A good friend called me yesterday and, after talking a bit, he asked if I would let others post on Opinion Paper. I told him, yes, the plan is to allow multiple authors to post on a different website, Opinion Papers. I own the domain, but haven't created the website yet.

You see the logo for it on this post.

As Elon starts doing a form of censorship with "more positive," AI-fueled algorithms, X is a wonderful place to get the latest news, but you have to scroll endlessly through a bunch of crap. His notion of "unregretted user seconds" - the time you regret spending on X for content you don't care for - will never be right.

Let's back up a bit.

When I go to the internet, I determine what sites I visit, what content I read. That is how I maximize my "unregretted user seconds." I choose where I go and how long I spend there.

I don't have that capability on X. An algorithm determines what content I see. No computer can determine me, my tastes, my thinking, my impulses. That maximizes the user seconds I do regret. Every time I go on X, I see something where I ask, why am I seeing this? Ditto Facebook.

An algorithm is failure. It cannot help but fail. So why not just let the person choose for themselves what content they want to see?

That's what search engines once did. Google's Page Rank looked for the frequency of words and their placement on the page and the number of sites that pointed to the page to determine how high up the page would be in any search results. Now, censorship and data farming and political bias is built in and sorts accordingly.

As a tech guy, I kind of understand why this change came about. To understand how to really streamline search results, you had to know to use the dash character in front of a word you wanted to filter out of the results.

For example: if you wanted to know about what states grow corn, but you wanted to filter Iowa out of the results, you type "corn state -iowa" into Google. Try it with and without to see the difference.

This requires tech savvy and too many people struggle with technology so the idea was to instead guess at what a person might want to see. Less tech support, less frustration, and if it got you right a decent percentage of the time, you probably wouldn't complain about the cute cat video you hadn't seen before.

As I mentioned in a previous post here on OP, social media penalizes you for providing links to other sites. They lose money when you walk away from the site. No ad revenue that way, so posts with links get little attention. This is why I put links to OP content in the comments rather than the post itself on FB.

Free expression is important. Your ability to choose is important. Your ability to source your information with links to other sites is important.

You deserve complete control. Complete control minimizes your "unregretted user seconds."

So, if you want to be an author on Opinion Papers when it rolls in February, let me know.