I miss the sprawling, cross-disciplinary dialogues that used to happen on Twitter. I miss the feeling of thinking together in public and watching ideas evolve. Substack fills part of that void, but it’s not the same, and neither are Reddit or Discord. There’s still no real marketplace of ideas for the curious and interdisciplinary, but I believe OpenAI is uniquely positioned to build it.
Basically, ChatGPT could become the public square for the next evolution of human discourse, and I think we’d all be better off if it did.
Here’s the vision:
Imagine a platform where the foundational unit is not a post, but a conversation.
Your homepage isn’t an endless scroll, but a garden of themes you keep returning to, and ideas you’re growing over time.
Sometimes you talk to ChatGPT and its infinite library of insight. But the magic happens when it links to someone else’s chat:
“Actually, someone you follow had a similar question—want to see where their conversation went?”
That person has their own garden of chats - some public, some private, some raw, some distilled. You can fork, remix, explore the highlights, or dive in.
The algorithm isn’t the enemy, it’s your companion and the concierge of your intellectual life. Instead of a firehose of opinions, you have an AI guide who knows your history and interests, and who helps you navigate the idea-graph behind the conversations shaping the future. There are countless great thinkers, builders, artists, scientists, and dreamers who no longer want to engage in clout-chasing or toxic discourse, but who would happily talk every day about interesting things with a knowledgeable AI. And if OpenAI can build a way for their conversations to link up with each other, this would build an interactive, thoughtful platform to evolve the next generation of ideas to shape our world.
(Also, I bet it would be fun for sillier stuff, too.)
I think this could be radically better than social media but just as engaging - a conversational knowledge commons with ChatGPT as your map, your memory, and your mediator.
I know this is (wildly, gloriously) ambitious for a feature request—but I’d love to know:
- Is anything like this already being built?
- Are there prototypes or discussion groups around these ideas that I could join?
- How can we make this happen?