On Pandemics and Bubbles

One of the hallmarks of social media is the ability for content to spread widely, to "go viral." Sometimes it's something good, like the Ice Bucket Challenge, sometimes innocuous fun, What Color Is This Dress?, and at its worst, fake news. The first two offer tangible boons to society at the risk and cost of the latter.

Still, consider how many causes you've heard of, donated to, thought more deeply about because it happened across your screen? What jokes did you read, interesting tidbits did you pick up not because you were looking for them but because someone you know passed it along?

The Problem

Imzy is anti-viral. The core structure as it stands is anti-pandemic. Content is not communicable. This means we're all stuck perpetually in bubbles of our choosing, with no random aspect at play that might bring the unexpected across our screens to broaden our worlds.

Yes, the Share feature exists, but it's paltry. I've tried a few times to describe and suggest a different method of sharing to try to increase proliferation and interaction, but no one has taken any interest.

So I'd like to propose a different solution.

The Proposal

Neighborhoods are currently functionally useless. They don't do anything other than tag another community as potentially something of interest, should anyone care to dig into the community About section that far.

What if, instead, they were lines of communicability. I could envision two different ways for this to play out.

Passive Proliferation

Say your community is in a mutual neighborhood of 3 (C1, C2, C3). C2 has 2 additional neighbors that are not mutuals with C1. C3 has 4 additional neighbors that are not mutuals with C1. Every post has an Activity threshold. If a post in C1 reaches that threshold, it automatically appears in the feeds of C2 and C3.

Now the post is open to more interactions. Suppose a member of C2 sees the post and interacts. If the system can track that that activity is attributed to C2, the threshold count can start again. When the threshold is met, the post spreads to the mutual neighbors of C2, which are not affiliated with C1 in any way but are now seeing something posted there.

If you'd played Pandemic, this is basically the Outbreak mechanic. As thresholds continue to be met, the post continues to move through lines of communicability established by mutual neighbors until it reaches dead-ends.

Suddenly, Neighborhoods mean something. Likes mean something. Activity means something. It all has a mechanic in whether or not the content spreads.

You would need a mechanism for locking a post into something that cannot spread, for people who specifically don't want a post to have a chance of going viral.

Active Proliferation

An active proliferation model would mean basically the option to Post to C1 or Post to Neighborhood. The content creator, or possibly the community Leader, would be responsible for initiating a post to spread to multiple communities.

For a content creator, the communicability would be limited to only first tier neighbors. They couldn't know what neighbors C2 has, nor would they have any way to push the content to the neighbors they have no direct connection to.

A Leader, however, would. C2's leader, upon seeing a neighborhood post, could choose to pass it along, proliferating the content to all of their connections.

It would be slower. There would be no guarantee that anything being passed along had any particular level of activity. But there would be at least some chance of a pandemic, whereas now there's virtually none.