| The theme I get from this post is that technology is becoming more and more frictionless at the expense of our agency. And when we lose control of what we do next we lose track of where we want to get to. "The feed" does not fully capture this idea. There are feeds that do not take away your control. My hobby project is a "feed". But the contents of the feed is fully determined by what items you explicitly upvoted and downvoted. When you upvote an item, you get stronger connected to other users who upvoted it. Their other upvoted items start ranking higher for you. When you downvote something, your connection to others who upvoted it becomes weaker. So their future upvote have less weight. This algorithm is transparent and predictable. This makes it possible to meaningfully interact with it. What you vote on has direct consequences for what you will see in the future. It makes you think about your future self. Where you want to be. When you consider to upvote something you need to answer the question: do you want to get more content from people who found this useful? If this sounds interesting to you, give it a try at https://linklonk.com/register with invitation code "hn" (a temporary account is created, you don't need to give your email to try). It is very early days, I would appreciate any feedback. |