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You know what the internet needs? User agents. We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content. Only Faceboo

You know what the internet needs? User agents. We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content. Only Facebook gets to decide which Facebook posts to show us. What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like. Instead of being tuned to line the pockets of Facebook, the AI is an agent of your own choosing. Maybe you want it to actually _reduce_ engagement after an hour of mindless browsing. And not just for Facebook, but every website. Twitter, Instagram, etc. Even websites like Reddit, which are "user moderated", are still ultimately run by Reddit's algorithm and could instead be curated by _your_ agent. I don't know. Maybe that will just make the echo chambers worse. But can it possibly make them worse than they already are? Are we really saying that an agent built by us, for us, will be worse than an agent built by Facebook for Facebook? And isn't that how the internet used to be? Back when the scale of the internet wasn't so vast, people just ... skimmed everything themselves and decided what to engage with. So what I'm really driving at is some way to scale that up to what the internet has since become. Some way to build a tiny AI version of yourself that goes out and crawls the internet in ways that you personally can't, and return to you the things you would have wanted to engage with had it been possible for you to read all 1 trillion internet comments per minute.

GuiA 6y ago
What you’re referring to is splitting the presentation from the content. The server (eg Facebook) provides you with the content, and your computer/software displays it to your liking (ie without ads and spam and algorithmically recommended crap). There’s a lot of history around that split, and the motivation for HTML/CSS was about separating presentation from the content in many ways. For another example, once upon a time a lot of chat services ran over XMPP, and you could chat with a Facebook friend from your Google Hangouts account. Of course, both Google and Facebook stopped supporting it pretty quickly to focus on the “experience” of their own chat software. The thing is that there is very little money to be made selling content, and a lot to be made controlling the presentation. So everyone focuses on the latter, and that’s why we live in a software world of walled gardens that work very hard to not let you see your own data. There is some EU legislation proposal that may make things a bit better (social network interop), but given the outsized capital and power of internet companies i’m not holding my breath.
- Lammy 6y ago
  > you could chat with a Facebook friend from your Google Hangouts account This was never true. There was an XMPP-speaking endpoint into Facebook's proprietary chat system, but it wasn't a S2S XMPP implementation and never federated with anything. It was useful for using FBChat in Adium or Pidgin, but not for talking to GChat XMPP users.
  - hesk 6y ago
    I don't know about Facebook but Google Talk was federated at some point [1]. [1] https://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html https://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html
    - Lammy 6y ago
      Yep, Google's was. They never enabled server-to-server TLS, though, so GTalk was effectively cut off from the federated XMPP network after May 2014 when that became mandatory: https://blog.prosody.im/mandatory-encryption-on-xmpp-starts-today/ https://blog.prosody.im/mandatory-encryption-on-xmpp-starts-...
- divbzero 6y ago
  RSS is yet another example of separating content from presentation.
  - drdeadringer 6y ago
    I don't see this as a bad thing. I experience this as a good thing. The RSS feeds I subscribe to give me plenty of "presentation" or "branding". Logos, written descriptions [both short- and long-form], clear names of what I am subscribing to, URLs. Just the right amount for me, in fact; if I wanted to go to their website(s) for their particular buffet of blog posts, featured puff pieces on Page Five, twitter mentions, &c I can do that ... or not. I'm glad I don't have to if I don't want to, and all of these folks are more than able to drop into their RSS feed a "Please go here for our tour information with new stuff in our online shop" mention just as you are able to go straight to some website full of deep-thumping media flashing into your senses as you get to where you want to go instead of using RSS.
grishka 6y ago
ActivityPub and other federated networks are the answer. They do exactly that: if you aren't satisfied with the rules on existing servers, you host your own. The network itself is wide open, and its control is distributed across many server admins. The way the content is presented is of course completely up to the software the user is running. Having no financial incentive to make UX a dumpster fire visible from space also helps a lot.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  They're not the answer as long as they don't have loads of people. The attraction of FB and the like is that almost everyone has a FB account, just like almost every public figure has a twitter account. The downside of things like Mastodon is how do you know what server you want to connect to? For a non-technical user it doesn't offer any more obvious utility than a FB group.
  - grishka 6y ago
    There is indeed the problem of discovery that Mastodon doesn't feel like addressing. Like, you pick a server, make an account and now what? There's no way to bring your existing social graph with you. Even if your friends are there, you won't ever find them without asking each and every one about their username@domain. But I have some ideas on fixing that for my fediverse project — like making a DHT out of instance servers, thus making global search possible while keeping the whole thing decentralized.
    - mikestaub 6y ago
      I agree this is the main problem with ActivityPub, can you elaborate on your DHT idea? I'm thinking of doing something similar. How can the search be fast if the data is on many nodes, will you store the cache on a single instance and update it on some interval?
      - grishka 6y ago
        To be honest, I haven't really explored this yet, it's just that DHT feels like the most sensible approach. It's a rather ambitious project and I'm currently making the core functionality work (and interoperate with Mastodon where applicable). I'll probably do a Show HN post at some point.
zachware 6y ago
The risk is that it behaves like a reinforcement learning algorithm which essentially rewards itself by making you more predictable, I'd argue that's what curated social networks do today. If you're unpredictable you're a problem. Thus, it makes sense to slowly push you to a pole so you conform to a group's preferences and are easier to predict. A hole in my own argument is that today's networks are incentivized to do increase engagement where a neutral agent is in most ways not. So perhaps the problem isn't just the need for agents but for a proper business model where the reward isn't eyeball time as it is today.
- scotty79 6y ago
  > If you're unpredictable you're a problem. But you are predictable, even if you think you are unpredictable, you are just a bit more adventurous. Algorithm can capture that as well. It will be easier for algorithm that works on your behalf.
  - airstrike 6y ago
    Reminded me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19336754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19336754
  - solarkraft 6y ago
    This makes me think of a talk with an AI-optimistic Microsoft sales guy I had a few years ago. His argument was essentially the same:"Look, it's no problem to have an AI curate everything for you because the algorithm will just know what you want, even if your habits are unusual!" Of course this hasn't happened yet and I doubt it ever will. Maybe I'm just insane, but most of the recommendations from services I have fed data for hundreds of hours (YouTube) are actually repulsive.
    - TheHegemon 6y ago
      Interesting because I think I have some rather random assortment of hobbies that generally tend to have no overlap and I get pretty good recommendations all the time.
gjs278 6y ago
uhh or just show me all the posts in chronological order
jackandrew 6y ago
We're a small team working in stealth on this exact challenge. Shoot me a note if you're interested in hearing more or getting involved. itshelikos@gmail.com
- mpfundstein 6y ago
  good luck
- cookiecaper 6y ago
  This type of thing is nothing new, but it's important to recognize that it doesn't take off because it's illegal. As soon as Facebook realizes you're a risk, you'll get a C&D ordering you to stop accessing their servers. These typically have the force of law under the CFAA. You won't access their servers, but just read the page that the user already downloaded? You'll still get nailed under the Copyright Act. "User agents" in the sense used by the OP are as old as the internet itself. There's an active, serious, and quiet effort to abuse outdated legislation to ensure that they never become a problem.
Swizec 6y ago
I tried building this 10 years ago as a startup. Maybe time to revisit, the zeitgeist is turning more and more towards this and computing power has gotten cheap enough ...
ralston3 6y ago
> I don't know. Maybe that will just make the echo chambers worse. This. Also. What incentive does a walled garden even have to allow something like this? Put a different way, what incentive does a walled garden have to not just block this "user agent"? Because the UA would effectively be replacing the walled garden's own "algo curated new feed" - except if the user builds their own AI bot -- the walled garden can't make money the way they currently do. I think the idea is very interesting. I personally believe digital UA's will have a place in the future. But in this scenario I couldn't see it working.
- fpgaminer 6y ago
  True, but we have ad blockers and they're effective. They're effective against the largest, richest companies in the world. There are various reasons for that, but at the end of the day it remains true that I can use YouTube without ads if I choose to. There's clearly a place in the world for pro-user curation, even if that's not in FAANG's best interests. I think it's antithetical to the Hacker ethos to not pursue an idea just because it's bad for mega-corps.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Mega-corps don't stop themselves from pursuing an idea just because it's bad for the hoi polloi, so why should we?
