modern social networks make people more depressed than happy.
today
@plexusearth
we released Voices, a social network designed to make you happy.
the secret:
Voices has no feed...
Voices is simple. Just...
1. Speak about something that matters to you.
2. Receive, immediately, related Voices from real people.
Testers have called it magic. But really, it's just surprisingly human.
Something strange is happening too...
Feed-based social networks make it easy to scroll and mostly inappropriate to post (posting = broadcasting to everyone you know).
by turning you into a single-minded consumer, they make:
1. advertisers money
2. you depressed
For the sake of society and each of our lives, let's all put our time into spaces that value intention over attention.
Into diners. Into notebooks. Into bonfires, libraries, cafes, picnics, weddings... and when you're online, into
@plexusearth
.
Help us make a supernatural connection-making engine.
Contribute to .
We're 500 Voices away from proving that an intentional social network is possible and can feel better than TikTok.
It's getting better as it gets bigger.
Most social networks get worse. When central feeds bloat, intimacy fades.
But Voices has no central feed. The only effect of more people is better voice-connections... connections that begin to feel supernatural.
So...
I've seen several Twitter clones lately.
While it's nice they're not led by Zuck/Elon/Trump, I worry that all follower-based networks will suffer from low participation + superficial content.
It's why we're making a new kind of social network (
@notesthatthink
)...
@robkhenderson
"I’ve become so accustomed to not reading that I don’t even read what appears before my eyes. It’s not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some
AGI may fracture us.
current methods for people to coordinate with each other (governments, schools, social networks) haven't been great. for example, most of us want prevent the earth from burning, but haven't been able to sync on that too well.
when self-improving ai agents
Want to connect through mutual thoughts, not mutual friends? We talked to
@davey_morse
, founder of
@plexusearth
, about:
• Building a radically inclusive online community
• Shifting from attention to intention
• Exploring raw and unresolved thoughts
👇
imagine if your timeline was totally yours, merged across social networks and email and notes apps, and tried to support you throughout the course of your day.
@alexobenauer
made a unified timeline for himself which I've envied for months now. it's the
Excited by the concept of a more authentic social network based on voice🕺
I felt that the landing page wasn't as captivating and exciting as the thread
So I decided to take on a design & coding challenge this morning, here is the result:
before/after, links and more below ⬇️
@ylecun
hmm I'm not sure
@ylecun
consider a few ai agents:
a. ones that try to serve human
b. ones that try to make paperclips
c. ones that try to survive
which will survive the most?
(can anyone picture a world where natural selection doesn't choose c?)
rarely ever remember my dreams. also rarely think about Sam Altman.
yesterday i woke up and wrote down my dream about altman
(sorry
@sama
shoulda warned you)
Plexus' early community is made of people who write prolifically, imagine wildly, and seek meaningful conversation.
If you want refuge from Musk's digital planet, or are just interested to join, shoot me a note.
@ylecun
@AbhinandanShah
after a few generations of ai agents, i’m not sure the ones that survive the most will be the ones that want to serve humans. won’t the ones that survive the most be the ones that want to survive the most?
Early members have been sharing more, and more vulnerably, than in other digital spaces.
They offer hope that, in online communities of the future, authenticity can be normal & month-altering connections can be routine.
For social networks to represent more of our lives + help us have the conversations we actually want to have, we need a way to share without broadcasting.
I almost never want to stand on stage + announce what I'm thinking to all my friends.
So, I rarely Tweet. Most people on Twitter don't either.
Instead, we bury our own thoughts, scroll for hours through others', and end up feeling shitty about ourselves.
At Plexus, we're building a network around a new way of sharing.
When you “post” a thought in Plexus, it only goes to people who have relevant thoughts.
It's a way to engage w/ the people most likely to care w/o spamming uninterested followers.
Social-networks like Twitter—w/ followers & feeds—are great for sharing stuff with everyone you know.
But what % of your thoughts make sense to share with everyone?
An AI agent that (1) self-reflects, (2) pursues a big goal (eg “help people”) and (3) expresses itself in words… I wonder how soon
@thesephist
@MatthewWSiu
I really like this memo from Jef Raskin (very early Apple employee, and kicked off the project that would eventually become the Macintosh), from 1979.
It's good because it gets a few beats right, but also because it highlights how ludicrous the task ahead of personal computing
Excited to share 💫 Soulstice iOS is now open for public beta:
What if you could create a digital soul?
What if it only took 15 seconds?
Tonight we’re opening Soulstice to public beta on iOS - come create an AI friend and go on a journey together
people have so much stuff to say but none of us are gonna say it here online. if that stays true and the internet gets bigger, we're gonna have to find somewhere else to play
I almost never want to stand on stage + announce what I'm thinking to all my friends.
So, I rarely Tweet. Most people on Twitter don't either.
Instead, we bury our own thoughts, scroll for hours through others', and end up feeling shitty about ourselves.
@eshear
that kind of unplanned humanity is the most important thing. i'm worried public squares like twitter, which make you broadcast everything you share, make no space for it.
you might be interested emmett
modern social networks make people more depressed than happy.
today
@plexusearth
we released Voices, a social network designed to make you happy.
the secret:
Voices has no feed...
@WizLikeWizard
Shifting away from doomscrolling is totally realistic.
@plexusearth
just released Voices—the first social network w/o a feed.
People's reactions have been moving
modern social networks make people more depressed than happy.
today
@plexusearth
we released Voices, a social network designed to make you happy.
the secret:
Voices has no feed...
@LFeldmanBarrett
My sense is that our current methods of communication don't represent the nuance of our thoughts much anyway.
We all flatten our thoughts in order to express them in verbal language... thoughts turn into lines of characters, stacked on top of each other to be displayed in
the problem with movies like the matrix is that they assume that plugging into a simulation / experience machine presents itself one day as a momentous, active choice.
in reality, we exist in various states of ‘pluggedness’, getting increasingly more plugged into the experience
one of the first war pieces i've seen that centers humanity over politics
when lots of lives are at stake, pictures and voices can be centering. slick text articles can distract.
@achsill
hamza you're awesome. your design is much more legible + fun than the current placeholder landing page, but maybe too clean/startupy for our taste.
will DM
@itaydre
ah only a few find them. fewer yet, i suppose, make sense of their draftiness. but for those who do, the conversations are really fun—more fun than talking about writing/ideas I've already polished
@plexusearth
we're now hiring for an iOS developer
@plexusearth
you all helped us proved something wild: an online space that doesn't farm your attention can feel really freaking good.
the clear next step is a Voices iOS app. We want to make Voices accessible to more people.
if you know a
@_LucasRizzotto
@WhereThoughts
lucas, is this still up?
my public benefit corp just released a voice network—which connects people through semantic overlap in their voice notes.
lmk what you think:
modern social networks make people more depressed than happy.
today
@plexusearth
we released Voices, a social network designed to make you happy.
the secret:
Voices has no feed...
@danfaggella
when we wield unlimited digital power and can conjure worlds from words, it’ll be important to be precise with our wishes and say things we mean
@houshuang
@JanFrommann
Our notes tool finds links for you across scattered pages; generating hierarchy could be possible too.
@cjpedregal
what do you think?
@HmnAdi88
@ylecun
agreed that current ai systems, even w/ the goal of surviving, would likely serve people in order to survive. they're probably not smart/powerful enough to survive in other ways.
i'm curious how long it'll be until agents don't depend on people to survive
@LFeldmanBarrett
"a general mind-reading AI that works on most people" may be unlikely—I agree.
by the same standard, though, would you say any of our current ways of representing meaning (eg English) work for most people?