Mixtapes: a Lightweight Plan to Save the Internet – ØF

Pablos: People are pissed off about social media all the time. They think that Facebook is making people vote for the wrong person.

It’s still very difficult to find somebody who thinks they voted for the wrong person because of Facebook, but they think everyone else did. Never mind that, there’s this kind of, uh, very popular sensibility, which is to blame Facebook for all the problems in the world. They’re doing fake news, they’re doing, disinformation they’re doing , every possible thing that could be wrong.

Everybody wants to blame Facebook for getting wrong or Twitter or, any of the other social platforms. So if you think about it, in one sense, , yeah, Facebook got everybody together. I’m just going to use them as the example, we can extrapolate. They got everybody together.

They, ended up getting too much content. you and your friends are posting too much shit. Nobody has time to see all of it. So you need the magical algorithm, which you should do like triple air quotes every time I say algorithm. They’re like, the algorithm is supposed to figure out, okay, of all the shit that’s supposed to be showing up on your feed, what’s the coolest, or what’s the stuff that you’re gonna like the most?

That’s the job of the algorithm. And of course, we all believe the algorithm is tainted. And so, it’s not really trying to find the things I care about the most or like the most. It’s just gonna find the things that piss me off the most so that I get my, outrage, dopamine hit and keep coming back. So, which may all be true.

We don’t know. But, the point is, there’s a fundamental problem, which is you cannot see everything that gets posted from all the people you follow. So, there does have to be some ranking. And then the second, thing is that you want that ranking to be tuned for you.

And I think the thing that people, are missing about this is that you’ve got to have, a situation where it is very personalized because, not everybody’s the same. Even if you and I followed the same thousand people, it doesn’t mean we have identical interests.

There are other factors that need to play into determining like what I want to see and what you want to see. And then I think that there’s a whole bunch of things that, are classified as societal evils, that Facebook has to decide are not okay for anybody to follow. So if you have posts about Hitler, nobody should get to see those.

Even if you’re a World War II historian, nope, you don’t get to see it. So there’s a kind of, problem here, which is that all of this flies in the face of actual diversity, actual multiculturalism, we have 190 countries in the world. We have a lot of different peoples, different cultures, you and I just had a huge conversation about, different cultures and how they drive, we don’t agree about these things. We have different ideas in different places in the world, even whole societies have different ideas about what’s okay, and what’s not okay, and that is the definition of Culture that is the definition of multiculturalism is valuing that that exists and letting everybody have their own ideas And and make let these different people operate in the way that suits them And when you travel, you get beaten over the head with that because, I can appreciate that people drive like this in Bangkok.

That’s not how I want to do it , that’s kind of the fundamental point here. So anyway, what I’m trying to get at is you cannot create one set of rules for the entire world. That is not okay.

Ash: 100%

Pablos: And so what Facebook has chosen to do is try to create one set of rules for the entire world, at least the two billion people that are on Facebook.

Ash: But then you become the government of Facebook.

Pablos: You become the government of Facebook. And it’s and we’re all pissed off because they keep choosing rules that some people don’t like or whatever. And so I think this is untenable and I don’t think there’s a solution there. I think it is a fool’s errand and what I believe is, has gone wrong is that Facebook made the wrong choice long ago and they chose to control the knobs and dials and now they’re living with the flack that comes with, every choice they make about where to set those knobs and dials.

And what they should have done is given the user the knobs and dials. They should let me have buried six pages deep in the settings, have control over. What do you want more of? What do you want less of?

Ash: More or less rant.

Pablos: Yeah, They try to placate you with the like button and unfollow and all that, but it’s not really control.

So, contrast that with, the other fork in history that we didn’t take, go back to like 2006, in the years before Facebook, We had this beautiful moment on the internet, with RSS. So RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, that hardly matters, RSS was an open standard that allowed any website to publish the content in the form of posts in a kind of machine readable way.

And then you could have an RSS reader that could subscribe to any website. So we didn’t have the walled garden of Facebook, but, you remember all this, of course, but I’m just trying to break it down here. What we had was, this kind of open standard. , anybody in the world could publish on RSS using their website, all the blog software did this out of the box.

