If there’s one certainty of social media in 2025, it’s this: rage clicks rule. Hyperbole, hate, brash deception—it’s all par for the course—and sometimes rewarded with virality.
However Sez Us, an app simply launched by veteran Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, believes it’s potential to alter that, by punishing customers who shitpost for the sake of provocation.
The timing could also be good. America is getting into an age of oligarchy with a rising wave of right-wing extremism taking maintain of worldwide politics. Platforms like Fact Social and X now function as efficient propaganda machines, recasting culture-war points over immigration, DEI, and trans rights as boogeymen in President Trump’s new imaginative and prescient of America, which is actually only a very outdated model of America. As the subsequent period of social media comes into view, rising platforms even have a chance to rise to the second. Can Sez Us, which is positioning itself because the antithesis to X, facilitate a greater manner ahead?
“If you happen to carry again accountability, possession, and popularity, then immediately all of the incentives that we’ve got in the true world are again,” says Yevgeny Simkin, Sez Us’ cofounder and chief product officer.
At the same time as on-line discourse has devolved into rabid spectacle, platforms like Bluesky have proven there’s an urge for food for a extra civil form of dialog. Reasonably than boosting any publish that’s getting rage clicks, Sez Us makes use of what its creators name a “popularity engine,” a characteristic that means that you can price one other consumer’s posts on the platform throughout 5 key areas: approval, affect, insightfulness, relevance, and politeness.
On the app, scores decide a consumer’s popularity rating and general visibility. The upper the rating, the extra attain you’ve locally. Customers also can management who replies to them primarily based on an individual’s rating, with low-scoring customers penalized by having much less affect. All posts are seen however you possibly can block customers from replying, for instance, in the event that they don’t have high-approval scores. In the end, scores are designed to deprioritize engagement primarily based round viral moments.
“It’s not concerning the moderators coming in and saying ‘you’re unhealthy,’” Simkin says. “It’s concerning the neighborhood saying ‘we don’t like what you’re saying.’ Then I do know that I’ve to mood how I say issues. I’ve to be extra well mannered. I’ve to be much less bombastic.”
Within the race to good social media, there has by no means been a one-size-fits-all resolution in terms of moderation—for many who nonetheless hassle with it. Scale could make this job much more troublesome as a platform’s consumer base grows. For Simkin and his group, the concept was to construct a platform that might “carry to the fore all of the methods through which social media ought to be operating relatively than the best way it has been,” he says. “The camel’s again was damaged by the straw of Elon [Musk] shopping for Twitter,” and immediately an entire new world appeared potential.
The fracturing of Twitter, since rebranded as X, kicked off an arms race amongst techies who had all types of concepts concerning the subsequent part of social media, and find out how to outline it. It was throughout this era, in 2022, that the idea for Sez Us was born, grounded within the lofty purpose of bringing again civil discourse.
