How Gather will change the world
Every idea should have a post with this title.
Gather is not-for-profit
By reversing the ad-driven business model of social networks, we reverse the effects.
Gather is a not-for-profit. There are no ads.
It shouldn't be that revolutionary.
Without ads, there is no incentive to keep people scrolling for longer. There is no reason to engineer addictive algorithms, and feed users increasingly alarming and divisive content to keep them trapped.
The only motivation left is to genuinely connect people.
Meta and Tik Tok's algorithms prioritise the most divisive content, and push it to the top of your news feed.
Meta's Andromeda update means you're starting to see more and more and more content that's not from people you follow. This is by design - it's to replicate Tik Tok in showing you the content it thinks will keep you hooked, rather than the content you've chosen to follow. This is to keep you on for longer.
Gather's Seed feed prioritises the posts from the people closest to you, who have done the most work to help their communities.
Meta's algorithm encourages you to post about yourself, to gain attention and feel validated. These posts get the most likes, and shoot to the top of the feed. It hooks into the reward center in our brains, and makes us want to post another as soon as the clamour quietens down.
This encourages you to act as an individual, in competition with the people around you for attention.
Gather's Seed feed encourages you to contribute to your group. It rewards group-first behaviour, like attending your club's events, meeting up with members close to you, doing volunteer actions, and completing tasks that help your group's goals. These actions shoot to the top of the seed feed, and get you the response that makes you feel valued.
You're valued for your contribution..
Meta's algorithm will have you eating on a rooftop alone so you can take a great photo that makes you look deep.
Gather's Seed feed will have you inviting 6 neighbours over for a potluck to get to know them better.
This is how we change the world.
Connection as climate resilience
David Suzuki, the environmentalist, famously said recently that the fight against climate has been lost. Governments have failed to do anything meaningful, and so we're headed for at least 3 degrees warming in the next 40 years.
This is 3 degrees on average, but temperatures over the sea are obviously lower. So on land, they're expecting this could be 6 degrees warming. In New Zealand, we can expect 20 degree winters - this is hot enough to swim - and 40 degree summers. A third of the earth's land will probably turn to desert from this heat, and tropical diseases like malaria that are carried by bugs who stay in defined temperature zones will be able to cover the globe.
David Suzuki said, because the fight against climate change has been lost, we must turn our focus to neighbourhood resilience instead.
This means:
- having somewhere to shelter in a crisis if your house is unstable
- nominating a place to store medical equipment, gas bottles, a generator and food for the community
- knowing who grows vegetables, who stores fresh water, who has solar power on your street
- who will need the most help without power
- how you'll communicate with each other if cell towers and the internet go down
How many people can answer these questions today?
The answer is, no one. And it's not because we're lazy or antisocial. It's because the mechanics of social interaction have undergone the most rapid, dramatic change in history over the last 10 years thanks to social media and on-person devices, and we've been left disconnected.
It's not your fault you don't know your neighbours. It's hard. It's vulnerable. It involves time we've lost and skills we don't have anymore.
But this can all be healed.
Gather makes the hard work of building community easy.
It takes 2 minutes to create a group for your neighbourhood and invite people to join.
Once you've set it up, people get celebrated each time they invite people in, write an encouraging message, create a task to help the group, and complete a task.
That's how community contribution works. You show up, you do the work, and you be consistent.
Gather's group-building mechanics work for childcare swap groups, volunteer organisations, political campaigns, potluck clubs, language nights, climate groups.
Anything that would be better with more people.
And that's how we change the world.
By making it easy to connect and contribute, without the noise, without the algorithm, without giving money to billionaires.
Gather is a not-for-profit, funneling money back into the communities it serves.
Looking forward
We see a future where everyone knows the people who live around them. You don't have to like them, or get on with them, but you do need to know where to find the things you need in an emergency. And no one can do that alone.
A future where volunteering is made easier and more rewarding, so more people do it. More composting clubs, more beach cleanups, more repair cafes, more vege co-ops, more shared childcare, more carpooling, more walking busses.
A future where young people feel confident and loved, because they have real-world connections with the people around them, and are recognised for their contributions to their groups - not for the way the algorithm thinks they look.
A future where we've not only reversed the drain on self-esteem of ad-driven social media - but we've actually built a better alternative instead.
Where your time is valued.
Where your community is connected.
Where people help people.
Gather - Welcome to the world of support.