WordPress does it out of the box. In fact, most websites, would support RSS. And then you had a reader app, that could be any reader app. This is again, open standards so get any reader you want. And if you just subscribe to any website in the world, you are following them directly. When they publish a post, it show up in your feed.

And when you followed too many people, you could start making filters. So I’ve been making filters. I still do RSS. So by the way, all this machinery still works 15 years later. The machinery still works almost any website if you just put /RSS or / feed on the domain name you’ll see an RSS feed and you can subscribe to that so it goes into my reader app And then I’ve been building filters over the years. So I have filters like -Trump because I got sick and tired of all this bullshit about Trump regardless what you think about Trump I just wanted to think about other things and it was painful to have a feed filled with Trump during the election So I have also -Biden, I have -Kanye, I have -Disney, I have minus all kinds of shit that I don’t want to see, I still follow the publishers, but it’s weeding out articles that are about those things. And so I get this feed that’s pretty curated for me and my interests, and I get more of the stuff I like and less of the stuff I don’t like, but I’m responsible for the knobs and dials, I’m controlling the settings, and I get to have my own autonomy about what I think is cool and not cool. And if I don’t want Hitler, I can easily just -Hitler. And what we did instead is we kind of signed up for this sort of, babysitter culture of having Facebook make those choices for us. And people not, taking responsibility for their own choices has put us in this situation where we just have an internet full of people want to blame somebody else for everything that they think is going wrong.

What we need to do is, figure out a way to, shift the world back to RSS. And out of the walled garden. So that’s my, that’s where I’m at, and I have ideas about that.

Ash: And it’s interesting, go back to Delphi, So Delphi internet…

Pablos: One of the first, before, before internet, this was like an ISP, like a, like AOL. Centralized ISP.

Ash: Right. So, so Delphi was sold to Murdoch, to News Corp and, and then the founder, Dan Burns brought that back. He purchased it, he re acquired the company and then invited a couple of ragtag individuals, myself and, and Palle again, and Rusty Williams. Chip Matthes, and we had like, you know, a room with a VAX in the back. I was doing a lot of the stuff, but we were running forums. Dan had this crazy idea. It was like, Hey, what if you could just make your own forum? And this would be like way pre Facebook, it’s like 97, 98. And 98, we started supplying that ability to websites. And the first one we did was a guy named Gil . And like we said to him, it’s like, Hey Gil, like you guys really should have some forums, like, yeah, we totally should be. Wait, so how do we do that? And we wrote like a little contract, right? like the first, I think, business development contract that you could probably make. He was head of, , business development, eBay. Right. So he did that. I mean, he’s very well known sort of angel kind of lead syndicate guy.

Now I like an angel is for like for, for ages.

Pablos: Oh, Penchina. I know who you’re talking about. Yeah.

Ash: We still have like the first document, you will do this. I will do this. I will give you a forum. You will use it for people to talk about, I don’t know, the, the, their beanie baby or whatever they were selling back then. And the, the reality was that that took off and then we started supplying this technology, which we then enabled, we RSS enabled it, by the way, of course, at some point, right.

When it was, when the, when the XML feeds were like ready to go, we upgraded from XML And then we, we, we took that and we said, all right, let’s go, let’s go for it. And at some point we’re doing 30 million a month, 30 million people a month. Unique. We’re like on this thing and we never governed.

You could, you could go hidden, right? Kind of like your locked Instagram page versus not, but we didn’t govern anything. Forums had moderators, they were self appointed moderators of that domain of, of madness. So if you didn’t like that person’s moderation, You know, like, all right, screw this guy. You know, like, I don’t, I don’t want to listen to you.

You’re crazy. And what we found, and this was the piece of data that I think that was the wildest. Servers are expensive back then. You actually have to have servers. Or in our case we were beating everyone else. Cause we had a VAX that was locked in a, Halon secure room. No, because it came when we repurchased it for a dollar.

Like the VAX was still there and Lachlan Murdoch’s, office became our like conference room. No, I’m not kidding. It was, it was really crazy. There was a, it was just a

VAX sitting there and, Hey, look, you could run UNIX on it. We were good. We didn’t care. It loved threads and it was good.

