Feature Unlocking (voice and recommendation chains)
TLDR: If you made your account 2 minutes ago, you can't @ certain people
So I'm thinking of two features:
- voice
- recommendation chains
Here's the idea:
There's alot of desire on twitter for a feature that mutes accounts younger than some_age (where some_age is usually something like a month)
The main goal of this is that trolls will often create accounts over and over again so that they can harass people. This leads to me thinking of feature (1) "voice". Voice is the ability to be heard / seen in certain venues. People who have just created an account, start off with no voice. And there should be an optional - default to 'off' but reccomended to be turned 'on' - feature that allows users to block users that "have no voice".
I'm describing this feature as voice because it could possibly mean something more complex than simply not allowing said users to @ mention people.
But then there's another factor ! What if you are a user who is just starting out, and you enter a social network with no voice and a ton of people that dont want to talk to you ? Well, that would be frustrating, if nothing else. So then I had the idea for feature (2) reccomendation chains. This is where a user with an old-ish account could reccomend a user without voice to get them closer to getting their voice. Could be used by:
- friends
- admins
- moderators
- etc ...
So that it could be entirely possible for someone to join the service and be able to @ mention people within a minute or two, given enough reccomendations.
-ALSO-
I had the idea that reccomendations could be stored long term, so if someone is reccomending too many accounts that eventually get banned for trolling, then their reccomendations start to lose weight. Basically this could be user to discover sleeper trolls.
Thoughts ?