OG twitter was it. Minimal characters so people could drone on. Subscribe to people so you get a well tailored feed. SMS based so you don’t even need data. Every evolution has made it worse.

Like if the original okCupid team had diversified into general online social interactions instead of selling to the dating monopoly. The platform tries to learn about you, not so that it can match you with advertizers, but so that it can try to give you meaningful social interactions with human beings.

For me, it would mainly be a blend between Tumblr and booru-style image boards, allowing users to follow people and tags, with filtering by tags and collaborative tagging. A trust-based moderation system akin to Discourse. I’d also want the ability to block tags and a Reddit-style tree-like comment system for better discussions. A nuanced voting system similar to Slashdot's could help finding quality discussions by differentiating between types of content and allowing sorting by these different types.

One change I would make is to hide up- and downvotes for all users but keep the voting feature for post sorting. Ideally there would also be a powerful, probably AI powered content filter that you could tell what you don't want to see instead of just bluntly blocking it based on community/user/keyword.