alt Hacker NewsThis API seems perfect for an idea I've had for a while: a de-snarkifier for social media.
Social media can be intellectually stimulating and educational, but it's also easy to get sucked into ideological sniping and flamewars, even if you didn't go looking for it. The emotional and intellectual energy spent flaming strangers on the Internet is a complete waste of human capital.
With an API like this, I assume you could have a browser extension that could de-snarkify content before showing it to you. You could ask the LLM to preserve all factual content from the post, but to de-claw any aggressive or snarky language. If you really wanted to have fun, you could ask it to turn anything written in an aggressive tone into something that sounds absurd or incompetent, so that the more aggressive the post, the more it would make the author look silly.
This could have a double benefit. For the reader, it insulates them from the personal attacks of random strangers on the Internet. Don't get me wrong, there is a time and a place for real, charged arguments about important issues that affect us all. But there is little to be gained from having those fights with strangers; on the contrary, I think it poisons the body politic when strangers are screaming at each other.
For the writer, it takes away any incentive to be snarky or rude. If other people filter their content this way, there's no point in trying to be mean to them, and no "race to the bottom" for who can be more nasty.
Replies
Kinda looking forward to something like this, as it has the potential to remove empty junk calories from the internet, hopefully leading to SIGNIFICANTLY less use of today's popular platforms.
My wish list:
- Eliminate ALL clickbait titles and ads. I only want to see a dry factual title.
- For any given topic, I only care about the main article (with the option to only see a summary, unless its a high quality blog) and couple of substantive comments, rest is junk I don't want to see.
The current state of popular social media sites has meant that I don't use it at all (except HN, which is trending in the same direction due to saturation with AI), but every other week or so I end up wasting a few hours, which I'd like to avoid entirely.
Ideally this would lead to 98% of content filtered/summarised out, and over time only use the internet for looking things up with intention. I want this to remove majority of "entertainment" value from the internet (by default) so that time/energy can be refocused in real life and high quality sources (books) only.
For YouTube, this already exists and I‘m using it. The extension is caller DeArrow and aims to reduce sensationalism via crowdsourcing, though I wouldn’t be surprised if top contributors are bots using LLMs.
Chrome PM for built-in AI APIs here.
I love this "de-snarkifier" idea and it seems to have broad interest. I couldn't resist hacking (well, vibe coding[1]) a "Snarknada" prototype to explore the viability, including patterns for low-latency and accuracy.
You’ve hit on exactly why we think on-device is the right move for this class of use cases. If you tried to "de-snark" an entire infinite-scrolling feed via a cloud API, the token costs would be astronomical for a developer. Plus, people (rightly) don't want to send their private social feeds or DMs to a third-party server just to clean up the tone.
Moving this to the device should make high-frequency "Semantic Mutation" financially and technically viable for the first time. If you (or anyone else) starts building this more seriously than my PM vibe coded toy, and hits specific friction points, I’d love to hear about them: it helps us prioritize the roadmap.
[1]: If you're using a coding agent (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.), I recommend pointing it to https://www.npmjs.com/package/built-in-ai-skills-md-agent-md. Most models were trained on the now-obsolete window.ai namespace, and this skill file helps them use the current APIs correctly.
I think it's an interesting idea to explore.
But... It's the type of idea that is unpredictable as it comes into contact with reality. If it works, it probably works very differently from the initial idea of how it will work.
I've thought about this for HN which, now that it's become so big, just has a lot of aggressive negativity and snark. You'd probably run into the same problem as Usenet Killfiles: the folks that use Killfiles would see random orphaned conversations or would just miss large parts of threads while the people that don't have Killfiles would see a mess of toxicity that would make them want to leave. Likewise if you prompt filter your experience, you'll be separating your experience from everyone else's.
Or just ignore it. Or say you will not engage under [conditions]. Ultimately it will be you who looks foolish when the AI rewrote something incorrectly and you engaged with something that wasn't being said.
I would love an app like this. I am a frequent user of https://www.boringreport.org/ for news, which does something like what you’re describing but for news articles.
Though I hate the idea of this, I can see it becoming popular in some use cases, such as schools with "safe places".
It is important, however, not intellectualise repugnant, racist, or inflamatory language; it deserves to be called out for what it is aimed at doing
On the other hand it would make all comments sound the same and further dilute internet content into average slop.
And then we will understand reality even more. Only let the tech giants tell us what other people are expressing. Great idea
Don't you think its better to just curate your social media and follow communities where the default is not toxicity? This is basically a distortion layer for reality and will just encourage more echo chambers.
Also what is toxic to one person is not toxic to another depending on their subjective choices. How will you solve for this without everyone just seeing what they want to see even if reality is not like that? I feel that will just enhance the problems of social media than reduce it.
It kind of falls apart when you start to think of edge cases rather than "hey this tool will keep morons off my feed!" mentality
I was literally just thinking that I’d like something like this for HN, which has become an incredibly bitter, cynical, and depressing place in the last decade. On virtually any story, most of the top comments are negative. Every major company is a greedy monster trying to destroy your life, every CEO is a sociopath, everything is terrible, all the time. I wonder how most HN users even get out of bed every day.
[dead]
[dead]
This is the Soylent of written communication. Full nutritional value with an unremarkable flavor.