Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
You know what the internet needs?  User agents.<p>We&#x27;ve got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content.  Only Facebook gets to decide which Facebook posts to show us.<p>What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you.  Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like.<p>Instead of being tuned to line the pockets of Facebook, the AI is an agent of your own choosing.  Maybe you want it to actually _reduce_ engagement after an hour of mindless browsing.<p>And not just for Facebook, but every website.  Twitter, Instagram, etc.  Even websites like Reddit, which are &quot;user moderated&quot;, are still ultimately run by Reddit&#x27;s algorithm and could instead be curated by _your_ agent.<p>I don&#x27;t know.  Maybe that will just make the echo chambers worse.  But can it possibly make them worse than they already are?  Are we really saying that an agent built by us, for us, will be worse than an agent built by Facebook for Facebook?<p>And isn&#x27;t that how the internet used to be?  Back when the scale of the internet wasn&#x27;t so vast, people just ... skimmed everything themselves and decided what to engage with.  So what I&#x27;m really driving at is some way to scale that up to what the internet has since become.  Some way to build a tiny AI version of yourself that goes out and crawls the internet in ways that you personally can&#x27;t, and return to you the things you would have wanted to engage with had it been possible for you to read all 1 trillion internet comments per minute.