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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you think about it, git is really just a big undo/redo button and a big "merge 2 branches" button, plus some more fancy stuff on top of those primitives.
"Merge 2 branches" is already far from being a primitive. A git repository is just a graph of snapshots of some files and directories that can be manipulated in various ways, and git itself is a bunch of tools to manipulate that graph, sometimes directly (plumbing) and sometimes in an opinionated way (porcelain). Merging is nothing but creating a node (commit) that has more than one parent (not necessarily two) combined with a pluggable tool that helps you reconcile the contents of these parents (which does not actually have to be used at all as the result does not have to be related to any of the parents).
(you may know that already, but maybe someone who reads this will find this helpful for forming a good mental model, as so many people lack one despite of working with git daily)
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.
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