Today’s social media platforms rely on eyeballs and ad revenue. We all know that this architecture drives algorithmic amplification of the worst of the worst content. Who doesn’t feel like social media leaves them feeling unhappy, or at the very least mind-numbingly unproductive and detached?
The societal impact is becoming more clear every day. Teen depression, rising suicide rates, political polarization, and neverending hate-filled shouting are just a few of the negative influences of social media. But it gets worse. As platforms get better at perfectly personalizing feeds to addict users, it’s easy to look at spending time on social media today as one of the most anti-social activities we can choose. These products are deliberately designed to lure us into endless scrolling - it’s a mental hijacking and we’ve had enough.
How can social media be fixed? Our answer is that people deserve to be informed in ways that spark real conversations and productive dialogue.
We’re on a mission to enable access to the ideas that matter.
So we built Spread as a way to redesign how people can share and access what’s actually interesting and important. How do we define what’s interesting and important? We believe that the people you trust are the best source of information, not some misguided algorithm that aims to maximize user engagement through enragement.
Spread is the platform for superior discovery and productive information gathering. How? We’re cutting out the worst aspects of User Generated Content (UGC). It’s as simple as that, no free form UGC meant to provoke, no likes, no upvotes, and no free-for-all comment sections. Rather, on Spread you simply share what you’re reading and listening to and easily discover what everyone else is too.
So…what are you reading and listening to?
Human progress requires healthy, and yes, argumentative dialogue. We believe humans are genetically curious and that objective knowledge is inherently social. So what better way to plant the seeds for productive knowledge gathering and dialogue than to guide your media diet based on what others you trust are reading. Even better, take a look at what the people you disagree with are reading and go read that too. Stay curious and informed across your circles so you can elevate the conversations you have in the real world. Think about someone you admire or just someone you want to have lunch with, don’t you want to know what they’re reading and listening to?
If the answer is yes, join the waitlist
Once you and your circles are Spreading, our goal is that the product will speak for itself. That said, a few words about how we think about the products we build at Spread.
• We nerd out on all things ‘safety-by-design’
• At Spread, our core design philosophy is anti-UGC (User Generated Content)
• We truly believe that objective knowledge is inherently social. People > Algorithms
• Spread realigns the incentives of sharing and viewing in ways that empower individuals to curate their feeds over time as interests evolve
• Spread is designed to maximize healthy, human information discovery and is inherently complementary to the communication that lives on other UGC platforms
• Early Spreaders say it best: “If social media is a town square, Spread is where I go to do my homework before showing up”
We’re a team of intellectually curious technologists on a mission to enable access to the ideas that matter. Our vision is to build the go to platform that enables people across the globe to improve their media diet and enrich their conversations.
We are looking to work with world class product and engineering folks that are compulsively curious and looking to build the next big thing.
Interested to learn more about joining our team? Please send a note to [email protected]