And it could do many, many, many, many threads. So we were running this, this thing highly efficiently. There’s six people in a company doing that much. That was the company, literally six. I look today and how many people we hire and I’m like, there were six of us. It was wild, the iceberg effect took place. So what ended up happening is the percent, and this is where I think Facebook can’t do or doesn’t want to do, is how do you advertise below the waterline? And when we were sitting there with the traffic, we’re like, dude, why is there so much traffic, but we can’t see it, right?

It looked like we only had 20, 000 forums or something, and there was like all this mad traffic going on. And. It was something like the 80, 20 rule the other way. It was like 20 percent was indexable that you could see that you could join a forum. And it was 80 percent were, were insane things like Misty’s fun house.

That by the way, is a legitimate. Forum at one point, right? It was Misty’s fun house. So I’m just saying, cause we’re trying to figure out what was going on. Where were the people chatting and talking? And that’s what we did. We let them bury themselves deeper and deeper and deeper.

Usenet did that. If you just go back in time, what do you think BBSs were? It’s the same.

Pablos: Exactly.

Ash: We always love talking.

Pablos: Yeah. People love talking.

Ash: You just figure out which one you want to dial into.

Pablos: Nobody’s pissed off about who they’re talking to really. Usually they’re pissed off about who other people are talking. They’re pissed off about some conversation they’re not really a part of. Or a conversation they can be a spectator on, but doesn’t match their culture.

That’s one of the big problems with Twitter it’s like BBSs, and it’s BBS culture. Elon was the winner of the Twitter game long before he bought Twitter, because, that’s just BBS culture that he had in his mind, IRC or whatever.

All kinds of people who are not part of that culture, are observing it and think that it’s a horrible state, of society that people could be trolling each other and shit. And that’s just part of the fun. You have this problem when you try to cram too many cultures into one place, it takes a lot of struggle to work that out if you’re in, Jamaica, Queens, then you’re gonna, you’re gonna work it out over time, with a lot of struggle, you’re going to work it out and the cultures are going to learn to get along.

But in, but on Twitter, there’s no incentive.

Ash: That’s why we still have states. The EU still has, like, how many languages? That’s why we have Jersey for New Yorkers.

Pablos: The EU in their way has figured out how these cultures can get along.

I think there’s a real simple fix to this. The big death blow to RSS in some sense was that the winning reader app was Google Reader. And so the vast majority, of the world that was using RSS was using Google Reader. And then I don’t totally have insight on how this happened, but, Google chose to shut down Google Reader.

And I don’t know if they were trying to steer people into their, Facebook knockoff products or whatever at the time. in a lot of ways I think what it did is it just handed the internet over to Facebook. Because anybody who was being satisfied by that, and just ended up getting, into their Facebook news feed instead.

So it just kind of ran into a walled garden. I don’t really blame Facebook for this, the way a lot of people want to. I blame the users. You’ve got to take some responsibility, make your own choice, choose something that’s good for you, and most people are not willing to do that.

But, I think to make it easier for them, and there is a case to be made that , people got better things to do than architect their own rSS reader process, but we could kind of do it for them. And so I think there’s one, one big kingpin missing, which is you could make a reader app that would be like an iPhone app now.

And you could think of it as like open source Instagram. It’s just an Instagram knockoff, but instead of following, other people on a centralized platform by Instagram, it just follows RSS. And then it only picks up RSS posts that have at least one picture, right? So any RSS post that has one picture and then the first time you post it automatically makes a WordPress blog for you, that’s free. And then, posts your shit as RSS compliant blog posts, but the reader experience is still just very Instagramesque. So now it’s completely decentralized in the sense that like you own your blog, yeah, WordPress is hosting it, but that’s all open source. You could download it, move it to Guam if you want, whatever you want to do.

So now all publishers have their own direct feeds. All users are publishers, which is kind of the main thing that Facebook solved.

Ash: Content is no longer handed over to someone, right? That’s the other big thing.

Pablos: Exactly. The content is yours and then your followers are yours, right? When they follow you, they follow you at your URL.

