the morning of 5 NovemberA few hours before I was faced with the sick realization that the world was about to get increasingly difficult again for me and the people I love, I received an email from Kunal Lunawat, CEO and co-founder of Wilder, An app that he described to me as an app. “Troll-free, text-only” social media platform. “Given the historical significance of today, I had to get in touch,” he wrote, “and I immediately wanted to call bullshit on it.”
I often get emails like this from startup founders. This is the app that solves everythingI have been promised. They throw around words like “game changer.” What they have created they characterize as a “pivotal turning point”. Those guarantees are rarely cashed in-70 percent Many startups fail between two and five years — and the urgency only masks what's really going on, which perhaps these aspiring Zuckerbergs can't see: Their idea isn't that innovative, no matter how much they want it. Why not express clichés in mechanical form?
Tech experts have been trying to create a “healthy” social media platform for decades, even though de-anonymity, hide likes, get rid of botseven creating networks Only botIn Wilder's case, it's AI (of course): The app promises a “back to basics” by taking advantage of a text-only format, which, as I understand it, combines the best of Reddit, Medium, and early Twitter. Will merge the parts. Open communication. Powerful dialogue. Zero troll. And all this is monitored by AI that “prompts” users to post “frictionless” content. It's a huge, perhaps impossible task—and I wanted to hear more about it.
As the election results became clear, Lunawat's utopia became difficult to realize. America was drunk on Trump. Tradewives and Truth Social acolytes want to push for mass deportations and fluoride-free water. The trolls had won.
But then I controlled myself. Facing the reality of what would happen again over the next four years, and perhaps wanting to save myself the complete and never-ending madness of it all, I emailed him back.
My big question for Lunawat – and probably yours too – is what, exactly, constitutes a troll-free forum. The purpose of social media by definition is to foster connection, but more than that, the bright hope, now too, is that which opens connection: a roadmap to learning from and challenging each other. Those challenges sharpen our understanding of the world, and may even change our brains—and that's actually a good thing. So then, where is the line between trolling and opposing someone's opinion?