The morning of November 5, hours before I was confronted with the sick realization that the world was again about to get exponentially harder for me and the people I love, I received an email from Kunal Lunawat, CEO and cofounder of Wildr, an app he described to me as a “troll-free, text-only” social media platform. “Given the historical import of today, I had to reach out,” he wrote, and I immediately wanted to call bullshit.
I get emails like this from startup founders often. This is the app that solves everything, I’m promised. They toss out words like “game changer.” They characterize what they’ve built as a “turning point.” Rarely do those guarantees cash in—70 percent of startups fail between years two and five—and the urgency only seems to mask what’s really going on, what maybe these wannabe Zuckerbergs can’t see: Their idea just isn’t that innovative, no matter how much they dress it up in mechanical cliches.
Techies have been trying to make a “healthier” social media platform for decades now, whether it’s been by ditching anonymity, hiding likes, getting rid of bots, even making the network only bots. In Wildr’s case, it’s AI (of course): The app promises a “return to the basics” by leveraging a text-only format that would, as I deciphered it, merge the best parts of Reddit, Medium, and early Twitter. Open communication. Robust dialog. Zero trolls. And all of it is monitored by AI that “nudges” users to post “frictionless” content. It’s a big, perhaps impossible task—and one I wanted to hear more about.
As the election results became clear, if anything it was harder to buy into Lunawat’s utopian dream. America was drunk on Trump. Tradwives and Truth Social acolytes want to get high on mass deportation and fluoride-free water. The trolls had won.
But then I caught myself. Faced with the reality of what the next four years will again unleash, and perhaps wanting to safeguard against the utter and unending hysteria of it all, I emailed him back.
My big question for Lunawat—and maybe yours, too—is what, exactly, a troll-free platform entails. Social media by definition is meant to foster connection, but even more than that, the bright hope, even now, is what connection opens up: roadmaps to learn from and challenge each other. Those challenges sharpen our understanding of the world, and can even change our minds—and that’s genuinely a good thing. Where, then, is the line between trolling and simply pushing back against someone’s opinion?
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