And so you can take them with you wherever you go. And then to make this thing more compelling, you just add a few tabs. You add the Twitteresque tab. You add the TikTokesque tab for videos. And, add, the podcast tab. So now, posts are just automatically sorted into the tab for the format that matches them.

Because people have different modalities for, for consuming this shit. So, depending on what you’re in the mood for, you might want to just look at pictures because you’re on a conference call. Fine. Instagram. Or, you know, you might want to watch videos because you’re on a flight.

Who knows? So, the point being, all of this is easy to do. You and I could build that in a weekend. And then the reason that this works, the reason this will win is because you can win over the creators, right? Because the sales pitch to a creator, and those are the people who drive the following anyway, you see TikTok and everybody else kissing the ass of creators because that’s who attracts the following.

The creators win because they’re not giving anything up to the platform. Because they make money off advertising. So fine. We make an advertising business and we still, take some cut of what the creators push out. But if they don’t like us, there’s a market for that, right? The market is I’m just pushing ads out along with my content to my followers.

Some of them watch the ads. Some of them don’t. I have this much of an impact. And so now you get the platforms out of the way.

Ash: If you do it right, Google has ad networks that they drop everywhere.

Pablos: Everybody has ad networks already for websites. You could just use that. Amazon has one. So you can sign up for that if you want. Or the thing that creators want to do, which is go do collabs, go do direct deals with brands.

Now you’re getting 100 percent of that income. You pump it out to your fans. And there’s no ad network in the middle. Nobody’s taking a cut. Alright, if you could cut your own deals, then great, but you’re in control and you can’t be shadow banned, you can’t be deprioritized in the feed, because that’s the game that’s happening.

These platforms, they figure out you’re selling something, you immediately get deprioritized. And so the creators are all pissed off anyway. So I think we can win them over easily enough. And then the last piece of it is, there’s one thing that doesn’t exist, which is you still need to prioritize your feed.

You still need an advanced algorithm to do it. You don’t want to be twiddling knobs and dials all day. You might put in -Hitler if you want. But what should happen is you should also be able to subscribe to feed ranking services. So that could be, the ACLU, or the EFF, or the KKK, whoever you think should be ranking your feed.

Ash: Well, I was actually thinking you could subscribe to a persona. So people could create their own recipes. So this is the world according to Ash, right? Here you go. Like, I’ve got my own thing. I’ve done my dials, my tuning, my tweaks, my stuff. And you want to see how I see the world. Here we go. The class I teach, that’s the first day I tell people, take Google news and sit down and start tuning it. And everyone’s like, well, let me just start to just add, put ups and downs, ups and downs, add Al Jazeera, do whatever you want.

Just do everything that you want, just make them fight and put all of that in and then go down the rabbit hole. But there’s no way to export that. When we start class, I always talk about viewpoints And how all content needs a filter because we are filter. But if I want to watch the world as Pablos, I can’t, there’s no, you can’t give me your lens.

So if we look at the lens concept, today you can tune Google News, there is a little subscribe capability, but you could tune it and poke it a little bit, and it will start giving you info. It’s not the same, quite the same as RSS, but it’s giving you all the news feeds from different places, right?

Could get Breitbart, you could get, Al Jazeera, you could get all the stuff that you want. And if you go back in time to, to when I was working with the government, that was actually my sort of superpower, writing these little filters and getting, Afghani conversations in real time translated.

And then find the same village, in the same way. So then I would have two viewpoints at the same time. The good thing was that when you did that what I haven’t seen, and I would love, love this take place, is for someone to build a, Pablos filter,? And I could be like, “all right, let me, let me go see the world the way he sees it.” his -Hitler, his minus, minus, -election, – Trump, -Biden, that’s fine. And then, and now I have a little Pablos recipe. I can like click my glasses, and then, then suddenly I see the world, meaning I filter the world through Pablos’s.

Pablos: Yeah, I think that, I think we’re saying a similar thing because then what you could do is you could, subscribe to that. You could subscribe to the Pablos filter. You could subscribe to the…

Ash: exactly, I’m taking your ACLU thing one step further. I think ACLU is like narrow, but you could go into like personality.

