Tyler from Pools

The choice online today is between silence and spectacle.

There are people in your life right now who would love to see what you're doing, seeing, reading, watching, and thinking.

But you're probably not gonna post it to social media.

And it would just get buried in the group chat.

You need better places to share. Where you control who sees what.

A lot of social media is “look at me” energy.

We’re building something that lets people say, “I was thinking of you”.

Imagine how different the content on these platforms would be if there wasn’t an incentive to go viral.

There’s an intimacy in sharing something that doesn’t scale. Sharing just for the sake of connecting is more human.

There’s a difference between attention and connection.

Attention burns fast. Connection builds slowly.

Social media chose attention. We’re choosing the other.

Social media apps trained us to think “share” means “broadcast to everyone”. The most meaningful sharing has always been private, personal, and specific.

Yeah the walled gardens inherently trap the network effect so they can become a monopoly

It ends up being bad for users. Classic enshittification unfortunately.

Yeah, the flaw is probably that it's about using the network of the app, versus having our own networks. In real life we are good with degrees of separation, but online it's just one big free for all

It's too bad it's a shopping app at the end of the day, and not an app to genuinely connect with people

A business model that was headed in that direction.

they didn't buy instagram to gift it to their users

explore other options :)

They're going in a different direction because it's their ad business. There are apps that let you just connect with the people you want and have it all be on your terms.

showing their true colours

but they're so good at targeting with their advanced ad-tech!! lol

Go to instagram for some fitness inspiration, come back with body issues and overpriced smoothie powder

The business model and incentives are all wrong.

The modern web is a handful of enshittified walled gardens and it's time to move forward

Because it's an advertising platform, not a personal social network.

So much hype but this place has the same social dynamics of twitter. Another noisy broadcast app. Need some options where people aren't the product and they're firmly in the driver's seat.

It's the downside of these open systems where anyone can talk to anyone. Same reason we get spam in our emails and texts. I agree it's not as simple as "just block them". It's a more fundamental underlying issue with how these social apps work.

For some reason people keep creating these sites where anyone can post to anyone. One big shared stream of consciousness. Not sure that's the best way for us to be social online.

Absolutely need more decentralized alternatives

The incentives are all wrong and the walled gardens just enshittify over time

Big Tech gives all tech a bad name lol

They're all basically doing the same thing. It can be fun again if we put people more in control instead of us having such limited choice of apps to use.

I think it still is on the edges, even though these big apps all end up being basically the same thing with people talking about similar stuff.