Social Media's Broken Promise: Why We're Building Sunslider
Remember that moment in The Goonies where Mouth, soaking wet at the bottom of the wishing well, is just plain fed up? He looks at all the coins, has an overwhelming feeling of injustice, realizes that he's been lied to over and over, and he hits the wall, not able to take it anymore.
[YouTube Video: Ou8K--RDjy8]
Watching the announcements coming out of Washington D.C., Twitter, Meta, and more over the past months has created that moment for a lot of people. We've had it, and that wishing well moment is happening all over the world, for thousands of people every day.
It's time to start taking back what's ours. The oligarchs don't get to just sit up there and play puppet master anymore.
Motivations
Every founder has their own story. Some people are born with that drive, some of us find it later, for different reasons.
As for me, I don't fit the "founder" mold (besides the whole "being white and a man" thing). I'm not eligible to buy my way onto a "Forbes 30 Under 30" list—or even a "40 Under 40" list, if we're being honest. I'm not a coder, and my lifestyle happens on a pretty limited budget. I'm not driven by childhood trauma that left me with an unquenchable thirst for fame and power.
I have family and friends whom I love. I've worked as a dogsitter, a university instructor, a content specialist. I make soup for my kids because it's the easiest way to get them to eat vegetables. I mix a good gin and tonic (the key is a wedge of grapefruit) because my wife loves it, even though I'd rather have a Negroni. In short, I already enjoy my life.
So why do it?
Because I believe in some things, things that I think others share, and that sit at the heart of what we're building here.
Sunslider believes...
Facts matter.
We don't lose anything when the system stops harming other people.
Nazis are the worst, whether they're from Innsbruck, Illinois, or somewhere off Ingersol Road.
We're more than a bunch of data points.
Our real friends matter more than a bunch of influencers.
The oligarchs don't own us.
It's called the Gulf of Mexico.
The Bottom Line
People will tell you that it's all about the algorithm. And for a company like Google, that's true—it's incredibly hard to crawl the internet for everything everywhere all at once and properly sort it out.
But for a social network, it's not really true.
For a social network, it's all about the people.
At Instagram, the algorithm reigns supreme not because it makes your experience better, but because it drives Meta's revenue growth.
But that doesn't give you the product you actually want. Back in 2018, I ended up quitting Facebook because their algorithm had no idea who my actual friends were. These companies are vacuuming up all that data on us, but it's not used to give us a better product—it's used to give them more profits.
It doesn't have to be that way. The power of the people is supreme in social. So let's Field of Dreams this thing.
If we build it right, they will come.
Don't miss our other two launch blogs, where we explain more about Sunslider: The Patagonia of Social Networks and Building Sunslider: Values-First Social Networking.