Pablos: You could even just reverse engineer the filter by watching what I read. My reader could figure out my filter by seeing the choices that I make.

Ash: Yeah, if it’s stored it right, if we had another format, but let’s just say that we had an RSS feed filter format. ’cause it’s there. It’s really the parameters of your RSS anyway. But if you could somehow save that, config file, go back thousand years, right? If you could save the config.ini, that’s what you want? And I could be like, Hey, Pablo, so I can hand that over. Let’s share that with me. And now what’s interesting is works really well. And it also helps because each person owning their own content, the, the beauty of that becomes, you never, you never filtered, you never blocked you, you, you’re self filtering.

Pablos: That’s right.

Ash: We’re self subscribing to each other’s filters.

Pablos: Publishers become the masters of their domain. If you’ve got a problem with a publisher, you’ve got to go talk to them, not some intermediary. The problem is on a large scale, control is being exercised by these intermediaries. And they have their own ideas and agendas and things.

The job here is to disintermediate – which was the whole point of the internet in the first place – communication between people.

Ash: Then the metadata of that becomes pretty cool, by the way. If I figured out that, okay, now it looks like 85 percent of the population has, has gone -Biden, -Trump.

Let’s think about that. Suddenly you’ve got other info, right? Suddenly you’re like, Oh, wait a minute. and if you’re an advertiser or you’re a product creator, or you’re a, like just sitting there trying to figure out how can I get into the world, that becomes really valuable, right? Because you could. Go in and say, people just don’t give a shit about this stuff, guys.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. Whereas when you have one algorithmic machine somewhere in Meta/Facebook, whatever we want to call it, pushing things up, it could be pushing sand uphill, right? It could be like stimulating things that you don’t necessarily know you want. The structure that you just described flips that on its head because it says, Hey, I just don’t want to listen to this shit, guys.

Like, I just could not give a crap about what you’re saying.

Pablos: Right.

Ash: And if enough people happen to do that, then the content creators also have some, some idea of what’s going on. We try to decode lenses all day long,? We spend our life, like you said, in meetings or in collaborations or business development. What do you think we do? We sit there, we’re trying to figure out the other person’s view. We’re trying to understand if you’re a salesperson, “Hey, can I walk a mile in that guy’s shoes” or speak like that person, I’ve never heard of anyone sort of selling me, lending me, letting me borrow their RSS, like, their filter. That would be phenomenal, that’d be great.

And I bet you, if you did it right, you might even solve a lot of problems in the world because then you could see what they see, you know, I don’t want to touch the topics that we know are just absolute powder kegs, but every time we get to these topics, I always tell the person, can you show me what you, what are you reading?

Pablos: Yeah.

Ash: Like, where did you get?

Pablos: Yeah.

Ash: You ever, you ever asked someone like, “where did you get that?” and then they show you, they show you kind of their, feed. And you’re just like, what is going on? Like, if you, if you go to someone, whether they’re pro or anti vax, it doesn’t matter where it is.

And just look at their feed, look at what they’re listening to, because it’s not the same thing I’m listening to, because the mothership has, has decreed which, which one we each get. But you look at it and then you’re like, okay, maybe the facts that they were presented with were either incomplete and maybe not maliciously?

I get it in the beginning of this, you started like, okay, is it malicious and didn’t do it would get changed. But if you just cut out, I don’t know, let’s just say there’s like 10 pieces of news, but I only give you five and I give the other person the other five.

And they’re not synchronous, you’re going to start a fight. There’s no question. What we don’t have is the ability to say, Hey, like, let me, let me be Pablos for a second before I start screaming, let me see what he sees. that will probably change that could change a lot.

Pablos: Think it could. That and certainly there’s a cognitive bias that feels comfortable in an echo chamber. This is one of the issues that we’re really experiencing is that, the process of civilization, literally means “to become civil” to do that.

It’s sort of the long history of humans figuring out how to control obsolete biological instincts. We’ve been evolved to want to steal each other’s food and girlfriends. That’s not specifically valuable or relevant at this point.

