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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> “So if I’m into guitar making and a Japanese guy has an 80% overlap of links on guitar making, it’s highly probable that I’m going to enjoy looking at what he’s done and enjoy navigating into his knowledge base. This is still very far away, but it’s basically a cultural search engine.”

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That interesting bit was first uttered at least a dozen years ago, and for the most part we've collectively decided that following that thought to its conclusions is exactly how Facebook got into the Current Troubles with farming dissent.

What it doesn't take into account is that the reason I only think 90% the same things as someone else is that I've accidentally or consciously avoided going down certain rabbit holes that are likely to break your brain. This concept that 'there are no dangerous thoughts' is directly at odds with, "there are some things you can't unsee". If you believe both things at once, then you're fooling yourself.

We protect our lizard brain from stuff that is rationally objectionable all the time so that we don't horrible things in the spur of the moment.

A lie is best concealed between two truths, and cults of every kind know that they have to find common ground with you. And on the internet there isn't a door for you to hide behind and "don't make eye contact" doesn't work as well. And then you add social networking algorithms that build the cult for you. You don't even have to decide to build a cult to end up running one.

Delicious offered something a lot like this. Obviously they only had actual bookmarks and tags were manually chosen by people (there wasn’t really machine learning) but on average tags made sense and by looking at the tags that people commonly applied to links, one could find similar links by searching for those tags. Some problems would be spam and the fact that modern urls are more likely to try to be unique—you’d need to figure out how to strip the tracking part from each url.

This would be a huge moderation task, I suspect. Maybe solvable... but probably very difficult.

(Wasn’t there a startup a while ago that let you add notes to any website, and they were visible to all... but it was horribly abused?)

Might you be referring to Dissenter? I think it started as a browser extension, now it's a browser:

https://dissenter.com/download

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