abhchand 6y ago
I like this idea. In response to it just creating more echo chambers: - it can't be worse than now - At minimum, it's an echo chamber of your own creation instead of being manipulated by FB. There's value in that, ethically. - Giving people choice at scale means it will at least improve the situation for some people.
- ketzu 6y ago
  Isn't facebook (and reddit, and twitter) showing you posts by people companies etc. that you decided to follow? (And some ads)? I am pretty sure things can be worse than right now, pretending like we are in some kind of hell state at the bottom of some well where it can't possibly be worse, seems unrealistic to me.
  - notriddle 6y ago
    I've seen Twitter pull tweets from an account merely because someone I follow follows them. Facebook is the same. I think Reddit sticks strictly to your subscriptions, unless you go to /r/all.
devonkim 6y ago
I think transparency matters more. I liked Andrew Yang’s suggestion to require the recommendation algorithms of the largest social networks to be open sourced given how they can shape public discourse and advertising in all mass media is regulated to prevent outright lies from being spread by major institutions (although an individual certainly may do so).
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  Not the recommendation engines. The graph. All the social media companies (and indeed Google and others) profit by putting up a wall and then allowing people to look at individual leaves of a tree behind the wall, 50% of which is grown with the help of people's own requests. You go to the window, submit your query, and receive a small number of leaves. These companies do provide some value by building the infrastructure and so on. But the graph itself is kept proprietary, most likely because it is not copyrightable.
  - annadane 6y ago
    Yeah, pretty much. It's easy for Facebook to claim that it's popular and the best thing going when you specifically need a FB account for contacting people
  - devonkim 6y ago
    The graph in itself is pretty close to privacy issues that border closely as well. Even if FB et al were government funded that wouldn’t make it good either. And said data could be considered competitive advantages but perhaps not. If everyone got a copy of various social networks’ friends lists, the number of viable alternatives would skyrocket quickly because the lock-in effect would be gone. Perhaps this needs to be theorized more along modernized anti-trust laws (which don’t work in a tech given anti-trust laws were based around trying to lower consumer prices).
- SkyBelow 6y ago
  Does that actually work? If they create some complex AI and then show us the trained model, it doesn't really give much insight into the AI doing the recommendation. You could potentially test certain articles to see if it is recommended, but reverse engineering how the AI recommends it would be far more time consuming than updating the AI. As such Facebook would just need to regularly update the AI faster than researchers can determine how it works to hide how their code works. Older versions of the AI would eventually be cracked open (as much as a large matrix of numbers representing a neural network could be), but between it being a trained model with a bunch of numbers and Facebook having a never version I think they'll be able to hide behind "oops there was a problem, but don't worry our training has made the model much better now".
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
Not a new idea. One example was early marketing of Apache Nutch.
meshaneian 6y ago
I like this, and so does my friend Confirmation Bias, who is pretty clear that the AI would select completely unbiased content relevant to me, not limited by any of the Bias family. It would be 100% better than the bias filters in place now, because my thoughts and selections are always unbiased, IMHO. (FYI: Obviously I'm not being serious. You clearly knew that, this notice is for the other person who didn't.)
munificent 6y ago
The fundamental flaw is this: The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads. Since ads are the primary way sites stay in business, they are obligated to fight against user agents or other intermediary systems. The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show you good, enriching content from your friends and family. They want to show you ads. The good content is just a necessary evil to make you tolerate looking at ads. Every time you upload some adorable photo of your baby for your friends to ooh and aah over, you're giving Facebook free bait that they then use to trap your friends into looking at ads.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  > The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads. Not that you're wrong, but: that's the fucking point! Advertising delenda est.
  - arihant 6y ago
    Pay for Facebook then. 1.5% of total YouTube users subscribe for YT Premium. I love how the smartest minds will ignore the most primitive economics. Ads work. For everyone. Except deluded.
    - creato 6y ago
      Where did you get that number? That's actually far, far higher than I would have thought and quite encouraging...
      - jjjensen90 6y ago
        On Feb 4th, Google said there were 20 million Youtube Premium users, and I believe the latest estimates put Youtube at 2 billion users, which would be a 1% subscription rate.
        mikenew 6y ago
bufferoverflow 6y ago
> AI that read every Facebook post I doubt FB would let you do that. It's "their" content.
- isbjorn16 6y ago
  Sure, you can't read every facebook post, but if your browser extension is scanning your feed and suppressing posts for you, how can they even stop you?
  - cookiecaper 6y ago
    It's a violation of copyright under current interpretations of the Copyright Act. Companies like FB are well aware of this and send C&Ds to this effect every day.
    - isbjorn16 6y ago
      That is shocking. How could something like uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger ever exist? They're doing the exact same thing; modifying the status of the page payload. Even BrowserName developer tools would run afoul of this. I can't fathom how these are materially different.
      - cookiecaper 6y ago
        These projects continue to exist because no company has felt it's in their interest to bring suit, I guess. This is the type of thing that companies like to keep quiet, and if something like uBlock Origin isn't a pervasive threat, they won't risk publicizing and potentially losing the loophole. In particular it would be dumb to sue the EFF for Privacy Badger, since part of the reason the EFF exists is to fight such things in court. Look up the "RAM Copy Doctrine". Basically, it means that every time data is copied within the computer's memory, it's a potential infringement. The HTML source of the page you've downloaded undoubtedly qualifies for copyright protection. Your argument would be an implied license to modify the page to make it suitable for display, but standard ToS will typically forbid any type of modification, removing any ambiguity into whether third-party extensions that modify the page may have an implied license. Your license would typically be limited to displaying the page as transmitted, and allowing an extension to read and modify the page would be an infringement. I'm not a lawyer but I had a neat little SaaS business that was killed by a C&D along these same lines. Multiple attorneys reviewed and this is basically the summary. When I suggested that we do a peer-to-peer data transmission thing to avoid handling or transmitting any copyrighted content, I was warned that doing so could easily be interpreted as conspiracy and that it'd be best not to go down that route. Maybe someone else's attorney would say something different, but that's what mine told me.
Merad 6y ago
I think the overwhelming majority of users don’t want to deal with this kind of detail. IMO most people would end up using some kind of preset that matched their preferred bubble.
gscott 6y ago
Facebook figured out how to bring a Usenet flame war to the masses and profit from it, job well done!
liopleurodon 6y ago
bring back rss feeds then I choose what I read in my reader
janekm 6y ago
Sounds pretty similar to the concept of “software agents” which was popular in the mid ‘90s: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/michael.wooldridge/pubs/iee-review96.pdf http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/michael.wooldridge/pubs/iee-re... Part of the concept was that the agents would actually roam onto servers on the internet on your behalf raising complicated questions around how to sandbox the agent code (came in useful for VPSs and AWS-style lambdas in the end).
tomc1985 6y ago
This misses the point. Facebook refuses to look inwardly or mess with their core moneymaker, regardless of how it affects people. Noone is ever going to sip from the firehose just like we'll never again get a simple view of friend's posts sorted by creation date. I think the real problem is Facebook's need to be such a large company. They brought this on themselves trying to take over the world. Maybe they need a Bell-style breakup
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
joejerryronnie 6y ago
Why would a personal AI which curates your content be any “better” than FB’s AI which curates your content? Isn’t the current AI based on what you end up engaging with anyway? If you naturally engage in a variety of content across all ideological spectrums, than that’s what the FB AI is going to predict for you. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us engage with content which reinforces our existing worldview - which is exactly what would happen with a personal AI.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Because an algorithm under your control can be tweaked by you. Could be as simple as reordering topics on a list of preferences. Facebook's algorithm can't be controlled like that. Also, an algorithm you own won't change itself unbeknownst to you.
  - joejerryronnie 6y ago
    Sure, but I bet 99.9% of the people will not tweak their personal algorithm and will end up with the same result as FB.