We’ve had to learn how to get along with more people, we’ve had to learn to become less violent, we’ve had to learn to, play the long game socially, those things. And, there’s work to do on that as far as like how we consume all this, this information, all the media.

You’re using the wrong part of your brain to tune your feed right now. You’re using the lazy Netflix part of your brain to tune your news, and that’s not really , how are you going to get good results. There’s work to do to evolve the tools and work to do to evolve the sensibilities around these things.

And so, you know, what I’m suggesting is like, we’re not going to get there by handing it over to the big wall garden. You got to get there through this, again, sort of. Darwinian process of trying a lot of things and so you’ve described some really cool things that we’d want to be able to try that are impractical to try because things are architected wrong and using Facebook is the central switchboard of these conversations or Twitter or whatever and so you know what we need is a more open platform where like you know we can all take a stab at figuring out how to design cool filters that express our point of view and share them.

And that’s not possible in the current architecture. I think the last thing is, there are certainly other frustrations and attempts to go solve some class of these, some subset of these problems. You’ve got Mastodon, of course, and the Fediverse, and you’ve got Blue Sky trying in their way to make a sort of open Twitter thing.

And then you’ve got, these other attempts, but a lot of them are pretty heavy handed architecturally. As far as I can tell, most of them end up just being some suburb of people who are pissed off about one thing or another that they get its adoption, right? So, Mastodon is basically a place for people who are, backlashing against Twitter. As far as I can tell.

Ash: Yeah, and we even worked on one, right? Called Ourglass.

Pablos: I don’t know that one.

Ash: It was coming out and we actually did an entire session on it. I actually worked on some of the product thought design on, on how that works. , it was like, it’s all on chain. Part of the, the thing that, we did was very similar to what you’re talking about.

You wanted the knobs and the controls, and you wanted people to rant in their space. I know it gets pretty dark when you say, okay, but what are they allowed to talk about in in the dark depths of that sort of internet and and I say, “well, they already talk about it, guys”

Whether they get into a smoky back room or, there’s somewhere else that if they don’t say it, I feel we get more frustrated.

Pablos: The fundamental difference here is between centralized services. That’s certainly Facebook and Twitter, but it’s also Delphi and AOL, versus open, decentralized protocols and the protocols in time win over the services like TCP/IP won over AOL, AOL was centralized service, TCP/IP, decentralized protocol.

At the beginning it was a worse user experience, harder to use, but It’s egalitarian and it won and I think that that’s kind of the moment we’re in right now with with the social media. We’re still on centralized service mode and it needs to be architected as decentralized protocol and we had a chance to do that before Facebook and we lost and so now there’s just like the next battle is like how do we get back on the track of decentralized protocol, and I think if we just define them…

That’s why I think RSS won because it’s called Really Simple Syndication for a reason. Because it’s really simple. It was easy for any developer to integrate. Everybody could do it.

And so it just became ubiquitous almost overnight. You could design something cooler with the blockchain and whatnot. But it’s probably over engineered for the job. And the job right now is just like, get adoption.

Ash: We started going down that path. So Delphi’s sort of twin. Was, called Prospero. So Prospero was, little Tempest reference, was designed. As a way that you could just adopt it. That was that, that first eBay deal. And then we did about.com and most of the stuff.

And right now you see Discuss. It’s at the bottom of, of some comments. It’s a supported service where, you had one party taking care of all of the threads and handles and display methods and posts and logins. And, you were seamlessly logged into the other sites. MD5 sort of hash and we did the first single sign on type nonsense, and we used to build gateways between the two, you’re going to go from one to another, but the whole idea was that you provide, the communication tool, As a, as an open or available service.

And you could charge for for storing it. And then what happens is you don’t do the moderation as a tool. That’s your problem. You strip it back to “look, I’m going to provide you the car and I don’t care how you drive it.” Go back to our story, whether you’re in Vietnam or Riyadh or whatever you’re doing, we’re going to, we’re not there to tell you which lane to go into, but that’s, that’s your problem. I think that one of the challenges with like RSS, cause we were RSS compliant, by the way.

