For years people have pointed out the downsides of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube having content recommendation systems (CRSs) (news feeds, etc) built to optimize engagement (in order to optimize ad revenue). The interests of the companies don't align with the interests of the users leading to suboptimal recommendations from the perspective of users.

Do there yet exist any companies whose product is the CRS itself? Built to optimize the user's preference?

I'd like such a product, and would like to have several feeds that I can optimize for different types of content that I want to see at different times.

(In a way Reddit is *sort of* like this. Users can go to different subreddits to see different kinds of posts. But Reddit posts are all for the public--they don't include personalized posts for specific social circles like e.g. Facebook--and therefore Reddit only has a subset of the sort of posts I'd want to be includeable in my customized feeds.)

It would also be nice if I could make a feed that includes posts from more than one website, e.g. Twitter and Facebook posts appearing in the same feed.

Does anything like this exist yet?

I made it to the finals of the the 2024 Chess.com Fog of War Chess Championship by winning the third qualifier tournament! chess.com/events/2024-chesscom…

The Finals are tomorrow, Friday, at 12:00pm EDT and will be broadcast live: youtube.com/@chesscomcommunity…

There is a $2000 prize pool, which will be distributed as follows:
1st $600
2nd $350
3rd $250
4th $200
5th (x2) $150
7th (x2) $100
Top streamer* $100

This is the first Fog of War chess tournament that Chess.com has hosted since adding the variant to their site four years ago, so I'm excited to make it to the finals.

Fog of War chess — originally called Dark chess en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_che… — is my favorite chess variant, and perhaps my favorite game, end stop. It's an imperfect information variant that involves bluffing.

I was immediately good at it when I first started playing, perhaps due to my passion for bluffing games in general (such as Quick Play Stratego, Hidden Capitols Risk, and Skull).

(At one point, the other 19 players in the top 20 Fog of War rankings were an average of 700 points higher rated than me at regular chess, so regular chess strength alone isn't too important.)

If you'd like to try your hand at the game, there are two more 75-minute qualifying arena tournaments tonight (starting at 5:30pm EDT and 7:00pm EDT), or I'd be happy to play casually anytime: chess.com/variants/fog-of-war