ereyes01 6y ago
Another early assumption about the internet and computers in general is that users were going to exert large amounts of control over the software and systems they use. This assumption has thus far been apparently invalidated, as people by far prefer to be mere consumers of software that are designed to make its designers money. Even OSS is largely driven by companies who need to run monetized infrastructure, though perhaps you don't pay for it directly. Given that users are generally not interested in exerting a high level of sophisticated control over software they use, how then is the concept of a user agent AI/filter any different at a fundamental level? It probably won't be created and maintained as a public benefit in any meaningful way, and users will not be programming and tuning the AI as needed to deliver the needed accuracy. I don't think AI has yet reached a level of sophistication where content as broad a range as what's found on the internet (or even just Facebook) can be curated to engage the human intellect beyond measuring addictive engagement, without significant user intervention. Hopefully I'm wrong, as I do wish I could engage with something like Facebook without having to deal with ads or with content curated to get my blood boiling. Sometimes I do wonder how much it is Facebook vs. human tendency under the guise of an online persona, as both are clearly involved here.
- ssss11 6y ago
  Are there research papers you could link that prove users don’t want to exert more control? I’d be interested in reading more. It always appears to me that the companies are making it difficult and users have no voice.
yots 6y ago
It’s really not as sophisticated, but these guys[1] created an extension that in addition to their main objective of analyzing Facebook’s algorithm also offers a way to create your own Facebook feed. If I got it right, they analyze posts their users see, categorize them by topic and then let you create your own RSS feed with only the topics you want to see. It’s not clear to me whether you may see posts collected by other users or only ones from your own feed and it seems highly experimental. [1] https://facebook.tracking.exposed/ https://facebook.tracking.exposed/
ssss11 6y ago
I agree - wasnt the browser intended to be the user agent? And counterpoint to some of the replies to you, surely people can just pay instead of sites being ad-based, what other industries operate in this absurd way? The public must think there’s no cost to creating software if everythings always free.
2019-nCoV 6y ago
This already exists — most social media is already curated. You only see tweets and posts from those you follow or friend. You can already block or ignore any undesirables. This works fine for self-curation. There is no need for holier-than-thou censorship short of legal breaches. Good to see FB take this change of direction.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  Except when it doesn't.
  - 2019-nCoV 6y ago
    Such as?
    - solarkraft 6y ago
      Twitter shows me garbage I don't like, as does YouTube. They do this with very little regard for who you follow nowadays and give you no say in what types of stuff you actually want to be recommended. Sometimes they're nice enough to say why they recommend something (which should be standard), but most of the time it's just infuriatingly stupid. I'm not against machine curation at all, mind you. I want the infrequent poster to have a higher weighed voice and such. But I want to be able to control the parameters.
      - 2019-nCoV 6y ago
        For Twitter use curated lists. This allows you to avoid "the algorithm". You are bemoaning YouTube's discovery process, you need not watch what's "Up Next" — that's your choice.
austincheney 6y ago
> What if, instead, you had a personal AI I was in agreement with you until I read that. People don’t need to have content dictated to them like mindless drones whether it is from social media, bloggers, AI, or whatever. Many people prefer that, though, out of laziness. It’s like the laugh track on sitcoms because people were too stupid or tuned out to catch the poorly written jokes even with pausing and other unnecessarily directed focus. It’s all because you are still thinking in terms of content and broadcast. Anybody can create content. Off loading that to AI is just more of the same but worse. Instead imagine an online social application experience that is fully decentralized without a server in the middle, like a telephone conversation. Everybody is a content provider amongst their personal contacts. Provided complete decentralization and end-to-end encryption imagine how much more immersive your online experience can be without the most obvious concerns of security and privacy with the web as it is now. You could share access to the hardware, file system, copy/paste text/files, stream media, and of course original content. > And isn't that how the internet used to be? The web is not the internet. When you are so laser focused on web content I can see why they are indistinguishable.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  I think your suggestion is a bit out of scope for what's actually being discussed/not really a solution. I'm active on the somewhat (not fully) decentralized social medium Fediverse (more widely known as Mastodon, but it's more than that) and I think a lack of curation is a problem: Posts by people who post a lot while I'm active are very likely to be seen, those by infrequent posters active while I'm not very likely to go unnoticed. How would your proposed system (that seems a bit utopic and vague from that comment, to be honest) deal with that?
- downerending 6y ago
  > People don’t need to have content dictated to them like mindless drones whether it is from social media, bloggers, AI, or whatever. If the AI is entirely under the user's control, why not? It's like having a buddie that's doing for me what I'd do for myself, if I had the time and energy (and eyebleach).
adrianmonk 6y ago
I like the line of thinking, but who actually provides the agent, and what are their incentives? This is far from a perfect analogy, but compare it to the problem of email spam. People first tried to fight it with client-side Bayes keyword filters. It turns out it wasn't nearly as simple as that, and to solve a problem that complicated, you basically need people working on it full time to keep pace. Ranking and filtering a Facebook feed would have different challenges, of course. It's not all about adversaries (though there are some); it's also about modeling what you find interesting or important. But that's pretty complicated too. Your one friend shared a woodworking project and your other friend shared travel photos. Which one(s) of those are you interested in? And when someone posts political stuff, is that something you find interesting, or is it something you prefer to keep separate from Facebook? There are a lot of different types of things people post, so the scope of figuring out what's important is pretty big.
globular-toast 6y ago
> What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. So you can read more of what you already agree with? That's called living in a bubble. The mind cannot grow in a bubble.
BaitBlock 6y ago
At Baitblock (https://baitblock.app https://baitblock.app), we're working on something similar. It's called the Intelligent Blocker, and has the same intended goal as your user agent 'AI' (not yet open to general public, under development right now). With it you will be able to block all Facebook posts that are for example say not from your family, or not of a specific type or from specific person. Or comments on different Internet forums that are blatantly spammy/SEO gaming etc. Or block authors in search results or Twitter feed or any comment that you don't like. Basically the Zapier of content filtering. This will be available to the user as a subscription service. Some of these thigs are not possible on mobile platforms (Android, iOS) unfortunately because the OS do not allow such access, but we hope that Android and iOS in the future open up to allow external curation systems, apart from the app platform it's self as it's in the interest of the user.
dvduval 6y ago
In the right medium, perhaps the user agent would also decide when my posts are shown to people versus an ad being shown in place of my post such that I make money. Then a site like Facebook would only make a small portion of my ad revenue in exchange for hosting it.
redelbee 6y ago
Neal Stephenson explores something like your “user agent” idea and comes up with an different solution in his novel “ Fall; or, Dodge in Hell.” Spoilers ahead: In Stephenson‘s world people can hire “editors” to curate what they see, and those editors effectively determine reality for people at a mass scale. This is just one of the many fascinating ideas Stephenson explores and I highly recommend reading the book. This interview covers some of the details if you’re not willing to dive into an 800+ page novel: https://www.pcmag.com/news/neal-stephenson-explains-his-vision-of-the-digital-afterlife https://www.pcmag.com/news/neal-stephenson-explains-his-visi...
- orcasauce 6y ago
  Highly recommend reading Reamde first if you can. The story is entirely different, but is the same world and comes chronologically first; I felt the continuity added a lot when reading Fall.
gitgud 6y ago
Well that kind of already exists in a project called "huginn". https://github.com/huginn/huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn
IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
This already exists. Its called Facebook purity. It obeys what you say. No cats? No problem. No babies? No problem. And yes, it also does filter out ads. FBP
kstrauser 6y ago
I haven't touched this in years, but one time I made a little project[1] to analyze the people I was following on Twitter and recommend who I might want to unfollow based on their attitudes. People who posted negative stuff very frequently were at the top of my list to ditch; I don't need extra input pushing me toward misery. The first few runs were very illuminated, but not surprising, like "wow, now that you mention it, Joe does saw awful stuff approximately hourly". I would love to have an agent that could apply those sorts of analyses to my data sources. In my case, I wouldn't want to filter out bad news, but unnecessarily nasty spins on it. I'd find that super valuable. [1] https://github.com/kstrauser/judgish https://github.com/kstrauser/judgish
