[jychang]

Yeah, I 100% agree with the caution in this comment.

I see the merit in such a proposal. It's the linguistic equivalent to boiling the food you consume, instead of eating it raw with all the associated bad stuff.

The problem is, as you said, that this plan is unlikely to be as rosy as it's portrayed and probably has a lot of drawbacks in real life.

Interesting to think about and explore, though.

[NobleLie]

The boiling - cooking - is the bias here. Winograds Understanding Computers and Cognition is the most excellent resource in 2026, written over three decades ago by now.

[netcan]

I wasn't even talking about drawbacks, though that applies too.

I mean... you would be basically taking a complex thing, transforming and reconstructing it. What we want out of social media isn't a simple, legible function. The positives. You'd have to discover them.

If someone starts building with the intitial idea above, my guess is that they'd end up with some sort of custom feed that draws inspiration and inputs from social media... but isn't social media. It's something else that you can scroll, read and whatnot.

[whatarethembits]

That is exactly what I want. A boring but factual summary of useful nuggets from the mountain of shite that is ALL of social media. For example, on any given day, reddit/X/Bluesky/HN only has a couple of paragraphs worth of stuff that I care to know about. I want to train my brain to equate the internet with something boring that's only worth visiting when I need to look up information. I want this tech to reduce my (and hopefully others') use of internet to down by 98%.

I want to go to news.ycombinator.com/reddit.com/etc on any given day and just see a couple of paragraphs and maybe a few reference links to follow if I so choose. Spend a few minutes reading that and close it.

All of that in the hope of diverting my limited time/energy on Earth to endeavours in real life with real people.