On the morning of November 5, hours before I was faced with the sickening realization that the world was about to become exponentially harder for me and the people I love, I received an email from Kunal Lunawat, CEO and co-founder of Wildr, an app that described to me as a “troll-free and text-only” social media platform. “Given the historical importance of today, I had to reach out,” he wrote, and I immediately wanted to talk nonsense.
I often receive emails like this from startup founders. This is the app that solves everythingThey promised me. They throw around words like “game changer.” They characterize what they have built as a “turning point.” These guarantees are rarely collected:70 percent of startups fail between the second and fifth year, and the urgency only seems to mask what’s really happening, which maybe these Zuckerberg wannabes can’t see: their idea just isn’t that innovative, no matter how much they dress it up. mechanical details. clichés.
Tech experts have been trying to create a “healthier” social media platform for decades, whether by abandoning anonymity, hiding likes, getting rid of bots, and even making the network healthier. only robots. In Wildr’s case, it’s AI (of course): the app promises a “back to basics” by leveraging a text-only format that, as I figured it out, would merge the best parts of Reddit, Medium, and early Twitter. Open communication. Robust dialogue. Zero trolls. And all of this is monitored by AI that “nudges” users to post “frictionless” content. It’s a big, perhaps impossible task, and one I wanted to know more about.
As the election results became clear, it became more difficult to accept Lunawat’s utopian dream. America was drunk on Trump. The acolytes of Tradwives and Truth Social want to get high on mass deportation and fluoridated water. The trolls had won.
But then I stopped myself. Faced with the reality of what the next four years will unleash again, and perhaps wanting to protect myself against the absolute and endless hysteria of it all, I responded by email.
My big question for Lunawat, and perhaps 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 great hope, even now, is what connection unlocks: roadmaps for learning from and challenging each other. Those challenges sharpen our understanding of the world and may even change our minds, and that’s actually a good thing. So where is the line between trolling and simply dismissing someone’s opinion?