subsubzero 6y ago
Zuck doesn't care about anything healthy as long as that healthy content reduces ad revenue/and or user activity(MAU/DAU) metrics. Basically he wants to extract enough time/money from each user to just be bearable for that user that they do not leave the site in disgust. Once you realize this cardinal truth from FB all the reprehensible actions from Zuck/senior leaders make perfect sense.
hallambaker 6y ago
There are models for this that could probably work. Tim Berners-Lee has been working on a scheme called Solid for years now. It is important to realize that Facebook is not the first, second or even tenth of its ilk. FaceBook combines a bunch of ideas from previous systems, in particular MySpace and USENET. It is more or less the third generation of Web Social Media. There is no reason to believe there can't be a fourth. My interest in these schemes is to provide a discussion space that is end-to-end encrypted so that the cloud service collecting the comments does not have access to the plaintext. This allows for 'Enterprise' type discussion of things such as RFPs and patent applications. I am not looking to provide a consumer service (at this stage). The system you describe could be implemented in a reasonably straightforward fashion. Everyone posts to the timeline service of their choice and choose between a collection of user agents discovering interesting content for them to read. These aggregation services could be a paid service or advertising supported. Timeline publishing services might need a different funding model of course but bit shoveling isn't very expensive these days. Perhaps it could be bundled with video conferencing capabilities, password management or any of the systems people already pay for. As for when the Internet/Web was not so vast. One of my claims to fame is the last person to finish surfing the Web which I did in October 1992 shortly after meeting Tim Berners-Lee. It took me an entire four days of night shifts to surf every page of every site in the CERN index.
- kleer001 6y ago
  In the context of this discussion Solid sounds amazing. I'd be super excited to tune the social web to my own preferences. Sadly however, I couldn't make heads or tails of this garbage jargon laden website. WTF? https://inrupt.com https://inrupt.com "Time to reset the balance of power on the web and reignite its true potential. When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, it was intended for everyone. The excitement and creativity of its early days were driven from the notion that we can all participate — and the impact was world-changing. But the web has shifted from its original promise — and it’s time to make a change. We can still unlock the true promise of the web by decentralizing the power that’s currently centralized in the hands of a few. How? By using the power of Solid. Solid is the technically potent, open-source platform built to decentralize the web. Inrupt is the company that’s helping to fuel Solid’s success." What? How will that help me or my grandma?
strogonoff 6y ago
I am thinking about the concept of “the last mile to user’s attention”. Currently, software clients of Mastodon or Twitter hold that mile. Mastodon gives all content unfiltered, which could be too much at times, while Twitter does some oft-annoying opaque black magic in its timeline algorithms. A better solution would be to have a protocol for capability that filters content with logic under your control. A universal middleware standard that is GUI-agnostic, can fit different content types. By adopting this, open/federated social could start catching up on content filtering features to for-profit social (in a no-dark-patterns way, benefitting user experience), hopefully stealing users. Ideally it could be used by the likes of Twitter and Facebook—of course, given the size of for-profit social, such an integration would take some unimaginably big player to motivate them to adopt (the state of their APIs is telling), but if it’s there there’s a chance.
kelchm 6y ago
Yeah, since what the world needs is more echo chambers.
industriousthou 6y ago
I mean Facebook doesn't really decide what content I see, I do. I aggressively police my timeline and unfollow people who post garbage content. I don't really need an AI to do that for me...
- baq 6y ago
  do you cross-validate what the algorithm serves to you with full timelines of people you follow? how do you do that?
jameslk 6y ago
"TiVo, but for the browser."
metrokoi 6y ago
Excellent idea, soon this will be a requirement for using the web in any productive way, considering the ratio of good information to junk info is getting worse rapidly. We already do this in a way; only visiting certain sites that we like and following certain users. A personal AI would make this process much more efficient. I do see a content filtering AI as very difficult to achieve, and I don't think it will be possible for quite some time. There are so many small problems, even getting AI to recognize targeted content is difficult, given that websites can have infinitely different layouts. And what about video or audio? The most practical way to achieve a content AI would be to persuade websites to voluntarily add standardized tags so that the only problem becomes predicting and filtering. Although I could see some issues with that like people trying to game the system.
mch82 6y ago
Nice idea. Anyone working on this?
tambourine_man 6y ago
Nah, they’ve already filtered by your IP, geolocation, browser fingerprint, etc. We need access to all the data so we can decide which algorithms to apply. There’s really no escaping that
breuleux 6y ago
> What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like. There is a feedback problem, though, which is that your preferences are modified by what you see. So the AI problem devolves to showing you the kind of content that makes you want to see more of it, i.e. maximize engagement. I think a lot of people are addicted to controversy, "rage porn," anger-inducing content, and these agents are not going to help with this issue. If we could train AI agents to analyze the preferences of people, I think the best use for them wouldn't be to curate your own content, but to use them to see the world from other people's perspective. If you know in what "opinion cluster" someone lies and can predict their emotional reaction to some content, you may be able to identify the articles from cluster A that people from cluster B react the least negatively to, and vice versa. And this could be leveraged to break echo chambers, I think: imagine that article X is rated +10 by cluster A and -10 by cluster B, and article Y is rated +10 by cluster A but only -2 by cluster B. It might be a good idea to promote Y over X, because unlike X, Y represents the views of cluster A in a way that cluster B can understand, whereas X is probably some inflammatory rag. The key is that you can't simply choose content according to a user's current preferences, they also have to be shown adversarial content so that they have all the information they need about what others think. This is how they can retain their agency. Show them stuff they disagree with, but that they can respect. I expect that a system like the one I'm describing would naturally penalize content that paint people with opposing points of view as evil or idiots, because such content is the most likely to be very highly rated by the "smart" side and profoundly hated by the "stupid" side. Again, note that I'm not saying content everyone likes should be promoted, it's more like, we should promote the +10/-2 kind of polarization (well thought out opinion pieces that focus on ideas which might be unpopular or uncomfortable) over the +10/-10 kind of polarization (people who disagree with me are evil cretins).
pckhoi 6y ago
Or you could just be your own user agent. Problem solved!
matheusmoreira 6y ago
> What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like. That would be great. Having an artificial intelligence as a user agent would be perfect. That'd be the ideal browser. So many science fiction worlds have the concept of an intelligent navigator who acts on behalf of its operator in the virtual world, greatly reducing its complexity. Today's artificial intelligences cannot be trusted to act on our best interests. They belong to companies and run on their computers. Even if the software's open source, the data needed to make it useful remains proprietary.
personjerry 6y ago
I'm building something like that. My app learns based on the content you've read, to show you more relevant passages for you: https://thinkerapp.com/ https://thinkerapp.com/
bergstromm466 6y ago
There are a few projects working on an next-gen agent-centric distributed web. Holochain is my favourite "Holochain is an open source framework for building fully distributed, peer-to-peer applications. Holochain is BitTorrent + Git + Cryptographic Signatures + Peer Validation + Gossip. Holochain apps are versatile, resilient, scalable, and thousands of times more efficient than blockchain (no token or mining required). The purpose of Holochain is to enable humans to interact with each other by mutual-consent to a shared set of rules, without relying on any authority to dictate or unilaterally change those rules. Peer-to-peer interaction means you own and control your data, with no intermediary (e.g., Google, Facebook, Uber) collecting, selling, or losing it. Data ownership also enables new frontiers of user agency, letting you do more with your data (imagine truly personal A.I., whose purpose is to serve you, rather than the corporation that created it). With the user at the center, composable and customizable applications become possible." http://developer.holochain.org http://developer.holochain.org and http://holo.host http://holo.host Apps building using the Holochain framework/pattern: http://junto.love http://junto.love using Also great are http://scuttlebutt.co.nz http://scuttlebutt.co.nz and https://docs.datproject.org/ https://docs.datproject.org/. Fritter is Twitter built on the DAT protocol (Paul Frazee) https://twitter.com/taravancil/status/949310662760632320 https://twitter.com/taravancil/status/949310662760632320
yosito 6y ago
Great idea, but who's gonna fund it?

