The morning of November 5A few hours before I was faced with the sick realization that the world was once again about to become exponentially more difficult for me and the people I love, I received an email from Kunal Lunawat, CEO and co-founder from Wildr, an app he described to me as an app. “troll-free and text-only” social media platform. “Given the historical significance of today, I had to reach out,” he wrote, and I immediately wanted to call bullshit.
I often receive emails like this from startup founders. This is the app that solves everythingI promise. They throw around words like “game changer.” They call what they built a “turning point.” It is rare that these guarantees are profitable…70 percent of startups fail between years two and five — and the urgency only seems to mask what’s really happening, which these Zuckerberg wannabes may not be able to see: their idea just isn’t that innovative, regardless to what extent they dress it in mechanics. clichés.
Techies have been trying to create a “healthier” social media platform for decades now, whether in abandon anonymity, hide likes, get rid of robotseven while creating the network 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 deciphered, would merge the best parts of Reddit , Medium and early Twitter. Open communication. Robust dialogue. Zero trolls. And all this is monitored by AI which “nudges” users to post content “frictionlessly”. This is a huge task, perhaps impossible, and I wanted to know more.
As the election results became clear, it became more difficult to adhere to Lunawat’s utopian dream. America was drunk on Trump. Acolytes of Tradwives and Truth Social want to get high on mass evictions and fluoride-free water. The trolls had won.
But then I caught myself. Faced with the reality of what the next four years will still unleash, and perhaps wanting to protect myself from the utter, never-ending 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 so, the bright hope even now is what connection opens up: roadmaps for learning from and challenging each other. These challenges sharpen our understanding of the world and can even change our minds – and that’s a really good thing. So where is the line between trolling and simply opposing someone’s opinion?