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Has there ever been a social network that limits visibility or reply access to your posts based on degrees of separation? 
@downey Thanks — I should've thought of that. Although it's telling that I didn't; I remember hearing about it and I think I looked at it but couldn't really get into it, and didn't know anyone else who did either.
Had a "shower thought" earlier about how there could be potential in using an approach based on degrees of separation but perhaps a bit more flexible than what's described there on the wikipedia page. It'd get complex quite quickly. But it could solve a *lot* of problems.
@downey Like... you could have something overlaying the Fediverse-semi-standard model: Your home timeline is follows (users and hashtags/topics/whatever you want to call them), and perhaps you can have lists as well. All the standard retweets etc. exist. Your local and/or federated timelines are replaced with a "social" timeline. You can configure how open or closed you want your account to be, based on degrees of separation, which controls both your social timeline and people's access to reply.
@tokyo_0 Reminds me also of Google+.
@downey Maybe you'd have separate settings for the social timeline and the reply access, or maybe just one (so there's a privacy cost associated with giving yourself a bigger microphone). And you could have a more public type of post (say automatically invoked when you add a hashtag) that makes that post visible and reply-able to more people.
If you see a problem post, you can see how it reached you (maybe the interface shows you the closest contacts by which it reached you), then you could...
@downey ...apply a custom restriction on those users, so while your standard "separation" setting is larger, you might choose to apply a smaller setting for those specific users. Fewer of their contacts can read you and reply to you and you see fewer posts from their network.
There's a privacy question, I think, about displaying that social connection information. This is all just very much a thought experiment. But it would address problem behaviour the same way human networks do—and at scale.