Here's perhaps a new way to think about social media. Let's focus on
one particular aspect of "not noise": news.
Twitter is a powerful tool for collecting/spreading real time news.
It also has many disadvantages, as we all know.
We have wikinews and other real-time information sources in our
project (including real-time edits to pages during big events, such as
the Olympics or Dancing With The Stars).
Why can't we work on integrating these better, so that when you are an
eyewitness with first-hand knowledge contributing to WikiNews is at
least as powerful/useful as tweeting? Perhaps integrating twitter and
flow (or something even more radical) to make this work really well.
If people either get in the habit of using wikinews instead of twitter
and/or wikinews becomes a powerful place to collect and filter tweets
on a topic (think of
https://storify.com/ for inspiration), we can
further our educational goals, provide a "trusted" source for news
that can be edited/vetted/archived and eliminate the echo chamber of
misinformation which plagues twitter and facebook. We also help
produce new editors who are generating content for our sites in the
process of documenting and vetting first-hand sources during important
events.
In my view, this is a more radical radical to think about social
media. Not blindly trying to increase a "number of shares" metric,
but trying to make our project an integral part of how the fact-based
social experience works.
Ideally, this integration with real-time content would be
bidirectional: real-time sources can be seamlessly incorporated into
wikipedia articles where appropriate, and in the other direction
quoting and sharing relevant wikipedia articles (or wikisource or
wikiversity content, etc) in conversations in your extended social
network would be facilitated for answering questions/filling in
context/settling bar bets. This starts to look more like a
wikipedia-enabled twitter client (or a twitter-enabled wikipedia) than
a set of share icons.
--scott