Fetch me my red box
2nd January 2025
Back at $MAINJOB this morning. New addition to this 'engine' (not really) - an RSS feed.
Been thinking a bit about social media (particularly Twitter) recently and along these lines for a few years.
It feels like a sizeable majority of people who I followed on Twitter in its heyday have jumped ship now. Or perhaps I just don't see their content any more. But many have done the 'I'm off, follow me here' message and legged it to BlueSky.
I've mixed feelings about going to another network. Not out of loyalty to Twitter/X which is largely unrecognisable these days, but rather to avoid simply transposing my doomscrolling to a slightly different interface, no matter how much nicer the community.
After a break of about a month I popped the Twitter app back onto my phone over Xmas before removing it again on New Years Eve. It's just too much of a timesink.
But it's a fact that amongst the utter crap that all of these things serve up there are some nuggets I'd like to know about. A lot of AI folks I want to hear from post to X for some reason for example. I must have favourited a ton of different posts in that brief window of being on there again. But that was hours of wading through junk and accompanied by the dreadful feeling I get afterward of having wasted so much time on nonsense.
And there seems to be mounting evidence that all of this is really bad for you.
There has to be a better way. Something Richard Stallman posted years ago has stuck with me:
I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program ... that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it.
Stallman's issue here was largely around not wanting to be tracked and snooped upon (see https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html for a fuller explanation) but mine is that I don't want to waste time on irrelevant stuff social media sites are serving me up to get me to stay on their site, so they can make money off me. 'For you' type feeds don't do it for me. They're owned by someone else and are still an attempt to make me stay online. This isn't even taking into account something like the TikTok algorithms which seem to be the apex predators in this space, nor the active propaganda prevalent on these sites.
The whole idea feels outdated.
What I want is some kind of modern system - AI agent perhaps? - that works for and is owned by me, knows what I'm interested in and actively seeks out this information on my behalf. That does the equivalent of what Stallman's laborious process did for him in a way. But better. Almost like a personalised newspaper or a red box of documents handed to a UK cabinet minister by their civil servant staff.
I can hear arguments about Google News back in the day, or the swathes of timeline experiences you can get on these sites. Or the ""personalised"" emails that are just delivering adverts mainly. But none of these provide what I want - the slower, deliberate consumption of targeted information chosen by an entity with my interests at heart, not those of a third party.
But what about hearing about something new, something you weren't aware of before? I can still use social media if I like, and I'm sure the system could select things for me over time.
I haven't researched whether anyone is offering what I have in mind here already. I'm sure they are. Perhaps I should have a go myself.
I'll ruminate on this topic I think and revisit it here with a more articulate and reasoned argument.
Todays links / reading:
Anthropic, building effective agents
Jeff Dean, Exciting Directions in Systems for Machine Learning