Introducing "Quanta" to create a more balanced and valuable media ecosystem

The underlying economics for much of the web is driven by advertising. People generate data through interactions, publishers chase engagement for revenue, advertising platforms generate 100’s of billions of dollars in profit each year. I have been collaborating with Loren Kohnfelder on a number of projects, and in this area we believe that the consequences of this model have profoundly transformed web content and the way it is consumed, sacrificing civility, quality and independence for outrage, quantity and centralization. Let's consider a few different perspectives :

1. For people, engagement is mostly centered around social networking platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter (or now "X"), Reddit etc) with a typical pattern being to locate content off-site (often from news or entertainment sites), reference and then ‘discuss’ onsite. The push to video (through Tiktok, Instagram Reels, Google showing YouTube video results with high priority) are all a reflection of a consumption culture, with video not only showing a longer time of engagement, but also enabling valuable video ads. All the social networking platforms mentioned above are all ad-based, and so are motivated to generate engagement, measured by key metrics such as on-site time and content interaction (likes, shares, retweets, subscribes etc).
2. In order for publishers to generate revenue (some subscriptions, but mostly ad based), they are driven to controversy (which drives engagement) and SEO optimization (so that they can appear above other similar content in searches and get picked by the social Algorithm). This even devolves into content copying - a publisher with better SEO optimization can steal content from elsewhere and pass it off as its own, generating more ad revenue. This is particularly rife on Youtube, where the perpetrators will even file DMCA take-downs against the original content producer.
3. To not risk losing eyeballs, social media platforms generally have a ‘feed’ model of some sort - a news feed or other infinite scroll list of unrelated content. This context-switch heavy model allows for new, small bursts of dopamine to be released by people as they ‘consume’ the content, the net effect being to have a thoughtless consumption of time, and discouragement of deep thinking., but it's also tiring and discourages deep thinking. Studies show that such doomscrolling is detrimental to mental health and focus, though having no content consistency or theme is actually a feature, and following/connecting with people (who contain multitudes) further supports this context switching world.
4. Since controversy generates more revenue than civility, all advertising platforms have to solve for the user-generated-content problem, surfing the line between what is legal & acceptable in any given jurisdiction and what creates outrage. Good outrage corresponds to impressions, bad outrage leads to advertisers distancing themselves. Whilst there is some reputational risk, and some sites seek to advocate for their communities, the advertising that underwrites the platforms means that content moderation is ultimately for the advertisers's sensibilities.

In summary then, we live an a world of centralized discussion, with constantly shifting focus, all with opportunity for enraged engagement to drive controversy, as it is a proven model for all parties to maximize ad revenue (along with conflict and divisiveness). Ultimately this is a focus on quantity of engagement and impressions, not on the quality of discussion and betterment of people. One further characteristic of this centralized model is that the publishers, who spend time and money to produce the content referred to in the first place, are removed from the discussion beyond the reference to the original article, because news site comments can't compete with social. Sadly, studies show that nearly 60% of people will interact with content without even clicking through.

To solve these inequities and unhealthy dynamics, we asked ourselves the question "What happens if a post isn't just a post? What happens if a post could be both a post, and an in-situ comment to the original article? This is a system we call "Quanta" and here's what it is and how it works.

Rather than continue the pattern of having social networks steal the conversation from publishers, we allow publishers to pull from a social network to host the relevant conversation in-situ, as a side-bar to the main article. Publishers have tried to create comment sections, mostly unsuccessfully, since the audience is poorly qualified/filtered and required per site registration. In Quanta, the audience is brought from the social network, and comments from the relevant audience (filtered by my network as well as using criteria that the publisher can introduce) are shown along side the article - even along side relevant parts of the article.

To explain how Quanta works, let's consider the following example:

Imagine a new article on The New York Times. Today, after a short period of time, the URL will be posted on social media with comments from readers. The conversation (retweets, replies etc) will all occur on the respective social media platforms.

In Quanta, a user would ‘post’ to Mastodon, or any ActvityPub based Fediverse app, quoting the URL, and Quanta would then index and organize such referring posts. In one implementation, the publisher would include comment blocks, and specify constraints/thresholds for the comments to be shown (reflecting popularity and editorial guidelines). The comment blocks would be rendered HTML (similar to how an ad slot is populated), and would be ‘passive’ in the sense of links (to favorite, repost etc) wouldn’t activate in-situ, but would (due to Same Origin Policy) send the user to the right point on the social instance. In another, more interesting, implementation, the browser could form a more opinionated view of content rendering and, with an appropriate social handle logged into the browser, render the comments in a pane next to the article.

In short, viewing the original page produces the current set of useful comments relating to the URL. All comments displayed are contextually relevant, and additionally provide a useful tool for user discovery.

A few interesting consequences of Quanta :

1. The publisher is now getting many more page views, because that's where the conversation about the page can be readily viewed. This increase in page views will increase the ad revenue the publishers can generate. Note - we don't consider a broader question about advertising being good or bad. We just want to shift revenue, discourse and attention to those that generate the content, away from the social networks that steal that attention.
2. The 'conversation' is now all in context. It's not about a newsfeed and context switching, but instead the conversation is focused on the topic the publisher has written about.
3. The duration of the conversation is longer. Doomscrolling a social media feed means that many users are just surfing that last few hours of content that's new to them. On Quanta, the published document and comments (and replies to comments) are all at the same URL, waiting for the next view. Referring to the same document days, months or years later will still have the conversation in place. We believe this will drive greater accountability of the poster and also create further re-engagement for the publisher(*).
4. Finally, we believe Quanta will provide a great follower discovery feature. All too often on social networks an interesting comment will be amplified, and in the moment the user has to make the decision "should I follow this person?" with little information (or a detour to research). In Quanta, the context is immediate, and publishers can choose to promote comments from known experts, making their work more broadly available. 

Quanta can be implemented as a Quanta server plus a browser extension. As a server, Quanta is an extension of Mastodon, as we believe the index of posts by URL should be distributed so that Quanta itself doesn't because another large centralized system that needs advertising or subscription to succeed. We also note that this seems directionally to be aligned with how Mastodon sees news integration as being important to the platform, as shown by the recently launched Mastodon byline feature.

Quanta has been shared as a concept with key browser vendors, and we firmly believe browser integration will provide the best experience.