Searching for the Next Social Media Fix for the Next Trump Era

The morning of November 5, hours before I was confronted with the sick realization that the world was again about to get exponentially harder for me and the people I love, I received an email from Kunal Lunawat, CEO and cofounder of Wildr, an app he described to me as a “troll-free, text-only” social media platform. “Given the historical import of today, I had to reach out,” he wrote, and I immediately wanted to call bullshit.

I get emails like this from startup founders often. This is the app that solves everything, I’m promised. They toss out words like “game changer.” They characterize what they’ve built as a “turning point.” Rarely do those guarantees cash in—70 percent of startups fail between years two and five—and the urgency only seems to mask what’s really going on, what maybe these wannabe Zuckerbergs can’t see: Their idea just isn’t that innovative, no matter how much they dress it up in mechanical cliches.

Techies have been trying to make a “healthier” social media platform for decades now, whether it’s been by ditching anonymity, hiding likes, getting rid of bots, even making the network only bots. In Wildr’s case, it’s AI (of course): The app promises a “return to the basics” by leveraging a text-only format that would, as I deciphered it, merge the best parts of Reddit, Medium, and early Twitter. Open communication. Robust dialog. Zero trolls. And all of it is monitored by AI that “nudges” users to post “frictionless” content. It’s a big, perhaps impossible task—and one I wanted to hear more about.

As the election results became clear, if anything it was harder to buy into Lunawat’s utopian dream. America was drunk on Trump. Tradwives and Truth Social acolytes want to get high on mass deportation and fluoride-free water. The trolls had won.

But then I caught myself. Faced with the reality of what the next four years will again unleash, and perhaps wanting to safeguard against the utter and unending 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 than that, the bright hope, even now, is what connection opens up: roadmaps to learn from and challenge each other. Those challenges sharpen our understanding of the world, and can even change our minds—and that’s genuinely a good thing. Where, then, is the line between trolling and simply pushing back against someone’s opinion?

As Lunawat sees it, there are obvious don’ts. Broadly, he defines trolling as deliberate and continuous abuse. Racial slurs, sexually offensive language, religious hate—they have no place on the app. So much so that Wildr’s AI will caution a user before posting, encouraging them to edit a flagged remark if it detects anything wrong. Snug in a navy blue Patagonia vest from his home in San Francisco, Lunawat also acknowledged the difficulty in the app’s premise.

Wildr has been around for a few years, without seeing too much success. It launched in 2022, in the US and India, as a troll-free social platform with images and video. It mirrored TikTok in its appetite for joyful challenges and generally uplifting content. Scaling moderation proved difficult—“You’d need to spend a lot of resources on image recognition and computer vision to detect what was offensive,” Lunawat said—and so early next year Wildr is relaunching as a text-only platform. He hopes this new direction for the app can help facilitate a “behavioral shift” in how we interact with one another online, believing text, as opposed to video, allows people to authentically be who they are.

“Inauthenticity comes into play when images are at play,” he said, and all I could think was how people have also hidden behind their words online, how trolls have used language to inflict pain.

In any case, the timing is providential. More and more there is a palpable need for a healthier way to engage on social media. Many people feel jaded by its original promise, others are weary of aligning their values with those of Big Tech CEOs Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, while some are abandoning social apps altogether.

An increasingly popular alternative is Bluesky, one of the fairly new decentralized platforms to crop up in recent years. Over the past week, as calls of an X exodus intensified from Musk’s critics, 1 million new users signed up for Bluesky, the company confirmed to WIRED. (And then, in the 24 hours or so after that communication, another million users signed up.) The reason may be that the platform has better moderation practices in place, and thus, is a safer alternative for users. But it remains to be seen whether Bluesky can uphold those protections as it grows, or, like X and others before them, they will blow up in its face.

Lunawat is disarmingly zen about the whole thing. He previously worked in Blackstone’s private equity division before launching his own fund, which invested in Wildr. He has little experience in content moderation. What would he, and Wildr, do that’s different from all the other apps?

“We try to understand the user,” he said. In so many words, he explained some of the moderation features they plan to institute—one involved a color-coded profile ring, which starts off orange and oscillates between green (good) and red (bad) depending how often a profile is flagged. He claimed that Wildr’s AI language module “outpaces ChatGPT both quantitatively and qualitatively”—claims I had no way to verify myself—but also admitted that “we are not perfect right now in terms of detecting toxicity and trolling.”

I got the sense that he and his team weren’t exactly clear on all the rules just yet—like, what if people are mass-reporting innocuous posts as part of a harassment campaign, how would they deal with brigading?—but what he seemed certain of was the want for something new, for a more upbeat social ecosystem overall.

Days after our conversation, I attended a corporate mixer where an investor from a Silicon Valley VC fund told me bluntly, “Community building is dangerous.” We were on the topic of social media, and where moderation comes in. It’s a losing game, which makes it unattractive to investors, he said. For startups trying to pull that off, “it’s more of a liability than it is an opportunity. Create a service, not something that just lets people talk.” I understood enough, even if I didn’t agree from a user perspective.

After years of untamed growth, social media is at an inflection point. All sorts of esoteric apps will continue to rise up. And in time, the Big Four—Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok—will sour under their diseased excess. I can’t say for certain what that means for Wildr, or us, but I do admire Lunawat’s moxie. Maybe being so heavily online for as long as I have has turned me too cynical. Maybe Wildr is exactly what I need. Maybe Wildr is bullshit. Or maybe it’s not the answer but one answer—of many, many more answers—to everything that awaits us in the next four years.

Updated 11-15-24, 9:55 am EST: This story was updated to reflect Bluesky’s most recent rapid growth numbers.