Thread by @RobertHaisfield

I wonder what a social media or personal knowledge management app would look like if it had *excellent* user-oriented newsfeed management built in. Given an endless stream of information, how can we give the user the most control over what takes up their attention?

https://twitter.com/RobertHaisfield/status/1329828499167711232

Newsfeeds are essentially a jumping off point for exploratory browsing. More in QT thread on that. People browse information without a goal and sometimes new goals arise. Essentially, scrolling through your newsfeed can give you new goals when you had none.

https://twitter.com/RobertHaisfield/status/1291730046684524544

A key question also would be: what are the effective responses to each block of content in a newsfeed? Most social media has functions for liking, commenting, and saving for later. What else? I would love to see newsfeed management around content I saved for later.

Apart from social media, I’ve been starting to open my @RoamResearch and browse it whenever I have free time, clicking on links based on interest. The best starting points I have there are searches and index pages, but those assume I already have a goal. Newsfeeds require none.

A key part of newsfeed management is that you have ultimate control over the algorithm. You can say, “I want to see more or less of this” in a way that doesn’t send a social signal. You have to be able to reinforce certain content that is high quality.

This gets into some conversations I’ve had with @leighblue about the “implication graph.” Basically our minds operate on a graph of connections, and when we search for information, useful paths between nodes are reinforced so that future searches are more efficient.

If @RoamResearch had a newsfeed, maybe you could have a “block rank” based on the number of times it has been referenced into new contexts (or things that reference it have been referenced) or the number of times page refs within it have been referenced.

I imagine a workflow where I can favorite my own notes each time I see them and find them useful, eventually ending up with a database/newsfeed that knows which notes are more likely to be relevant than others. In the newsfeed, it prioritizes those notes w/ randomness

For any endless stream of information that I have access to, I want to be able to tell an algorithm what I like, don’t like, and what’s useful. I want each block of content to link out to other meaningful actions that I could do. I want mindless scrolling to lead to useful goals.