GuiA 6y ago

What you’re referring to is splitting the presentation from the content. The server (eg Facebook) provides you with the content, and your computer/software displays it to your liking (ie without ads and spam and algorithmically recommended crap). There’s a lot of history around that split, and the motivation for HTML/CSS was about separating presentation from the content in many ways. For another example, once upon a time a lot of chat services ran over XMPP, and you could chat with a Facebook friend from your Google Hangouts account. Of course, both Google and Facebook stopped supporting it pretty quickly to focus on the “experience” of their own chat software. The thing is that there is very little money to be made selling content, and a lot to be made controlling the presentation. So everyone focuses on the latter, and that’s why we live in a software world of walled gardens that work very hard to not let you see your own data. There is some EU legislation proposal that may make things a bit better (social network interop), but given the outsized capital and power of internet companies i’m not holding my breath.

Lammy 6y ago
> you could chat with a Facebook friend from your Google Hangouts account This was never true. There was an XMPP-speaking endpoint into Facebook's proprietary chat system, but it wasn't a S2S XMPP implementation and never federated with anything. It was useful for using FBChat in Adium or Pidgin, but not for talking to GChat XMPP users.
- hesk 6y ago
  I don't know about Facebook but Google Talk was federated at some point [1]. [1] https://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html https://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html
  - Lammy 6y ago
    Yep, Google's was. They never enabled server-to-server TLS, though, so GTalk was effectively cut off from the federated XMPP network after May 2014 when that became mandatory: https://blog.prosody.im/mandatory-encryption-on-xmpp-starts-today/ https://blog.prosody.im/mandatory-encryption-on-xmpp-starts-...
divbzero 6y ago
RSS is yet another example of separating content from presentation.
- drdeadringer 6y ago
  I don't see this as a bad thing. I experience this as a good thing. The RSS feeds I subscribe to give me plenty of "presentation" or "branding". Logos, written descriptions [both short- and long-form], clear names of what I am subscribing to, URLs. Just the right amount for me, in fact; if I wanted to go to their website(s) for their particular buffet of blog posts, featured puff pieces on Page Five, twitter mentions, &c I can do that ... or not. I'm glad I don't have to if I don't want to, and all of these folks are more than able to drop into their RSS feed a "Please go here for our tour information with new stuff in our online shop" mention just as you are able to go straight to some website full of deep-thumping media flashing into your senses as you get to where you want to go instead of using RSS.

grishka 6y ago

ActivityPub and other federated networks are the answer. They do exactly that: if you aren't satisfied with the rules on existing servers, you host your own. The network itself is wide open, and its control is distributed across many server admins. The way the content is presented is of course completely up to the software the user is running. Having no financial incentive to make UX a dumpster fire visible from space also helps a lot.

anigbrowl 6y ago
They're not the answer as long as they don't have loads of people. The attraction of FB and the like is that almost everyone has a FB account, just like almost every public figure has a twitter account. The downside of things like Mastodon is how do you know what server you want to connect to? For a non-technical user it doesn't offer any more obvious utility than a FB group.
- grishka 6y ago
  There is indeed the problem of discovery that Mastodon doesn't feel like addressing. Like, you pick a server, make an account and now what? There's no way to bring your existing social graph with you. Even if your friends are there, you won't ever find them without asking each and every one about their username@domain. But I have some ideas on fixing that for my fediverse project — like making a DHT out of instance servers, thus making global search possible while keeping the whole thing decentralized.
  - mikestaub 6y ago
    I agree this is the main problem with ActivityPub, can you elaborate on your DHT idea? I'm thinking of doing something similar. How can the search be fast if the data is on many nodes, will you store the cache on a single instance and update it on some interval?
    - grishka 6y ago
      To be honest, I haven't really explored this yet, it's just that DHT feels like the most sensible approach. It's a rather ambitious project and I'm currently making the core functionality work (and interoperate with Mastodon where applicable). I'll probably do a Show HN post at some point.

zachware 6y ago

The risk is that it behaves like a reinforcement learning algorithm which essentially rewards itself by making you more predictable, I'd argue that's what curated social networks do today. If you're unpredictable you're a problem. Thus, it makes sense to slowly push you to a pole so you conform to a group's preferences and are easier to predict. A hole in my own argument is that today's networks are incentivized to do increase engagement where a neutral agent is in most ways not. So perhaps the problem isn't just the need for agents but for a proper business model where the reward isn't eyeball time as it is today.

scotty79 6y ago
> If you're unpredictable you're a problem. But you are predictable, even if you think you are unpredictable, you are just a bit more adventurous. Algorithm can capture that as well. It will be easier for algorithm that works on your behalf.
- airstrike 6y ago
  Reminded me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19336754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19336754
- solarkraft 6y ago
  This makes me think of a talk with an AI-optimistic Microsoft sales guy I had a few years ago. His argument was essentially the same:"Look, it's no problem to have an AI curate everything for you because the algorithm will just know what you want, even if your habits are unusual!" Of course this hasn't happened yet and I doubt it ever will. Maybe I'm just insane, but most of the recommendations from services I have fed data for hundreds of hours (YouTube) are actually repulsive.
  - TheHegemon 6y ago
    Interesting because I think I have some rather random assortment of hobbies that generally tend to have no overlap and I get pretty good recommendations all the time.

gjs278 6y ago

uhh or just show me all the posts in chronological order

jackandrew 6y ago

We're a small team working in stealth on this exact challenge. Shoot me a note if you're interested in hearing more or getting involved. itshelikos@gmail.com

mpfundstein 6y ago
good luck
cookiecaper 6y ago
This type of thing is nothing new, but it's important to recognize that it doesn't take off because it's illegal. As soon as Facebook realizes you're a risk, you'll get a C&D ordering you to stop accessing their servers. These typically have the force of law under the CFAA. You won't access their servers, but just read the page that the user already downloaded? You'll still get nailed under the Copyright Act. "User agents" in the sense used by the OP are as old as the internet itself. There's an active, serious, and quiet effort to abuse outdated legislation to ensure that they never become a problem.

Swizec 6y ago

I tried building this 10 years ago as a startup. Maybe time to revisit, the zeitgeist is turning more and more towards this and computing power has gotten cheap enough ...

ralston3 6y ago

> I don't know. Maybe that will just make the echo chambers worse. This. Also. What incentive does a walled garden even have to allow something like this? Put a different way, what incentive does a walled garden have to not just block this "user agent"? Because the UA would effectively be replacing the walled garden's own "algo curated new feed" - except if the user builds their own AI bot -- the walled garden can't make money the way they currently do. I think the idea is very interesting. I personally believe digital UA's will have a place in the future. But in this scenario I couldn't see it working.

fpgaminer 6y ago
True, but we have ad blockers and they're effective. They're effective against the largest, richest companies in the world. There are various reasons for that, but at the end of the day it remains true that I can use YouTube without ads if I choose to. There's clearly a place in the world for pro-user curation, even if that's not in FAANG's best interests. I think it's antithetical to the Hacker ethos to not pursue an idea just because it's bad for mega-corps.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Mega-corps don't stop themselves from pursuing an idea just because it's bad for the hoi polloi, so why should we?

abhchand 6y ago

I like this idea. In response to it just creating more echo chambers: - it can't be worse than now - At minimum, it's an echo chamber of your own creation instead of being manipulated by FB. There's value in that, ethically. - Giving people choice at scale means it will at least improve the situation for some people.

