There was a discussion here a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37720804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37720804 Ask HN: Is there a way t

There was a discussion here a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37720804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37720804 Ask HN: Is there a way to get back to the web we lost? What intrigues me is this article: "The synthetic social network is coming" https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/29/23895675/ai-bot-social-network-openai-meta-chatbots https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/29/23895675/ai-bot-social-ne... So, in short, what used to be "a network of your friends" became an echo chamber trapping you with highly curated news that agrees with your views, and probably will soon be populated with chatbots. Focused advertising gives way to building AI training databases to sell. https://tonysull.co/articles/web-3-is-here/ https://tonysull.co/articles/web-3-is-here/ The web is moving from an ad platform to an AI training platform. Not liking any of these, I rely on two affinity sites, one of which is HN, and the familiar email and messaging to stay in touch with my real networks, as in 150 or less, Dunbar's number. I hope that more affinity sites pop up, serving the social connection needs of people. That affinity can be just family. The process just needs to be simple, not much more than email and messaging. As for getting messages out to large numbers of people (say, a scientific discovery or alert), I really do get ALL of that from my two aggregators. Scientists and government agencies may feel that they lose by abandoning twixter et. al., the hoped-for increase in small networks which aggregate information will make up for this. They're actually not terribly social. But we need both, in some blend. So let's think about news and social. Reading PaulHoule's post, a filter per individual, if made real easy to set up and use, might be a great answer. Social networks for real social communication, and news filtering for news. I suspect that the reason for the merger of the two is simply convenience/ease of use, as are many things. A lot of technology would serve people better if it weren't so complicated. That's a choice that technologists make. People use crappy services because they are simple. Why not GOOD THINGS that are simple? Will people here build something better?