That is unironically exactly what I want from social media.
I want the option to engage with the substance of new developments in the world, technology, etc. without the drama. I don't want to be drawn into the drama of strangers (who could, for all I know, just be bots or ragebaiting AIs).
If I want drama, there's plenty of it on TV, or I could talk to my friends about what is going on with people I actually know.
The anti-pattern, in my mind, is logging on to engage with substantive content and to be inadvertently drawn into flamewars with strangers.
I would really just like the quirkier internet of old.
Flamewars these days are just created by shit-stirrers in another country who are just pumping out rage bait from an massive array of smartphones. It's not even an impassioned flamewar, it simply exists to aggravate.
Using AI to forcefully disengage by simply suppressing that content would be nice and also have the secondary effect of depriving various internet resources of ad revenue.
I'd argue the issue is people have figued out that "shit stirring" can make actual meaningful differences to reality, be they foreign or local.
When the limit of effect a flamewar would have is if Star Trek or Star Wars got the top billing, or Vim was recommended to new programmers instead of Emacs, it was a fun novelty.
But now there's real money and power resulting from this shit stirring of course people will use it as a means to an ends. They've optimised professional shit-stirring because it's so valuable now.
Are humans supposed to enjoy the "flavor" of diarrhea, as the result of giving every village idiot a microphone so they can spew shit from their mouths?
Sure, you might say this sort of thing is boiling flavor out of your food, but... boiling the bacteria out of what you consume isn't a bad thing.
I worry that "boiling" is still optimistic, since it isn't as simple or foolproof. It's more like a complex fermentation process, where it's possible for a malicious input to hijack how it works and generate something more dangerous than what you put in.
Even if the output is only shown to a human, imagine a comment in a thread that tricks an LLM into "summarizing" a false account where other innocent people said terrible ban-worthy things.
I want the option to engage with the substance of new developments in the world, technology, etc. without the drama. I don't want to be drawn into the drama of strangers (who could, for all I know, just be bots or ragebaiting AIs).
If I want drama, there's plenty of it on TV, or I could talk to my friends about what is going on with people I actually know.
The anti-pattern, in my mind, is logging on to engage with substantive content and to be inadvertently drawn into flamewars with strangers.