ketzu 6y ago
Isn't facebook (and reddit, and twitter) showing you posts by people companies etc. that you decided to follow? (And some ads)? I am pretty sure things can be worse than right now, pretending like we are in some kind of hell state at the bottom of some well where it can't possibly be worse, seems unrealistic to me.
- notriddle 6y ago
  I've seen Twitter pull tweets from an account merely because someone I follow follows them. Facebook is the same. I think Reddit sticks strictly to your subscriptions, unless you go to /r/all.

devonkim 6y ago

I think transparency matters more. I liked Andrew Yang’s suggestion to require the recommendation algorithms of the largest social networks to be open sourced given how they can shape public discourse and advertising in all mass media is regulated to prevent outright lies from being spread by major institutions (although an individual certainly may do so).

anigbrowl 6y ago
Not the recommendation engines. The graph. All the social media companies (and indeed Google and others) profit by putting up a wall and then allowing people to look at individual leaves of a tree behind the wall, 50% of which is grown with the help of people's own requests. You go to the window, submit your query, and receive a small number of leaves. These companies do provide some value by building the infrastructure and so on. But the graph itself is kept proprietary, most likely because it is not copyrightable.
- annadane 6y ago
  Yeah, pretty much. It's easy for Facebook to claim that it's popular and the best thing going when you specifically need a FB account for contacting people
- devonkim 6y ago
  The graph in itself is pretty close to privacy issues that border closely as well. Even if FB et al were government funded that wouldn’t make it good either. And said data could be considered competitive advantages but perhaps not. If everyone got a copy of various social networks’ friends lists, the number of viable alternatives would skyrocket quickly because the lock-in effect would be gone. Perhaps this needs to be theorized more along modernized anti-trust laws (which don’t work in a tech given anti-trust laws were based around trying to lower consumer prices).
SkyBelow 6y ago
Does that actually work? If they create some complex AI and then show us the trained model, it doesn't really give much insight into the AI doing the recommendation. You could potentially test certain articles to see if it is recommended, but reverse engineering how the AI recommends it would be far more time consuming than updating the AI. As such Facebook would just need to regularly update the AI faster than researchers can determine how it works to hide how their code works. Older versions of the AI would eventually be cracked open (as much as a large matrix of numbers representing a neural network could be), but between it being a trained model with a bunch of numbers and Facebook having a never version I think they'll be able to hide behind "oops there was a problem, but don't worry our training has made the model much better now".

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

Not a new idea. One example was early marketing of Apache Nutch.

meshaneian 6y ago

I like this, and so does my friend Confirmation Bias, who is pretty clear that the AI would select completely unbiased content relevant to me, not limited by any of the Bias family. It would be 100% better than the bias filters in place now, because my thoughts and selections are always unbiased, IMHO. (FYI: Obviously I'm not being serious. You clearly knew that, this notice is for the other person who didn't.)

munificent 6y ago

The fundamental flaw is this: The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads. Since ads are the primary way sites stay in business, they are obligated to fight against user agents or other intermediary systems. The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show you good, enriching content from your friends and family. They want to show you ads. The good content is just a necessary evil to make you tolerate looking at ads. Every time you upload some adorable photo of your baby for your friends to ooh and aah over, you're giving Facebook free bait that they then use to trap your friends into looking at ads.

a1369209993 6y ago
> The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads. Not that you're wrong, but: that's the fucking point! Advertising delenda est.
- arihant 6y ago
  Pay for Facebook then. 1.5% of total YouTube users subscribe for YT Premium. I love how the smartest minds will ignore the most primitive economics. Ads work. For everyone. Except deluded.
  - creato 6y ago
    Where did you get that number? That's actually far, far higher than I would have thought and quite encouraging...
    - jjjensen90 6y ago
      On Feb 4th, Google said there were 20 million Youtube Premium users, and I believe the latest estimates put Youtube at 2 billion users, which would be a 1% subscription rate.
      - mikenew 6y ago

bufferoverflow 6y ago

> AI that read every Facebook post I doubt FB would let you do that. It's "their" content.

isbjorn16 6y ago
Sure, you can't read every facebook post, but if your browser extension is scanning your feed and suppressing posts for you, how can they even stop you?
- cookiecaper 6y ago
  It's a violation of copyright under current interpretations of the Copyright Act. Companies like FB are well aware of this and send C&Ds to this effect every day.
  - isbjorn16 6y ago
    That is shocking. How could something like uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger ever exist? They're doing the exact same thing; modifying the status of the page payload. Even BrowserName developer tools would run afoul of this. I can't fathom how these are materially different.
    - cookiecaper 6y ago
      These projects continue to exist because no company has felt it's in their interest to bring suit, I guess. This is the type of thing that companies like to keep quiet, and if something like uBlock Origin isn't a pervasive threat, they won't risk publicizing and potentially losing the loophole. In particular it would be dumb to sue the EFF for Privacy Badger, since part of the reason the EFF exists is to fight such things in court. Look up the "RAM Copy Doctrine". Basically, it means that every time data is copied within the computer's memory, it's a potential infringement. The HTML source of the page you've downloaded undoubtedly qualifies for copyright protection. Your argument would be an implied license to modify the page to make it suitable for display, but standard ToS will typically forbid any type of modification, removing any ambiguity into whether third-party extensions that modify the page may have an implied license. Your license would typically be limited to displaying the page as transmitted, and allowing an extension to read and modify the page would be an infringement. I'm not a lawyer but I had a neat little SaaS business that was killed by a C&D along these same lines. Multiple attorneys reviewed and this is basically the summary. When I suggested that we do a peer-to-peer data transmission thing to avoid handling or transmitting any copyrighted content, I was warned that doing so could easily be interpreted as conspiracy and that it'd be best not to go down that route. Maybe someone else's attorney would say something different, but that's what mine told me.

Merad 6y ago

I think the overwhelming majority of users don’t want to deal with this kind of detail. IMO most people would end up using some kind of preset that matched their preferred bubble.

gscott 6y ago

Facebook figured out how to bring a Usenet flame war to the masses and profit from it, job well done!

liopleurodon 6y ago

bring back rss feeds then I choose what I read in my reader

janekm 6y ago

Sounds pretty similar to the concept of “software agents” which was popular in the mid ‘90s: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/michael.wooldridge/pubs/iee-review96.pdf http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/michael.wooldridge/pubs/iee-re... Part of the concept was that the agents would actually roam onto servers on the internet on your behalf raising complicated questions around how to sandbox the agent code (came in useful for VPSs and AWS-style lambdas in the end).

tomc1985 6y ago

This misses the point. Facebook refuses to look inwardly or mess with their core moneymaker, regardless of how it affects people. Noone is ever going to sip from the firehose just like we'll never again get a simple view of friend's posts sorted by creation date. I think the real problem is Facebook's need to be such a large company. They brought this on themselves trying to take over the world. Maybe they need a Bell-style breakup

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

joejerryronnie 6y ago

Why would a personal AI which curates your content be any “better” than FB’s AI which curates your content? Isn’t the current AI based on what you end up engaging with anyway? If you naturally engage in a variety of content across all ideological spectrums, than that’s what the FB AI is going to predict for you. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us engage with content which reinforces our existing worldview - which is exactly what would happen with a personal AI.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Because an algorithm under your control can be tweaked by you. Could be as simple as reordering topics on a list of preferences. Facebook's algorithm can't be controlled like that. Also, an algorithm you own won't change itself unbeknownst to you.
- joejerryronnie 6y ago
  Sure, but I bet 99.9% of the people will not tweak their personal algorithm and will end up with the same result as FB.