I’m pretty sure Prospero and I’m sure it’s still around because it went XML to RSS. And I remember the fact that you could subscribe to any forum that was Prospero powered.

You could subscribe to it a lot, like directly through your RSS reader.

And I remember what was great about it is that people were like, “we don’t want, your viewer.” Just like we didn’t want your AOL view of like, “you’ve got mail.” I want my own POP server and then IMAP or whatever it is. I think there does need to be, like you said, someone putting together a little toolkit that’s super easy. They don’t need to know it’s got RSS. They don’t need to know anything. But it’s like, “own your post.” it can be like an Own Your Post service. And then the Own Your Post service happens to publish RSS and everything else, and it’s compliant.

Pablos: I think you just make an iPhone app and when you set up the app it just automatically makes you a WordPress blog and if you want you can go move it later.

Ash: You got it. All that other stuff is just automated.

Pablos: You don’t even have to know it’s WordPress. It’s behind the scenes.

Ash: If you were going to do this, what you would do is you’d launch and I would launch it like three different companies. Like three different tools. I’ve got a, “keep your content” tool and the keep your content guys are something compliant, RSS. You keep bringing it back. It’s published, it’s out there and then some new company, Meta Two, Son of Meta, creates a reader. Anyone that’s got a RSS tag on it, we’re a reader for it. So anyone using Keep Your Content or, whatever. the idea being that now you’re showing that there’s some adoption. You almost don’t have to rig it. There is a way to do this because no one wants to download a reader if there aren’t sources.

Pablos: The thing can bootstrap off of existing sources because there’s so much RSS compliant content. You could imagine like day one. If you downloaded this reader today. You could follow Wall Street Journal and just everything online. And some of it you have to charge for it. Like Substack has RSS. I follow Substacks. You could just follow those things in the app Substack has a reader, but it only does Substacks, and probably Medium has one that only does Medium. But we have one that does both, plus New York Times and everything else.

So now, like any other thing, you just follow a bunch of stuff. And then, there’s a button that’s like post. Sure, post. Boom. Now that fires up your own WordPress blog. Now you’re posting. All your content’s being saved. You control it. You got some followers or if you have this many followers, here’s how much you can make in ad revenue.

Boom, sign up for ad network. Now you’re pushing ads out. All This could be done with existing stuff, just glued together, I think, and with the possible exception of the filter thing, which, needs to be more advanced probably worth revisiting.

Ash: I think what You could do is maybe the very first thing you do, create the filter company, like your RSS glasses. So instead of having to do that heavy lift, curate Pablos’s, I would love to get your RSS feed list. How do you give it to me? How could you give me your RSS configured viewer?

Pablos: A lot of RSS readers make it really easy to like republish your own feed. So like all the things I subscribe to, then go into feed…

Ash: But then, that’s blended, right?

Pablos: Oh, it’s blended. Yeah, for sure.

Ash: Is blended, right? So now it becomes your feed. I’m saying, can I get your configuration?

Pablos: I don’t know if there’s a standard for that.

Ash: I’m saying that’s maybe the thing you create a meta, Meta.

Pablos: Honestly, I think these days what you would do is just have a process that looks at everything I read, feeds it into an LLM, and tries to figure out like how do you define what Pablos is interested in that way. You probably would get a lot more nuance.

Ash: That’s to find out what you’re interested in.

Pablos: It’s almost like you want your feed filtered through my lens.

Ash: That’s exactly what I want. I want to read the same newspaper you’re reading, so to speak. So if you assume that that feed that you get is a collection of stories. That’s your newspaper, the Pablos newspaper, right?

That’s what it is, Times of Pablos and you have a collection of stories that land on your page, right? It’s been edited. Like you’re the editor, you’re the editor in chief of your little newspaper. If you think of all your RSS feeds ripped down your, your own newspaper, I’d like to read that newspaper.

How do I do that? That doesn’t exist. I don’t think that’s easy to do. And if I can do that, that’d be great.

Pablos: If you’re looking on Twitter and people are reposting, if I go look at your Twitter feed and all you do is repost stuff and then occasionally make a snarky comment, that’s kind of what I’m getting.

