We’ve built massive online attention competitions disguised as social platforms. That’s not necessarily a criticism—it’s simply what market forces selected for. Platforms that effectively capture and maintain attention thrive; those that don’t, disappear.
The Social Game We’re Playing
Think about it: social media platforms function remarkably like games. They feature:
- Clear reward systems (likes, shares, followers)
- Status indicators and leaderboards (verification badges, follower counts)
- Variable reward schedules that trigger dopamine responses
- Personalized progression systems
- Identity customization and expression
- Team-based competition (the inevitable formation of in-groups)
These gamification elements aren’t being forced upon unwilling participants—people genuinely enjoy them. The game-like qualities make these platforms sticky precisely because they tap into fundamental human social desires: to be seen, to belong, to achieve status, to express identity.
The Bottom-Up Advantage
What makes these platforms so successful is their bottom-up nature. They don’t dictate what users should care about; they’re goal-agnostic environments where people bring their own motivations. Some come to maintain friendships, others to build professional networks, share creative work, or find entertainment.
Political and civic discourse emerges organically within these spaces—not because the platforms were designed for it, but because humans naturally discuss matters of collective concern when they gather.
This contrasts sharply with top-down platforms specifically designed for political deliberation, which often struggle with adoption. Most people don’t wake up excited to engage in structured policy debates. Instead, civic engagement tends to flourish as a “side effect” of platforms people join for other reasons.
The Tension
Here’s the challenge: the very features that make these platforms successful at attracting users often make them problematic for thoughtful discourse. The reward systems that drive engagement can incentivize polarization over understanding, emotional activation over nuance, and tribal signaling over intellectual charity.
We’ve optimized for engagement but not for the quality of discourse—especially around complex social and political topics where thoughtful deliberation matters most.
Two Gaming Models for Social Media
When we look at how social platforms operate, we can identify two contrasting approaches based on different gaming paradigms:
The Battle Royale Approach
Look, the catastrophe of our attention economy wasn’t an accident – it was the inevitable outcome of venture-backed surveillance capitalism’s remorseless logic. These platforms are engineered like dopamine casinos, each notification a slot-machine pull designed by armies of dark-pattern specialists. They’ve managed the near-impossible feat of creating digital enclosures that simultaneously feel like public squares while operating as private fiefdoms controlled by oligarchic tech bros.
The mechanics are ruthlessly efficient: every post competes in a zero-sum gladiatorial arena where the prize isn’t just eyeballs but the very currency of relevance itself. Content doesn’t just age – it’s actively buried, compacted beneath the algorithmic sediment of whatever outrage is currently lighting up the engagement metrics. The digital architecture creates artificial scarcity in an environment that could theoretically support abundance, manufacturing a kind of positional hyperinflation where users must continually escalate their performative emotional labor just to maintain visibility.
This system doesn’t merely permit toxicity – it selects for it with the cold efficiency of natural selection. The platforms have effectively gamified our social interactions into a battle royale where only the most emotionally hijacking content survives.
The Cooperative MMO Alternative
But what if there’s another way?
What if we built platforms that resembled villages instead of coliseums?
The most resilient communities online don’t treat attention as a commodity to be hoarded. They treat it as a gift to be shared.
The mechanics are simple:
Create spaces where yesterday’s conversations still matter tomorrow.
Give people tools to build something together, not just perform for each other.
Recognize that different voices contribute in different ways – the questioner is as valuable as the answerer.
In these places, your contribution isn’t measured by how many people you momentarily distracted, but by how you helped the group move forward.
The value compounds over time.
The standards rise.
The culture matters more than the algorithm.
People show up differently when they’re building a cathedral together versus fighting for scraps in a zero-sum game.
Learning From Games
This dichotomy makes me wonder: might certain video games offer alternative models for sticky, engaging social environments that nevertheless foster more pro-social interactions?
The best multiplayer games create intricate social ecosystems with different incentive structures than we typically see on social media. Some reward cooperation over competition, create scenarios requiring perspective-taking, establish norms that value intellectual charity, or design mechanics that naturally lead to bridging divides rather than deepening them.
So I’m curious: Do you know of any games (video games or otherwise) that have created sticky, engaging social environments while also encouraging truly pro-social interaction patterns? What mechanics or design elements make them work?
What if our next generation of social platforms learned from these examples, maintaining the bottom-up, goal-agnostic nature that drives adoption while subtly reshaping the rules of the game to reward different outcomes?
[This post was inspired by a comment by Jacopo Tagliabue in a conversation long ago; it benefitted from another conversation with Giovanni Spitale. The styles for two sections have been imitated from Cory Doctorow and Seth Goodin, as an homage to their being so influential.]
Production note.
