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218 sats \ 4 replies \ @justin_shocknet 16 Jan \ parent \ on: The dead internet vs the Lightning network mostly_harmless
I like Elon's stated objective of "unregretted user minutes", that's a distinction from user minutes more generally which has been the standard, and has long used tricks to keep people addicted to serve more ads.
I think unregretted user minutes is an evolution to the times, because people are going to spend the minutes anyway... the arb is now where those minutes aren't regretted and how they're monetized.
So, we have the feed as the emergent standard since when, MySpace era probably? And feeds have always been twitters whole thing, true also of facebook and so on. Feeds being a lindy pattern, the only option for them is to improve incrementally because we don't know what the successor to feeds looks like yet.
To make matters worse, feeds only have 2 properties to compete for minutes on, network and algorithm. Yet, both of these inevitably reward bot and bullshit DIT behavior because feeds don't work if they're stale.
The SN/Reddit-like social filtering system is the only alternative I can think of where newness matters somewhat less than in feeds, but is probably still more ephemeral than whatever ultimately starts taking user minutes away from feed based apps.
I like Elon's stated objective of "unregretted user minutes
I hadn't heard that phrasing, but it's a noble aspiration for sure. "Regret minimization" is a storied concept from decision theory, seems worth applying to this new universe.
The SN/Reddit-like social filtering system is the only alternative I can think of where newness matters somewhat less than in feeds, but is probably still more ephemeral than whatever ultimately starts taking user minutes away from feed based apps.
I am titillated by the idea of breaking the "newness" thing out entirely -- this is the source of my commitment to evergreen-ness but I admit that there's not much of a model for it at anything like scale, at least as far as I've seen.
The distance between some non-newness-based interaction paradigm and the current state of things seems both daunting, and a substantial opportunity. Nobody whose current existence is underwritten by a traditional business model will go after it, that's for sure.
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evergreen-ness
Framing of that may need to change, less about what's absolutely new and more what's newly relevant to the user
How often do you get a recommendation for an old movie or TV show? Read a wikipedia article that's not been updated in months or years? Peruse an old review or blog post?
There's an infinite amount of content that would be stale on a feed, but you haven't seen yet because you didn't seek it out probably because it hasn't been relevant to you... so whatever replaces feeds (or a new algo for feeds) assesses what's new with you and your mind and not so much what's been newly posted.
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You described evergreen the way I intend the term -- doesn't matter when it was written, it's relevant now. Although you added a distinction that complicates it a bit -- the relevance would evolve based on your own evolution.
Crime and Punishment references from a hundred years ago were not relevant a month ago, now they are. So it's less about the thing, even if it's a high-quality and timeless thing, and more about the interface between you and the thing, whoever you happen to be at the moment.
Maybe the science fiction version would be an intent-less / ambient search engine.
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Maybe the science fiction version would be an intent-less / ambient search engine.
I think that's what Google at one point said they wanted to do, it just requires a lot of your private data... ironically the same people that would probably most enjoy higher signal feeds are going to be more stingy with their data than average feed dopamine enjoooyer.
Surely a fortune to be made figuring this out.
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