ereyes01 6y ago

Another early assumption about the internet and computers in general is that users were going to exert large amounts of control over the software and systems they use. This assumption has thus far been apparently invalidated, as people by far prefer to be mere consumers of software that are designed to make its designers money. Even OSS is largely driven by companies who need to run monetized infrastructure, though perhaps you don't pay for it directly. Given that users are generally not interested in exerting a high level of sophisticated control over software they use, how then is the concept of a user agent AI/filter any different at a fundamental level? It probably won't be created and maintained as a public benefit in any meaningful way, and users will not be programming and tuning the AI as needed to deliver the needed accuracy. I don't think AI has yet reached a level of sophistication where content as broad a range as what's found on the internet (or even just Facebook) can be curated to engage the human intellect beyond measuring addictive engagement, without significant user intervention. Hopefully I'm wrong, as I do wish I could engage with something like Facebook without having to deal with ads or with content curated to get my blood boiling. Sometimes I do wonder how much it is Facebook vs. human tendency under the guise of an online persona, as both are clearly involved here.

ssss11 6y ago
Are there research papers you could link that prove users don’t want to exert more control? I’d be interested in reading more. It always appears to me that the companies are making it difficult and users have no voice.

yots 6y ago

It’s really not as sophisticated, but these guys[1] created an extension that in addition to their main objective of analyzing Facebook’s algorithm also offers a way to create your own Facebook feed. If I got it right, they analyze posts their users see, categorize them by topic and then let you create your own RSS feed with only the topics you want to see. It’s not clear to me whether you may see posts collected by other users or only ones from your own feed and it seems highly experimental. [1] https://facebook.tracking.exposed/ https://facebook.tracking.exposed/

ssss11 6y ago

I agree - wasnt the browser intended to be the user agent? And counterpoint to some of the replies to you, surely people can just pay instead of sites being ad-based, what other industries operate in this absurd way? The public must think there’s no cost to creating software if everythings always free.

2019-nCoV 6y ago

This already exists — most social media is already curated. You only see tweets and posts from those you follow or friend. You can already block or ignore any undesirables. This works fine for self-curation. There is no need for holier-than-thou censorship short of legal breaches. Good to see FB take this change of direction.

solarkraft 6y ago
Except when it doesn't.
- 2019-nCoV 6y ago
  Such as?
  - solarkraft 6y ago
    Twitter shows me garbage I don't like, as does YouTube. They do this with very little regard for who you follow nowadays and give you no say in what types of stuff you actually want to be recommended. Sometimes they're nice enough to say why they recommend something (which should be standard), but most of the time it's just infuriatingly stupid. I'm not against machine curation at all, mind you. I want the infrequent poster to have a higher weighed voice and such. But I want to be able to control the parameters.
    - 2019-nCoV 6y ago
      For Twitter use curated lists. This allows you to avoid "the algorithm". You are bemoaning YouTube's discovery process, you need not watch what's "Up Next" — that's your choice.

austincheney 6y ago

> What if, instead, you had a personal AI I was in agreement with you until I read that. People don’t need to have content dictated to them like mindless drones whether it is from social media, bloggers, AI, or whatever. Many people prefer that, though, out of laziness. It’s like the laugh track on sitcoms because people were too stupid or tuned out to catch the poorly written jokes even with pausing and other unnecessarily directed focus. It’s all because you are still thinking in terms of content and broadcast. Anybody can create content. Off loading that to AI is just more of the same but worse. Instead imagine an online social application experience that is fully decentralized without a server in the middle, like a telephone conversation. Everybody is a content provider amongst their personal contacts. Provided complete decentralization and end-to-end encryption imagine how much more immersive your online experience can be without the most obvious concerns of security and privacy with the web as it is now. You could share access to the hardware, file system, copy/paste text/files, stream media, and of course original content. > And isn't that how the internet used to be? The web is not the internet. When you are so laser focused on web content I can see why they are indistinguishable.

solarkraft 6y ago
I think your suggestion is a bit out of scope for what's actually being discussed/not really a solution. I'm active on the somewhat (not fully) decentralized social medium Fediverse (more widely known as Mastodon, but it's more than that) and I think a lack of curation is a problem: Posts by people who post a lot while I'm active are very likely to be seen, those by infrequent posters active while I'm not very likely to go unnoticed. How would your proposed system (that seems a bit utopic and vague from that comment, to be honest) deal with that?
downerending 6y ago
> People don’t need to have content dictated to them like mindless drones whether it is from social media, bloggers, AI, or whatever. If the AI is entirely under the user's control, why not? It's like having a buddie that's doing for me what I'd do for myself, if I had the time and energy (and eyebleach).

adrianmonk 6y ago

I like the line of thinking, but who actually provides the agent, and what are their incentives? This is far from a perfect analogy, but compare it to the problem of email spam. People first tried to fight it with client-side Bayes keyword filters. It turns out it wasn't nearly as simple as that, and to solve a problem that complicated, you basically need people working on it full time to keep pace. Ranking and filtering a Facebook feed would have different challenges, of course. It's not all about adversaries (though there are some); it's also about modeling what you find interesting or important. But that's pretty complicated too. Your one friend shared a woodworking project and your other friend shared travel photos. Which one(s) of those are you interested in? And when someone posts political stuff, is that something you find interesting, or is it something you prefer to keep separate from Facebook? There are a lot of different types of things people post, so the scope of figuring out what's important is pretty big.

globular-toast 6y ago

> What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. So you can read more of what you already agree with? That's called living in a bubble. The mind cannot grow in a bubble.

BaitBlock 6y ago

At Baitblock (https://baitblock.app https://baitblock.app), we're working on something similar. It's called the Intelligent Blocker, and has the same intended goal as your user agent 'AI' (not yet open to general public, under development right now). With it you will be able to block all Facebook posts that are for example say not from your family, or not of a specific type or from specific person. Or comments on different Internet forums that are blatantly spammy/SEO gaming etc. Or block authors in search results or Twitter feed or any comment that you don't like. Basically the Zapier of content filtering. This will be available to the user as a subscription service. Some of these thigs are not possible on mobile platforms (Android, iOS) unfortunately because the OS do not allow such access, but we hope that Android and iOS in the future open up to allow external curation systems, apart from the app platform it's self as it's in the interest of the user.

dvduval 6y ago

In the right medium, perhaps the user agent would also decide when my posts are shown to people versus an ad being shown in place of my post such that I make money. Then a site like Facebook would only make a small portion of my ad revenue in exchange for hosting it.

redelbee 6y ago

Neal Stephenson explores something like your “user agent” idea and comes up with an different solution in his novel “ Fall; or, Dodge in Hell.” Spoilers ahead: In Stephenson‘s world people can hire “editors” to curate what they see, and those editors effectively determine reality for people at a mass scale. This is just one of the many fascinating ideas Stephenson explores and I highly recommend reading the book. This interview covers some of the details if you’re not willing to dive into an 800+ page novel: https://www.pcmag.com/news/neal-stephenson-explains-his-vision-of-the-digital-afterlife https://www.pcmag.com/news/neal-stephenson-explains-his-visi...

orcasauce 6y ago
Highly recommend reading Reamde first if you can. The story is entirely different, but is the same world and comes chronologically first; I felt the continuity added a lot when reading Fall.

gitgud 6y ago

Well that kind of already exists in a project called "huginn". https://github.com/huginn/huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn

IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago

This already exists. Its called Facebook purity. It obeys what you say. No cats? No problem. No babies? No problem. And yes, it also does filter out ads. FBP

kstrauser 6y ago

I haven't touched this in years, but one time I made a little project[1] to analyze the people I was following on Twitter and recommend who I might want to unfollow based on their attitudes. People who posted negative stuff very frequently were at the top of my list to ditch; I don't need extra input pushing me toward misery. The first few runs were very illuminated, but not surprising, like "wow, now that you mention it, Joe does saw awful stuff approximately hourly". I would love to have an agent that could apply those sorts of analyses to my data sources. In my case, I wouldn't want to filter out bad news, but unnecessarily nasty spins on it. I'd find that super valuable. [1] https://github.com/kstrauser/judgish https://github.com/kstrauser/judgish

subsubzero 6y ago

Zuck doesn't care about anything healthy as long as that healthy content reduces ad revenue/and or user activity(MAU/DAU) metrics. Basically he wants to extract enough time/money from each user to just be bearable for that user that they do not leave the site in disgust. Once you realize this cardinal truth from FB all the reprehensible actions from Zuck/senior leaders make perfect sense.

