[sanxiyn]

I heartily recommend Kill Process (2016) by William Hertling, where a startup trying to bootstrap a social network uses AI to avoid empty network problem. The novel describes the version of this "done right" pretty well.

Right now, you can find the version of this "done wrong" in "dating site" populated by chatbots.

[tedmiston]

Sounds like an interesting dystopia, and definitely geared toward programmers.

Synopsis from the publisher:

> By day, Angie, a twenty-year veteran of the tech industry, is a data analyst at Tomo, the world's largest social networking company; by night, she exploits her database access to profile domestic abusers and kill the worst of them. She can't change her own traumatic past, but she can save other women.

> When Tomo introduces a deceptive new product that preys on users’ fears to drive up its own revenue, Angie sees Tomo for what it really is—another evil abuser. Using her coding and hacking expertise, she decides to destroy Tomo by building a new social network that is completely distributed, compartmentalized, and unstoppable. If she succeeds, it will be the end of all centralized power in the Internet.

> But how can an anti-social, one-armed programmer with too many dark secrets succeed when the world’s largest tech company is out to crush her and a no-name government black ops agency sets a psychopath to look into her growing digital footprint?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30658546-kill-process

[sapphireblue]

Am I the only one who thinks that dystopian scifi got boring a decade or two ago, while utopian scifi is an almost entirely neglected genre?

I prefer a techno-optimistic point of view shown here http://foundersfund.com/anatomy-of-next/

[shostack]

I've wondered if that correlates with many of the old themes of such stories becoming mainstream realities that it turns out people don't care much about.