A social Media with Privacy

Hello Everyone,

I often think about can there be a competitor to Facebook now and I think there can be. In Germany by 2019 31 million people used Facebook ([https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/facebook-users-by-country](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/facebook-users-by-country)). I wonder if it has gone down now due to new scandals on facebook. Usually social media services optimize one metric which is number of hours spent on their platform (in case of youtube, number of hours spent watching videos). This leads to these algorithms learning to chunk out addictive information to you at every step. For this these companies utilize your personal data (messages, conversations, location data etc etc). However, the information you get on platform is not **productive.** For useful information that big companies rely on simple expert surveys to find out what is useful to you. (to further get a sense of how data must always be secured, check this out: [https://www.hownormalami.eu/](https://www.hownormalami.eu/))

I believe, there is now a demand for an alternative social media product, which does not exploit data to give you ADHD but rather protects data. I believe, the high sensitivity towards privacy and data protection within German culture makes it a perfect spot to start a social media competitor. For such a social media competitor which protects data, **one would need to come up with a recommendation algorithm which uses user survey data (instead of personal messages and conversation) to decide what information is useful for the users for their own version of “timeline”.** *Big companies already rely on user surveys to find out what is useful information for you*. I recently deactivated my facebook because it was addictive and useless. If there was a social media company which was more democratized in the way it pitches information to user, I would definitely prefer it over generic social media companies. I think someone should look into it and really try to capitalize on German culture of privacy and data sensitivity. This might be a time for a new social media company.