Latest newsletter yakcollective.substack.com/p/yak-trails-2
and are iterating on a really cool way to scrape and semi-auto-compile our Discord activity into an update newsletter.
Conversation
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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