Thoughts on Social Algorithms

What Facebook could have been

Early-2000s Facebook, for college kids, was genuinely revolutionary. It let you explore and meet people you'd never have met otherwise. Compare that to college students now: they have none of it. You log into Instagram and see slop. I have friends who sit on reels all day. Maybe an image here and there. It's all fake, performative, vain. It's not connecting you to anyone. It's a bunch of high school friends you don't care about anymore.

There's a real need for a social algorithm used for good.

Nobody else fills the gap

The point is: this doesn't exist anymore.

What they're actually doing

I think Facebook is genuinely evil now, same with Google. X is an exception because they stay in their lane. These companies have years of data on millions or billions of people. They could use it for anything. Instead they use it to get you more addicted and feed you reels.

Here's the dynamic: say you're into space content, you like a few posts, but you keep engaging with posts of women, so it just feeds you women. It knows human psychology. It wastes that real signal to make more money off you. That's the whole game.

What it should be

They could take that same web of people and profiles and actually connect you with anyone. Find the person who could be your best friend, your soulmate, a mentor, a collaborator, proactively. We literally have the technology. The algorithm is just switched to farm your brain for clicks instead of make your life better.

Say 5% of people stuck on reels have a hidden talent. Imagine if, instead of watching reels all day, they got connected to a mentor or a group working on the same thing. Think how much more culture and art we'd produce. More people working on cool problems instead of rotting on reels. That's a clear win.

If we did this right, all the numbers go up. Fertility, happiness, employment, everything, because we're more connected based on the data we already have on ourselves.

Why this is personal

I went to RIT as a freshman. I love simulations, programming, AI. I wanted to meet people into the same stuff. I didn't find the AI club for one or two months because there was no good way to find it. And when I did, there were people in there who never knew I existed. Those connections just got missed.

A real social algorithm, a closed ecosystem where you connect online and meet in real life, a few meters away, fixes exactly that. That's the end goal with belo.

Where I land

I don't know everything and I'm not certain on my thesis. This is just what I've noticed. But I really think algorithms used the right way could fundamentally change society for the better, instead of being used for the worst thing possible. I'm optimistic people wake up and decide maybe they don't want to watch reels for six hours a day. We'll see. I'm happy to keep trying for it.