> Current content feeds are optimized for engagement (ie. advertisement load) and thus won't conceive of a "future self", only what your current self will look at and click on right now.

Spot on analysis. When I open Reddit it's indeed as if I don't have to think, I can just... turn off. Sure, there are times when that's the right experience be it after a long day or something - but once you're on an infinitely scrolling app it's hard to leave. Our brains just haven't caught up yet. As soon as I've left the app I struggle to list the 5 most interesting things I learned or saw.

> For those wanting to do anything difficult they need to optimize their information diet over a very long time-scale, like years, so content-feed tools should be aware of human-scale timelines (eg. high school, college, career, parenting).

One of the things I like about school is in some way it takes care of that for you, for a while anyway: this book follows that one, don't waste your time understanding this until you've poked at that, etc. But I don't think we actually learn how to develop (or maintain) those long-term learning plans; especially as they are rarely linear but much more akin to an RPG skill tree.

I'm excited to see what you build!

I have been emailing links to myself tagged with a one word keyword for the last decade. They focus on things that I or my (unconceived, unborn) son or daughter would like to read, learn or understand “later”. I have about 10k sitting in my inbox (including this one) that I plan to convert into a critical path and consumption order once I take a sabbatical.

Sometimes the best systems are the simplest.

I started saving links and notes like this too. I type a subject that consists of any relevant tag words that come to mind

What kind of algorithm/system do you think you'd use to convert them into a consumption order?

Create a rough dependency graph and perform a topological sort, potentially skipping, down weighting, or skimming nodes that are onerous to consume but of dubious value (e.g. a link that’s a review about a long textbook that isn’t fundamental to a space).

I think even if you have a content feed incorporating goal-orientation you'll still struggle with the learning part. I think this article is very valuable in explaining why: https://andymatuschak.org/books/.

Yep, I'm familiar with that post and largely agree. I personally love books as a learning tool but I've personally not learnt nearly as much about programming from reading compared with 'doing'.

The content-feed I'm aiming towards certainly includes books because they're essential to really understanding certain things, but won't be just concerned with reading material.

The key to supporting goal-orientation is some notion of scheduling, requisites, and knowledge-evaluation. This system should not at all be limited to books. My early prototype will include flash-cards, articles, programming koans, and Leetcode problems.

For programming, you might find this video interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgrdg1uwDeA Larry Sanger (co-founder of wikipedia) found SuperMemo/SRS sort of clunky for use with program so he made a program which lets you review more by doing rather than just recalling.

I think rest of what you're after are in large part SuperMemo which I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread. It basically allows the same goal orientation feature through its priority/scheduling system though it lacks managing requisites (aside from just scheduling something to show up later than something else).

I'm not a huge fan of books for 2 reasons: -they're not information dense (you can get way more information-per-paragraph from a wikipedia article rather than a book) -they're not very context independent, as in, if I want to understand some specific part of a book I'll likely have to read the entire thing while with internet articles I can read one part and ignore the rest. The main reason this is important is that I can read the parts I find valuable and ignore less valued things. Reading an entire book for one concept that takes 15 chapters to get to isn't great.

With SuperMemo, if there's a book I find interesting I'll generally try to find any alternative wikipedia article first or otherwise some other web article on the same idea. It's just takes so much more time to read and retain a book than to retain a smaller, denser article.

Thanks for the video link, I’ll check it out.

SuperMemo is a large part of it yeah. I’ve thought about how I will integrate that functionality in as the evidence is there that it works.

In certain domains I really disagree that books aren’t information dense. If you want to properly understand say philosophy, politics, literature it is essential to read primary sources which are often books. Reasons and Persons does not waste a page, for example.

Agree that a lot of books are padded as hell, but to say this is a problem generally with books is myopic. You might just be reading Self-Help and Management books which are notoriously padded out.

> The "Queue Management for Inbound Content" section is exactly what I really want as well, so much that I've just started building it instead of waiting and hoping.

Personally I just use mails for that.

More specifically, I have a VPS with a dovecot mail server, and I wrote a set of tools to write almost anything to any of my maildir folder (shameless self advertising: https://github.com/sloonz/ua). Most of it is RSS feeds, but I also receive a daily summary of operations in my bank accounts (with boobank from weboob), new posts from a forum I’m subscribed to (with boobmsg's tapatalk plugin from weboob), and new posts from reddit

> I think that content feeds need to incorporate goal-orientation and move away from right-here-right-now orientation

I think part of the issue with the current inbound content queues (e.g. Instapaper, Pocket) is that they treat all content the same. There is a difference between content I need immediately from content my future self will find interesting in the future.

there should be a way to rank/aggregate content according to this.

Agreed. These queues also seem like a natural place for a "show me this content again in x months/years" pipeline/priority/feature.

> "all content I think my future self would appreciate me consuming."

I think The Syllabus [2] is kinda like this for a certain type of content (mostly academic). It aims to find stuff that doesn't get attention in the regular surveillance capitalistic hellscape that is the internet. It's run by Evgeny Morozov, someone who's thinking I admire.

Currently, my online reading is mainly based on hn (and multiple sources that often get posted here [0]), The Browser [1], The Syllabus [2] and people I follow on Mastodon and Twitter. Basically in absence of how to find content for my future self, I look for content that is being recommended by people I admire.

[0]: laphamsquarterly.org, slatestarcodex.com, ribbonfarm.com, etc.

[1]: thebrowser.com

[2]: the-syllabus.com

Also all the individual effects get exponentially amplified when dealing with orgs/groups/teams being hit by/creating their own info tsunamis.

Can you elaborate? What’s an info tsunami as it relates to my comment?