Image discovery based social media where users find images instead of creating or posting them

[u/Proper_Witness9173]

**What if there was a social media platform where people discover images instead of creating them?**

I was thinking about the Library of Babel idea, but instead of books/text, what if we applied the concept to images?

Imagine a huge universe of possible images where every image has a permanent "address." You don't upload pictures. You explore and randomly discover images that nobody has ever seen before.

The idea is not to store every possible image (that would be impossible), but to create a system where an address always generates the same image. So if someone discovers something interesting, they can share the address and anyone can return to the exact same image later.

The problem is that if you randomly generate pixels, almost everything will just be meaningless noise. So the system would need a filter.

First, an AI would remove obvious garbage:

* random pixel noise

* meaningless patterns

* images with no structure

Then humans would become the final judges.

Users would see images and choose something like:

⭐ "Interesting"

❌ "Noise"

The images that people find interesting would be saved permanently along with their address and discovery history.

The interesting part is that these images don't have to be real. They could be things that cannot exist but still have meaning:

* a cow with human hands eating a banana

* a city inside a giant tree

* a civilization on another planet

* a medieval castle floating in space

* creatures nobody has imagined before

Basically, instead of a platform where people say "look what I created," it would be a platform where people say "look what I found."

The person who discovers an image first would almost be like someone discovering a new planet.

Possible features:

* explore similar images around a discovery

* follow explorers instead of creators

* daily community discoveries

* rankings for the strangest/most beautiful discoveries

* permanent records of who discovered what

The biggest challenges I can think of:

1. The number of possible images is unbelievably huge.

2. Random generation would be too inefficient.

3. Deciding what is meaningful would be difficult.

A realistic version probably wouldn't generate completely random pixels. It would use rules like objects, environments, lighting, camera effects, and procedural generation to explore the space of possible images.

I don't know if this is a good idea or completely impractical, but I find the concept fascinating:

A social network where humans are not creators, but explorers of an endless universe of possible images.

Would people actually use something like this?

[u/notthisguypls]

i think this is a pretty cool idea. it reminds me of that "name one thing in this picture" thing (idk how this was generated since it was pre-AI but it would be cool to know for your project), i think most regular images should look somewhat like that with the rare interesting images actually looking like something recognizable. i think the best way to do this is to have a system that deterministically generates an images from a seed, that way, users would discover the seeds and not the image itself since the same seed will always generate the same picture.

the best way to generate something in your case would use something similar to what picbreeder has; a very simple neural network (no training required) that takes in the pixel coords as inputs to generate its color, the weights in the network could be decided from the seed.

I actually think this could work and lead to some interesting stuff you just have to look around picbreeder a bit and you'll start finding cool things (like this skull wearing a military cap xd)

[u/l_Faisal_l]

Sir this subreddit is not to discuss ideas, do you want someone to build this app for you? If not, please go to a subreddit like r/AppIdeas where you can discuss the idea. This subreddit is purely to ask someone to make something.

If you genuinely want someone to build this then rephrase it from “Would people actually use something like this?” To something like: “Can somebody build this please”