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Comment by mgdev | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what's next.

We had BBSes, usenet, email, IRC, webmail, ICQ, social media of all kinds, then private communities via commercial companies (Discord, Slack).

What does a person-to-person communication protocol that leans into LLMs (vs sees it as purely competitive or an impediment) look like?

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I've been mulling over the idea of a vouch-based social network. You can follow someone or whatever, and you can also tag them as "person I've met" or "my uncle." If you see a post that's insane or spam, you can open a little graph that shows you that the reason you're seeing this post is because this is your friend's friend's friend, and you can bug your friend about it. Everyone will have a responsibility to only tag people who they know are actual real people who post content with their hands.

Unless you find a way to stop bots, they will overrun everything and all tag each other as "someone I've met"

lobste.rs has an account tree thing. I don't know how well it works at all, but maybe in a worst-case scenario the moderators can get rid of an entire subtree, at the cost of some collateral damage.

https://lobste.rs/users

This is interesting, though I'm envisioning a web rather than a tree.

That's fine, it'll all be left-handed whuffie (in Cory Doctorow terms) because although they'll all tag each other, they won't be part of my tag web.

Then you'll see the common entry point to that network and untag it. Maybe your uncle's friend (who is secretly a spammer) tagged a bunch of bots as family members so you cut off your uncle's friend. Or your uncle, if he has a lot of these friends.

It probably won't work in reality but that's the idea.

I like the idea of financial or reputational stakes tied to information. I just don’t know how the mechanics work out such that all the incentives are aligned.

Whoever figures it out will enjoy the same boons that PageRank gave Google for years.

A next generation spam filter, perhaps. Rather than answer your interesting emails, the communication tool that leans into LLMs will show it to you so you can respond to it personally or have the LLM make a response that you review. And as for it being a different protocol, it would handle a lot more messages through training rules about which messages to filter, which to store long term, which to store short term, etc.

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