hallambaker 6y ago

There are models for this that could probably work. Tim Berners-Lee has been working on a scheme called Solid for years now. It is important to realize that Facebook is not the first, second or even tenth of its ilk. FaceBook combines a bunch of ideas from previous systems, in particular MySpace and USENET. It is more or less the third generation of Web Social Media. There is no reason to believe there can't be a fourth. My interest in these schemes is to provide a discussion space that is end-to-end encrypted so that the cloud service collecting the comments does not have access to the plaintext. This allows for 'Enterprise' type discussion of things such as RFPs and patent applications. I am not looking to provide a consumer service (at this stage). The system you describe could be implemented in a reasonably straightforward fashion. Everyone posts to the timeline service of their choice and choose between a collection of user agents discovering interesting content for them to read. These aggregation services could be a paid service or advertising supported. Timeline publishing services might need a different funding model of course but bit shoveling isn't very expensive these days. Perhaps it could be bundled with video conferencing capabilities, password management or any of the systems people already pay for. As for when the Internet/Web was not so vast. One of my claims to fame is the last person to finish surfing the Web which I did in October 1992 shortly after meeting Tim Berners-Lee. It took me an entire four days of night shifts to surf every page of every site in the CERN index.

kleer001 6y ago
In the context of this discussion Solid sounds amazing. I'd be super excited to tune the social web to my own preferences. Sadly however, I couldn't make heads or tails of this garbage jargon laden website. WTF? https://inrupt.com https://inrupt.com "Time to reset the balance of power on the web and reignite its true potential. When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, it was intended for everyone. The excitement and creativity of its early days were driven from the notion that we can all participate — and the impact was world-changing. But the web has shifted from its original promise — and it’s time to make a change. We can still unlock the true promise of the web by decentralizing the power that’s currently centralized in the hands of a few. How? By using the power of Solid. Solid is the technically potent, open-source platform built to decentralize the web. Inrupt is the company that’s helping to fuel Solid’s success." What? How will that help me or my grandma?

strogonoff 6y ago

I am thinking about the concept of “the last mile to user’s attention”. Currently, software clients of Mastodon or Twitter hold that mile. Mastodon gives all content unfiltered, which could be too much at times, while Twitter does some oft-annoying opaque black magic in its timeline algorithms. A better solution would be to have a protocol for capability that filters content with logic under your control. A universal middleware standard that is GUI-agnostic, can fit different content types. By adopting this, open/federated social could start catching up on content filtering features to for-profit social (in a no-dark-patterns way, benefitting user experience), hopefully stealing users. Ideally it could be used by the likes of Twitter and Facebook—of course, given the size of for-profit social, such an integration would take some unimaginably big player to motivate them to adopt (the state of their APIs is telling), but if it’s there there’s a chance.

kelchm 6y ago

Yeah, since what the world needs is more echo chambers.

industriousthou 6y ago

I mean Facebook doesn't really decide what content I see, I do. I aggressively police my timeline and unfollow people who post garbage content. I don't really need an AI to do that for me...

baq 6y ago
do you cross-validate what the algorithm serves to you with full timelines of people you follow? how do you do that?

jameslk 6y ago

"TiVo, but for the browser."

metrokoi 6y ago

Excellent idea, soon this will be a requirement for using the web in any productive way, considering the ratio of good information to junk info is getting worse rapidly. We already do this in a way; only visiting certain sites that we like and following certain users. A personal AI would make this process much more efficient. I do see a content filtering AI as very difficult to achieve, and I don't think it will be possible for quite some time. There are so many small problems, even getting AI to recognize targeted content is difficult, given that websites can have infinitely different layouts. And what about video or audio? The most practical way to achieve a content AI would be to persuade websites to voluntarily add standardized tags so that the only problem becomes predicting and filtering. Although I could see some issues with that like people trying to game the system.

mch82 6y ago

Nice idea. Anyone working on this?

tambourine_man 6y ago

Nah, they’ve already filtered by your IP, geolocation, browser fingerprint, etc. We need access to all the data so we can decide which algorithms to apply. There’s really no escaping that

breuleux 6y ago

> What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like. There is a feedback problem, though, which is that your preferences are modified by what you see. So the AI problem devolves to showing you the kind of content that makes you want to see more of it, i.e. maximize engagement. I think a lot of people are addicted to controversy, "rage porn," anger-inducing content, and these agents are not going to help with this issue. If we could train AI agents to analyze the preferences of people, I think the best use for them wouldn't be to curate your own content, but to use them to see the world from other people's perspective. If you know in what "opinion cluster" someone lies and can predict their emotional reaction to some content, you may be able to identify the articles from cluster A that people from cluster B react the least negatively to, and vice versa. And this could be leveraged to break echo chambers, I think: imagine that article X is rated +10 by cluster A and -10 by cluster B, and article Y is rated +10 by cluster A but only -2 by cluster B. It might be a good idea to promote Y over X, because unlike X, Y represents the views of cluster A in a way that cluster B can understand, whereas X is probably some inflammatory rag. The key is that you can't simply choose content according to a user's current preferences, they also have to be shown adversarial content so that they have all the information they need about what others think. This is how they can retain their agency. Show them stuff they disagree with, but that they can respect. I expect that a system like the one I'm describing would naturally penalize content that paint people with opposing points of view as evil or idiots, because such content is the most likely to be very highly rated by the "smart" side and profoundly hated by the "stupid" side. Again, note that I'm not saying content everyone likes should be promoted, it's more like, we should promote the +10/-2 kind of polarization (well thought out opinion pieces that focus on ideas which might be unpopular or uncomfortable) over the +10/-10 kind of polarization (people who disagree with me are evil cretins).

pckhoi 6y ago

Or you could just be your own user agent. Problem solved!

matheusmoreira 6y ago

> What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like. That would be great. Having an artificial intelligence as a user agent would be perfect. That'd be the ideal browser. So many science fiction worlds have the concept of an intelligent navigator who acts on behalf of its operator in the virtual world, greatly reducing its complexity. Today's artificial intelligences cannot be trusted to act on our best interests. They belong to companies and run on their computers. Even if the software's open source, the data needed to make it useful remains proprietary.

personjerry 6y ago

I'm building something like that. My app learns based on the content you've read, to show you more relevant passages for you: https://thinkerapp.com/ https://thinkerapp.com/

bergstromm466 6y ago

There are a few projects working on an next-gen agent-centric distributed web. Holochain is my favourite "Holochain is an open source framework for building fully distributed, peer-to-peer applications. Holochain is BitTorrent + Git + Cryptographic Signatures + Peer Validation + Gossip. Holochain apps are versatile, resilient, scalable, and thousands of times more efficient than blockchain (no token or mining required). The purpose of Holochain is to enable humans to interact with each other by mutual-consent to a shared set of rules, without relying on any authority to dictate or unilaterally change those rules. Peer-to-peer interaction means you own and control your data, with no intermediary (e.g., Google, Facebook, Uber) collecting, selling, or losing it. Data ownership also enables new frontiers of user agency, letting you do more with your data (imagine truly personal A.I., whose purpose is to serve you, rather than the corporation that created it). With the user at the center, composable and customizable applications become possible." http://developer.holochain.org http://developer.holochain.org and http://holo.host http://holo.host Apps building using the Holochain framework/pattern: http://junto.love http://junto.love using Also great are http://scuttlebutt.co.nz http://scuttlebutt.co.nz and https://docs.datproject.org/ https://docs.datproject.org/. Fritter is Twitter built on the DAT protocol (Paul Frazee) https://twitter.com/taravancil/status/949310662760632320 https://twitter.com/taravancil/status/949310662760632320

yosito 6y ago

Great idea, but who's gonna fund it?