📖 The Algo Enhancer (Idea Feature #15)

🧠 Top of Mind Technology

• This is an insane stat – the global counterfeits market costs consumers more than $3 trillion a year! Detecting counterfeits is usually a difficult task, as typically experts are required for identification, and experts usually serve specific industries. Alitheon hopes to change that. They’ve created FeaturePrint, a counterfeit identification app that can help identify fraudulent items from sports memorabilia, to car brakes, to even pharmaceuticals.

• Researchers at Aston University in the U.K. broke a record for fiber-optic data transfer speed by measuring a data transfer of 402 terabits per second, which is roughly 1.6 million times faster than typical home broadband speeds. The researchers used materials available within commercially used fiber-optic cables, and their methods for achieving such high speeds were outlined in this journal article.

• The impacts of the CrowdStrike outage from two weeks ago are still being felt, and longer term, there could be some major changes coming to Windows systems, which were the most impacted operating system from the failed software update. Microsoft signaled last week that changes could be coming to their kernel access.

🍪 Business Bites

• You would think that hosting the Olympics would benefit a city’s tourism, but for Paris, it has actually had the opposite effect. Multiple airlines are projecting greater than $100 million due in large part because of a drop in travel volume to France, and Paris’ tourism board projected a drop of 15% in July of air travel arrivals.

• Want to make a couple hundred bucks quickly? One method personal finance nerds have been using for years is collecting bank and investing app bonuses. Basically, banks and investing apps will give you cash or some sort of bonus for opening an account. Sometimes, you may need to deposit some cash and/or make some purchases, so be weary of that.

• Here is a great article on the impact of more AI-generated content and our potential acceptance of it. It’s called: Dear Google, who wants an AI-written fan letter?

Idea Journal Feature: The Algo Enhancer

⚾The Elevator Pitch - A simple software product designed to take back your algorithm on social media sites and help you view content that will benefit you long term.

 💡The Idea

We’ve all been there. And by there, we mean the Social Media/Content Rabit Hole. Whether it be Tik Tok, Instagram, or Twitter, it is easy to find yourself sucked into the vortex that is social media. The problem is, too much time spent on social media can lead to mental health issues, sleep problems, and just general time wasting. That last part is key for the purposes of our idea feature today. One of the many reasons why time spent on social media can be so wasteful is because the content we are shown is not always what would be the best for us, or necessarily even what we want to see. Assume for instance, you are a non-political person that joins Twitter for the first time and gets sucked into the world of politics. Scrolling for 30 minutes through political content is probably a waste of time for you, even if you learn something in the process. That is where today’s idea feature comes in to play.

The Algo Enhancer works with you to develop a plan of the content you want to see on social media that you think will be helpful and beneficial for your own personal development. It will also help you block out content you do not want to view, and help you limit your time spent on social media as a whole.

👷The Work

The Algo Enhancer would work with users through the following steps:

1. Users sign up for The Algo Enhancer and are presented with instructions on how to clear their current social media content preferences (we need to start at stage 0).

   1. There are plenty of articles online that show you how to do this for different platforms.

2. Users are asked which platforms they want their content feed to be adjusted.

3. The user is brought through a series of questions that ask them what content they ACTUALLY want to see (meaning what content is going to benefit them long-term).

4. Users are fed a series of posts and asked whether or not they would find that content beneficial or not (done in an offline setting as to not impact their reset algorithm).

5. Users are then asked to log onto the platform and are fed a series of posts and are told to interact with each for a certain amount of time and like the posts to show their engagement.

6. Steps 5 and 6 will be repeated over a period of time as needed until their content feed is reset to their liking.

7. Users are also asked what type of content they do not want to see, and are suggested to block certain accounts and pages based on their input.

“The Algo Enhancer” could be offered as a solo SAAS service, or it could be offered as a type of “Social Media consultancy,” which would increase both product costs and expenses. For purposes of analysis, we will portray it as a SAAS service.

💸Revenue

• Monthly Fee – Users would have to pay a small monthly fee for the software. With the fee, users could reset and change their algorithm as many times as they want.

• Data Sales – As the software grows, The Algo Enhancer would be granted insight into what various trends and user experiences on social media platforms, which would be of use to ad agencies and influencers.

🔻Expenses

• Content Sourcing – Thousands of posts would be needed to be able to adjust the algorithm of any person that uses the site, since each person would hypothetically have different wishes.

• Software Costs – Software development, user management, servers, etc.

• Marketing -  Potentially work with influencers, ads on social media would probably work well.

👍The Good Stuff

• The Market and Impact – The average amount of time spent per day on social media per user has grown to 2 hours and 23 minutes. This is a stunning figure and shows that decreasing this time spent, or at least enhancing a person’s productivity during that time would be beneficial for society.

👎The Risks

• Long-Term Results – Even if the software could change a person’s algorithm in the short term, will it just revert back to the current state of content after a few searches and post interactions outside of their desired content feed?

• A Paid Service? – Will people really pay for a service that just gets them to view some posts that will enhance their content feed? Couldn’t they just do it by themselves?

🤔 Musing of the Week

What has happened to the quality of the content on the internet?

Too much of the content on the internet feels either AI-generated, or at least largely written though an AI bot. On top of that, most websites coming with ads that almost make articles unreadable. Take this article for instance.  We have no doubt that a human at minimum contributed to this article, but the writing also feels too generic for us to know that it was fully written by a human. On top of that, a quick scroll through the article on a desktop computer shows north of 10 different advertisements. Now you may be asking, what is the problem with that? Simply put, AI generated content cannot yet provide the “inside scoop” or the details that can’t already be found on the ten other websites promoting the same article. This is because AI is trained on the data already found on the internet. Furthermore, the affiliate revenue that can be generated through a high-ranking SEO page makes generic, AI-looking content actually work better financially, because now a 1–2-person team can churn out multiple lengthy articles a day about various topics because AI is doing the work for them. It will be interesting to see if over time, content improves or gets worse on the internet and social media as AI becomes more popular.

📚For the Road

• Experts: 90% of Online Content Will Be AI-Generated by 2026

• Inside the good, bad, and very ugly of social media algorithms