Comment by frosted-flakes
1 day ago
In my opinion the answer is curation. If you're getting so many magazines and newspapers in the post that you can't read them all, the answer isn't to hire someone to cut out random pages for you to read (oh, why are they all adverts?), the answer is to stop subscribing to so many publications.
I never fail to read all of my social media feeds and email messages, because I actively cancel subscriptions to stuff that I don't have time to read. After all, it's entertainment/casual education, not mandatory learning.
Most people never read most of the magazines and newspapers they got cover to cover. I certainly read a fairly small percentage of the New York Times.
Hire someone? What about just using a system that crowd-sources it. That's what "Thumbs Up" icons can do, if you can get people to use them.
Popularity contests don't do a great job of surfacing quality. They do OK at pruning away the dullest 25℅, but tend to also throw away the top 5‰ most interesting stuff, because that stuff is invariably niche. They also don't do great in the meh middle, favoring loudness and approachability over thoughtfulness and competence.
It's just like when people say Twitter/X is a Cesspool. Of course it is if you view the unfiltererd/agorithmic feed. However, if you only view the content from who you're following you get exactly the content you want.
I use Twitter/X and all I ever see is AI/LLM stuff because it's all I follow and all I use it for. Zero politics. If someone does a political post, that's an instant unfollow.
This is how we can rank RSS as well. You can look at a rank-ordered list only from people you trust, or a rank-ordered list from the public at large, which will be a dumpster fire. So you can take a union of all content from those you follow and put the ones with most upvotes at top, and viola, you're done.
EDIT: However a better approach is do use AI to categorize as, politics/non-politics, hotdog/non-hotdog, etc, and then I can turn off political posts without having to completely unfollow someone I'd otherwise like.
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