Comment by scotty79

If only we could separate out social network from content.

I think chat apps are a good place to start. It's a place where contents of your friends list matters. Where the only way to have something recommended to you is asking someone for it or someone close to you coming to the conclusion that you, personally might enjoy it.

What's left to figure out is how to connect these systems that have strong identity and viciously curated friends lists to recommendation engines and content mills in a way that's opt-in. That lets users control the content that lands in their lap. That let's them decide where they land between "I'm gonna ask a friend about what's cool" and "just plug me to firehose" spectrum.

The connection should let users make available many freshly generated pseudonymous identities so that content mills can only create ephemeral profiles of you.

I imagine chat systems should let you tag your contacts and expose only a part of your social network when you ask content mill for recommend content.

There's so much more to discover beyond the modern status quo where we basically surrendered everything.