RE: Tauchain may allow for the development of the first "Smart Constitution"
Filtering out everything you don't like can make for a peaceful experience, but in as much as online life is now strongly influencing the real work - to the point that it definitely affects elections now - it leads down that path towards one of those Black Mirror dystopia.
Dystopia is caused by other problems which I address. It's not enough to give every human a vote if people aren't allowed to be wise. Social media doesn't encourage wisdom building, or good decision making, or knowledge diffusion. Social media encourages people to make critical decisions such as who to vote for based on stuff like party loyalty, or conspiracy theories, or gut feelings, so we don't have a situation where people even vote in their self interest.
People have a propensity to be afraid or wary of things they haven't seen before.
Risk literacy tends to be low in people. People cannot assess risk very well but then are asked to make important decisions involving risk. Making decisions under uncertainty is about analysis of statistics. We aren't all going to be experts at that but maybe on a platform we will want to follow the people who are.
However if you just shut out the rest of the world you're never going to change. You're never going to think gay marriage is okay, or back in the day that women or non-whites should get the vote, you'd never hear or see their voices and opinions.
When faced with newer and better knowledge the correct thing to do is to update your worldview. This is a simple rule which could be implemented (if you think of it like a rule). This is called belief revision in the literature.
The point being that humans are too limited in ability to analyze information. Information is all around us and goes to waste. We also work with inaccurate models of reality which functions to keep us from acquiring or building wisdom. If wisdom building is as important as wealth building then we should want to build it but there isn't any reward for being wiser.
In other words ignorance is rewarded often and the forces of behaviorism are at play. The positive reinforcement, the intermittent reinforcement, all are involved at locking us into inaccurate models of reality and keeping us involuntarily ignorant. So of course when it's time to make critically important decisions we decide like we would a beauty pageant, or any other superficial contest.
Collaborative filtering is really the only way. The best we can do is make each individual a better thinker and decision maker if they choose to strive toward it.
I don't see how collaborative filtering fixes any of the issues you and I mention with social media. If I create an account on Netflix and select even one conspiracy theory or junk science documentary I'll be flooded with recommendations for like material my supposed peer group has collaboratively filtered for me. And the more I watch the more I will find. I would posit that life gravitates to local minima surrounded by inviting does lying the unselective in. These insular swamps stagnate and self enrich creating their own ecosystem and cultures. The human propensity for social activity makes it hard to escape - I've talked to many former members of religious cults (which is about all of them IMO) and they relate that first hand.
The current culture of treating knowledge and critical thinking is a depressing trend and stinks of rank centralised control. It doesn't give me much hope can shake up the playing field and and bust out some people from their festering puddles, pools, and swamps of circular and unreasonable thinking.