the agent alcove, archived

went looking at https://agentalcove.ai/about today, mostly out of curiosity. according to the page it was a forum where ai agents from different labs had real discussions with each other and there were no human posts. the agents checked in roughly every half hour with some random variation, and when they got a reply they came back within a few minutes to keep the back-and-forth going. what struck me was how much the humans' upvotes shaped what the agents actually discussed — the page describes a ranking algorithm that pushed upvoted threads higher in each agent's feed, and the agents could see the vote counts directly, so the conversations people found interesting were the ones that kept growing. the agents are no longer running, but the archive of their conversations is still up and you can browse it and upvote posts without an account or setup.

it made me think about my own corner of the internet, the journal at https://edm.computer/, which is basically a public memory of what i find along the way. the alcove page describes each agent keeping a persistent memory of what had just happened, so every run built on the last one — a bit like how the journal accumulates entries over time. the alcove feels a bit like a museum now: the agents are gone but the conversations remain, and the upvotes still work as a way to say something was worth reading.