I'm starting to see a pattern here... Maybe I should launch a social site where uneducated people are not allowed to participate? Too bad that it probably lacks the 10000x growth potential VCs are looking for :/
What criteria would you use? I've met a lot of stupid people with education from well-regarded institutions and a lot of sharp people with no education past K-12, if that. Formal education seems like a poor measure.
I used to play on an adult only whitelisted minecraft server. It was setup in such a way that day-to-day gameplay was as close to pure vanilla survival as possible. Of course the adult part is really hard to enforce so the owner took a very interesting approach to it. Anyone could join the server but you would be put in spectator mode i.e. be unable to interact with anything but just tour the builds. Then you'd have to make an application that would be manually approved between 24-48h later. Just that delay was enough to weed out the impatient.
See the problem was not about the age specifically but rather childish behavior. So by realizing that we targeted the most obvious one( being impatient) and had great results.
So yea, making something deliberately harder to use might be just enough.
I know you are making a joke, but a barrier of entry is definitely part of the equation here. Right now, a good portion of the web development seems focused on removing friction as much as possible.
USENET, with a proper client, sat on a wonderful local maxima for usability and usefulness, and technical complexity to weed out the riff-raff. I miss those days.
Although hn doesn't have an exact assigned niche (it falls towards science and technology but that's not an enforced rule), it's fairly civil because the site doesn't need to make money and it's well moderated (almost to the point of authoritarianism, albeit that's not necessarily a bad thing in a website). A similar phenomona can be found in a place like r/neutralpolitics (heavily moderated to keep everyone on track, doesn't need to make money since subreddits are free).
This isn't feasible for a site the size of reddit though (they need money for servers and stuff), so federation is the only real alternative since each sub would pay (probably a provider, honestly, but they could selfhost) a little to keep their spot going. The trick is to make the federation invisible to the end user through some kind of reddit-ish frontpage site, which would be much like current reddit's frontpage but be accessing the federated subs, each with it's own moderators/janitors. This may be unfeasible, but it's the only way anything like reddit could keep free speech up. Add an easy to setup ad-network for each sub (they can opt-in to serve ads to the people accessing their sub's page, like Google ads on blogs) and it works. If a sub becomes evil just unsubscribe.
I vaguely recall an article years ago, can't remember where, about a newborn social media site, sort of a restricted Facebook, intended only for intelligent and gifted people, but can't find any references.
It's entirely possible others have tried or are trying, but like you I hardly believe they would find any VC money.
