I actually have built myself a personal AI agent that does this for nthe main news headlines and for a summary of my personal email (sadly I can’t run it on work email yet). It can extract any actions required from a mail and make them into tasks, and also has a killer feature - a “sort out my email” button that archives all the emails it classifies as FYI, spam, mailing list or moot (it has classifiers for this), first producing a one-pager markdown summary of the whole lot in one shot, leaving all emails marked “action required” or “Urgent”. Email summaries are deliberately dry and factual with all advertising false urgency removed.

I can manually “hold” emails so they don’t go in the “sort out my email” woodchipper. It’s been life-changing.

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.

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.

Man, that before-after slider on the home page makes me so sad... YouTube used to just be random people sharing cool stuff, and those de-sensationalized titles really brought me back to that time for a second! Cool stuff.

For people like me had tried it in the past and found it annoying, note that it now has a 'casual' mode where it only changes the truly useless titles and leaves reasonable ones alone.

I 100% agree with this. I am certain that I cannot foresee how this would play out in reality.

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.

I'm hoping that something like this can condense a 1000+ comments thread to couple of paragraphs at most.

on reflection, i would appreciate average slop more than the occasional heinous slop people say when they are opinionated..

I think the proposed extension would simply hide your comment, and all users would be better for it.

Actually, yeah, unironically that's a great idea.

Think about actual human psychology for a minute- modern humans are nothing like people from 500 or 1000 years ago. Before instant communication around the globe, behavior was not anonymous. You ran your mouth off, you get socially punished in your village.

Life was both more harsh (you can randomly die from an infection, etc) but also more psychologically healthier in certain ways. You had much more of a sense of "belonging" within your clan/village/etc. Being socially ostracized was a real punishment, not just people casually running off their mouths.

I think the allegations of "snowflake" would be really interesting if you flip the assumption on its head. (And I've spent plenty of time on 4chan, nothing you say can hurt me). Instead, assume "snowflake" is actually the intended default for human psychological health; and flip other assumptions, like assume groupthink is actually an evolutionary survival strategy... and then see what conclusions you draw from that.

He can't see your message because it's snark. Assuming author already has this built in somehow.

haberman's requested translation (that would cause the comment above to be filtered out): this stranger on the internet has nothing useful to add and so their comment does not appear.