Prosocial builder Ben Werdmuller on journalism, AI, and the open social web
Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?
Our obsession with AI code-writing tools is overwhelming the web’s unsung human caretakers
✨🙌 AI that helps communities thrive on their own terms
Open protocols + AI-enabled coding = building what we need for ourselves
✨🙌 AI that helps communities thrive on their own terms
Open protocols + AI-enabled coding = building what we need for ourselves
The AI Aesthetic
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
‘There’s a Value in What We Produce Because We Feel – and an AI Chatbot Can’t Feel’
Byline Times' Editor in Chief meets Kate Devlin, Professor of AI and Society at King’s College London, to explore how relationships with AI companions aren’t particularly new, why she believes the under-16s social media ban is flawed, and why human creativity can't be matched
An AI Upheaval Is Coming for Media. This Journalist Is Already All In.
AI-assisted stories accounted for nearly 20% of Fortune’s web traffic in the second half of 2025. Most are written by Nick Lichtenberg.
If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?
You can hardly get online these days without hearing some AI booster talk about how AI coding is going to replace human programmers. AI code is absolutely up to production quality! Also, you’re all…
After the feed with Eli Pariser, Ben Smith, and Jasmine Sun
Mark Zuckerberg is excited to add more AI content to all your social feeds
Is AI the next era of social media?
Ryan Cordell (@ryancordell.org)
Claude Code is blowing my mind—the 1st thing I’ve seen amid the AI hype that feels truly transformative One example—we’ve been doing genre classification work & I had the thought "it’d be nice to have a web application that lets users tag newspaper texts"—literal minutes later it exists & works
The Atmosphere . Building the open social web
Why the Algorithm Loves a Villain, And How to Beat It
When the internet is full of distortions, fake news, and AI-generated slop, how can facts and journalism rise to the top? Former BBC and Vice journalist Sophia Smith Galer has one possible way to…
John Horton on Twitter / X
I increasingly think we have to keep AI generated 'papers' out of venues meant for humans---not b/c the papers are bad per se---just that our currently-designed systems cannot accommodate and will break. But I also think what we need a venue for AI generated work (it's good &… pic.twitter.com/fXd92SYbN5— John Horton (@johnjhorton) September 29, 2026
Perplexity CEO: Browser Wars, Taking on Google, White Collar Jobs and More!
Many builders in the Open Social Web are discouraged by the lack of funding in the ecosystem, slow pace of feature development (e.g. private accounts), and “low” adoption relative to incumbents like Meta. In my keynote I emphasized multi-generational struggle & movement building. People who faced…
I think it’s telling that people very interested in AI (like Eugene and myself) still have no interest in using it as a proxy for human communication. “Being a good writer” is not the same thing as having social agency, and making the models even better at writing won’t change that.
Eugene Vinitsky 🍒
When you deploy heavily LLM text, you currently have no way to prove that you actually read it and therefore cannot convince me to read it
