A large number of startups are emerging to challenge the status quo. Many of them are rooted in the experiences of their founders at the industry-leading giant, the parent company of Facebook, now known as Meta Platform Inc.
Almost a decade ago, WhatsApp’s then-executive Neeraj Arora helped Facebook negotiate a $22 billion sale of the messaging startup, one of the largest technology deals in history.
But once on Facebook, Mr. Arora says he soured on the company’s reliance on online advertising and saw its leadership focus more on competition and rapid growth than on improving core products. “They didn’t build with the user in mind,” said Mr. Arora, who left in the same year as the founders of WhatsApp in 2018.
Now Mr. Arora and Michael Donohue, formerly of WhatsApp, are tackling social media once again with their two-year-old startup HelloApp. However, this time around, M/s Arora and Donohue say that they are not focused on increasing the amount of time people spend on their app to attract advertisers or on motivating users to expand their online network to the maximum possible size. are doing.
Instead of ads, HeloApp plans to charge a subscription fee, possibly a dollar or two and less than $5 a month. The group inside the app is capped at 50 people. “You don’t want to lose the plot by moving too fast,” Mr. Arora said in one of the many recent interviews.
HelloApp — which has raised $15 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, former Facebook board director Jim Breyer, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton and others — is one of several startups aiming to solve social media problems . Yet how to define those problems is a matter of intense debate.
Some startups say that product design should be considered as much as the content decisions that make headlines. At HalloApp, he believes that limiting the size of groups will help reduce the potential for abuse. Right-wing forums such as Parlor and Truth Social argue that people need fewer content rules to speak freely to the public without worrying about censorship. Other companies argue for a combination of strong content policies and design choices to make online political discussions more civil.
Last month, the world’s richest man, Mr. Musk, stepped into the fray and offered to buy Twitter Inc. for $44 billion to relax its content rules and promote free speech.
This competitive pressure comes as the meta faces an unprecedented array of challenges. Its advertising business is taking a beating after Apple Inc. limited its ability to collect data and the stock price fell sharply this year. Meta is also under investigation for alleged violations of antitrust laws — investigations that could hinder the company’s ability to acquire smaller rivals, a tactic it has successfully deployed in the past.
“We have always faced tough competition and that is a good thing. It forces us to focus on innovating, creating better experiences for people, and creating the best products in the world,” said a spokesperson for Meta.
He said the company is investing heavily in so-called community messaging, a creation tool that makes it easier to connect with family and small groups of friends, as some startup services are calling it.
Any company dealing with social media today faces challenges entering an industry that hasn’t produced a bootstrapped success story in years. The hottest app of the moment, TikTok, is backed with a significant investment from its Chinese owner, ByteDance Ltd.
But many of those trying to re-imagine social media today say their diminutive size is just about right. They say they’re not trying to compete with Facebook’s wide range of features and its global reach.
“The era of some big winners is coming to an end,” said Ellie Pariser, co-director of New Public, a nonprofit trying to create an online space to foster healthy conversation. “Consumer tastes are changing. One-size-fits-all approach—they’re looking at how much it’s breaking down.”
Mr Pariser said the nonprofit model is built on the premise that people are more likely to hold each other accountable and more familiar with different ideas in smaller, more intimate forums. The new co-director of his initiative to tackle this problem is Deepti Doshi, who spent seven years at Facebook.
Many of those founders who have now departed from Facebook believe that the size of the company has become a liability. Some are removing growth-friendly features like friendships or followings that have long been the bread-and-butter of mainstream social-media sites.
“I think scale is problem number one,” said Rob Enels, a former product manager at Facebook, where he tried to make public conversations on the platform less toxic and divisive. “All these things fall apart when things get too big. We haven’t really worked out the right way to design at scale.”
In the online space, including Facebook, groups are often dominated by the most prolific members, who post so much that it drowns out the quieter, more liberal voices, Mr. Enels says.
Mr Enels, who left Facebook in 2018, has since created a service called Talkwell to improve the way public debates take place online. On Talkwell, which is still in testing, users’ posts are organized behind their user icon, no matter how many times they post. This design, in theory, makes it difficult for any one person to handle the discussion. “You don’t miss the cool people,” said Mr. Enels.
Other sites are removing common features because they can be easily misused. Somewhere Good, a platform for audio discussion that launched last month, doesn’t allow users to direct message or follow each other or befriend each other in order to reduce abuse and social comparisons. . “It was important to think about a person from the most marginalized community and how they could use this product,” said Naj Austin, founder of Someware Good.
Users who violate the rules should speak to a “conflict coordinator” and read the documents about why their behavior was problematic before posting again. These moves are intended to “lay the foundation for users and set a different expectation” of how users should behave online, Ms Austin said.
Its founders say that Central to HelloApp’s appeal is its lack of reliance on advertising. Users can only connect with people in their address book. Posts disappear after 30 days. Messages are encrypted by default.
HeloApp’s design won’t “prevent your crazy uncle from sharing misinformation,” Mr Donohue said, but because the networks are smaller than Facebook and it’s harder to share, he believes the impacts will be minimal.
In 2018, WhatsApp was implicated in violent attacks in India, a fact that took Mr Arora and other officials by surprise. The incidents prompted the service to impose a limit on how often information can be forwarded and how large WhatsApp groups can be.
Those incidents and others have created a different environment around technology and social media today, he says. “Even five years ago, if you had asked me about the propaganda, I would have said, ‘Are you an idiot? Who cares about these things?'” Mr. Arora said. “We’re building on a different planet.”