posts to /r/all by pinning and un-pinning them, or explicitly asking its members for upvotes. They are also notorious for "brigading": mass harassing users in other communities. Although all of these activities fly in the face of community etiquette, T_D rejects these norms, insisting on being seen.



As a result, some subreddit moderators have tried auto-banning users who are active T_D members: a no-fly list gating inter-neighborhood mobility. As user communities battled to control discursive norms on the site, Reddit administrators ultimately responded by quarantining T_D. A warning is displayed when people navigate to the subreddit, and T_D posts are barred from appearing in /r/all. This step was both extreme—Reddit is known for its bias toward self-moderation—and not enough—given how many users were alienated by T_D trolls. This dilemma highlighted the challenging role of administrators in legitimating users' competing claims to 'public' space.



how a platform is (not) like a city

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

So far, I've been ignoring a core difference between the city and the social media platform: democracy.



No matter how corrupt a city government may be, no matter how violent its police force or strict its zoning laws, American cities retain an institutional mandate to serve and represent their population. Mayors can be voted out of office and referenda can be voted in. Laws and budgets are in the public record, creating concrete evidence that can be leveraged for or against reform.



A social media company has none of the above. Their executives can be voted out only by the board of directors; proprietary algorithms are hidden in impenetrable black boxes; and accounts can be removed at will. Unless regulated, decisions are made nearly exclusively in the interest of profit: retaining users deemed high value, segmenting them for advertisers, and making it easier to conduct business. Engagement converts to dollars, not votes.



So far, most people have accepted the autocratic nature of tech companies through the lens that they provide a voluntary and non-essential service. Theoretically, we can't escape the city we live in, but we can hop from one platform to another, or none at all.



But our actions contradict this assumption. A majority of U.S. adults use Facebook, and a majority of those visit the site at least every day. It's hard to think of another company that commands this level of undivided attention from the American public, curating our friendships, news knowledge, purchases, voting behavior, romance, disaster response, activism, and event planning. Social platforms mediate every function of everyday life.



I can't resolve this tension, and companies' pursuit of profit remains the greatest limitation to this comparison. But for this reason, I'm especially interested in alternative governance models for social media: nonprofit organizations, government-run, worker and user cooperatives. I hope to explore these in a later essay.



digital social futures

"There is no new world that you make without the old world."

The history of the Internet is a history of utopian thinking. From Richard Stallman's rejection of passwords and payments to Mark Zuckerberg's unbridled cosmopolitanism, leading technologists have long hoped that turning humans into users, content, and preferences would lead to the perfection of social relations. The hope was that algorithms could provide people with perfect partners and perfect news sources, customized for perfect happiness and perfect productivity.



But online communities, like the social life of the city, are characterized by conflict and inefficiency—serendipity, some might call it. History and culture are produced through negotiation: how can such diverse peoples collaborate, compete, and coexist?



In my view, utopia doesn't need to eliminate conflict. Perfection is unnecessary—life is about growth, sustainability, and care.



That's why, for its failings, I remain hopeful about the digital social world. Unlike the concrete jungle, the digital jungle does not require a single unified vision of the future. Rather, multiple utopias can coexist. Popular features will be propelled into widespread adoption; other sites will fall into obscurity, losing users but not lives. One can think of the architectural differences between platforms as competing governance structures, value sets, and belief systems about how people should interact and thrive.



Above all, we cannot cede community governance to top-down decisionmakers. Our humanity will always play an indispensable role in innovating new use cases, forming grassroots communities, pushing for platform change, and building culture on top of of code.



Other than the those explicitly cited—all section quotes come from The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs—I have drawn inspiration from a multitude of sources, including Taylor Lorenz's reporting, /r/TheoryOfReddit, Future Histories by Lizzie O'Shea, Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufceki, and more.



Thank you to my friends Emily de Grandpre and Indra Sofian for their feedback!



(may 6, 2020)