I’m getting the all the stuff you thought was interesting enough to repost and I think that’s a big part of like why reposting merits having a button in Twitter because that’s the signal you’re getting out of it. I don’t love it because it’s part of what I don’t like about Twitter is I’m not seeing a lot of unique thought from the people I follow.

I’m just seeing shit they repost. And so my Twitter feed is kind of this amalgamation of all the things that were reposted by all the people I follow and and to me, that’s what I don’t want. I would rather just see the original post by those people. Twitter doesn’t let me do that, so I’m scrolling a lot just to get to the, first person content.

I think it is a way of substantiating what you’re saying, though, which is “There’s a value in being able to see the world through someone else’s eyes.” Repost might just be kind of a budget version of that.

Ash: The reason I say that it’s valuable, it’s like the old days you’d sit on train and maybe even today and you had a physical copy of the New York Times, and everyone, and you could see who reads the New York Times and who reads the Journal.

Right. And who reads The Post and The Daily News, that’s what you can tell. And those people had their lenses, you go to the UK and everyone, this is the guardian, the independent, whatever. And you were like, Oh, that’s a time, Times reader. That’s a Guardian reader or someone looking at page three of the sun. I have no idea what they’re doing, but, you knew immediately where they were.

Pablos: It’s the editorial layer.

Ash: You got it.

Pablos: it’s what’s missing in today’s context. What’s missing now is you got publishers, and you got the readers. but the editor is gone.

Ash: Well, it’s not gone, that’s the problem, right? So what we did is , in the, in the world of press, there was a printing press and an editorial group took stories and they shoved them through the printing press. And then, the next minute, another editorial group came in and ran it through the printing press. so if you went out , and you were making your sort of manifestos, the printing press probably didn’t care, right? The guy at like quickie print or whatever it was didn’t care. Today, Facebook claims it’s the place to publish, but it’s not. Because it’s editorial and publish so that so what they’re doing is they’re taking your IP They’re taking a content and then there’s putting their editorial layer on it. Even if it’s a light touch or heavy touch, whatever it is. But it’s sort of like if the guy that was the printing press like “I don’t really like your font.” ” Dude, that’s how I designed it.”

I want the font. Like I like Minion, Minion Pro is my thing, right? That’s what I’m going to do. But, but if they just decided to change it, you’d be really pissed off. Now, Facebook claims to be an agnostic platform, but they’re not an ISP. They’re not a, an open architecture. like we would have had in the past where like you host what you wanted to host. There, you host what you want to host, but they’re going to down promote you.

They’re going to boost you. They’re going to unboost you. So wait a minute, hold on a second. You’re, you’re not really an open platform. And I think that’s what you’re getting at, which is, either you’re a tool to publish or you’re the editorial, the minute you’re both.

You’re an editorial.

You’re actually no longer a tool.

Pablos: That’s exactly right.

I think, that’s the key thing, we’ve got to separate those things.

Ash: That’s the element. And I think that that tells you a lot about why we get frustrated.

If Twitter was just a fast way to shove 140 characters across multiple SMS, which we didn’t have, because we’re in the U.S. We were silly and we didn’t have GSM. That’s what Twitter was, right?

Twitter was kind of like the first version of like a unified messaging platform. Cause it was like, you could broadcast 140 characters and it would work on the lowest common denominator, which was your StarTAC flip phone.

So the point was that Twitter was a not unmoderated open tool.

Then it got editorial. And now it’s then it’s no longer. And I think that’s the problem, right? It used to be, you had a wall on Facebook and you did whatever the hell you wanted to. And then Facebook said I need to make money and it became the publisher, became the editorial board.

Pablos: Okay, so we have a lightweight plan to save the internet. Let’s see if we can find somebody to go build this stuff.

Ash: If you could build that last thing, I think it’s not a, it’s not a complicated one, but they, I think they just need to sit down and, grab your feed. Or someone can come up with a collection of, Mixtapes, let’s call it.

Pablos: Yeah, cool. Mixtapes, I like that.

Ash: Internet Mixtapes. There you go.

Recorded on December 22, 2023

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