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It’s a fascinating challenge since newsletters are generally thought of as marketing and the discord streams are more like the inner life of a group that will make no sense to outsiders. So the project is about taking a relatively legible state snapshot.
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It’s more like an MRI than a photograph. I suspect this kind of content will increase in the world as automation improves. Reading it is closer to radiology than literacy.
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But this is a feature not a bug IMO. The world is increasingly awash in packaged marketing that’s easy to grok and says little. But TextOps as a scanning tech is both new and promising, given that machine learning nlp tech is coming down the pipeline.
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Imagine firehose sources of millions of words being intelligently semi-auto-summarized. Producing things like this will be to writing text as drawing single static pictures is to movie-making/editing.
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I’m not directly involved in this project, though as an active discord member I often end up featured in it. But it intrigues me as an an alternative to directly competing for scarce attention and engagement with increasingly desperate and sophisticated persuasion techniques.
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One reason I’m meh on the “ermahgad they’re hacking our attention with super-sophisticated hacks” moral panic crowd is that it doesn’t actually work on anyone whose attention is worth having. For people doing interesting things, their goals are strong filters.
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Packaging crap persuasively is not a particularly important problem for interesting producers, and filtering it out is not hard for interesting audiences. It’s sort of a 101 problem of learning to be Very Online . tldr: get an interesting life and you’ll be fine.
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But the rapid growth of oceans of information that IS worth the attention of people but hard to package, is a real problem. It’s hard to present for producers, hard to consume for audiences. Automation for semantic summarization can help on both ends, but it’s very challenging.
Correction, third tag in OT should be @nathan_acks … necopinus is his discord handle. Nathan and lead our infrastructure dev on the web/api plumbing side and Python-based Discord automation side respectively. Between them they’re inventing a kind of TextOps.
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