A New Social Media App Punishes Customers for Rage-Baiting

If there may be 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 vary that, by punishing customers who shitpost for the sake of provocation.

The timing could also be excellent. America is coming 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trans rights as boogeymen in President Trump’s new imaginative and prescient of America, which is de facto only a very outdated model of America. As the following 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 method ahead?

“If you happen to deliver again accountability, possession, and popularity, then abruptly all of the incentives that now we have in the actual 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 may be an urge for food for a extra civil sort of dialog. Fairly than boosting any submit that’s getting rage clicks, Sez Us makes use of what its creators name a “popularity engine,” a characteristic that permits you to fee one other person’s posts on the platform throughout 5 key areas: approval, affect, insightfulness, relevance, and politeness.

On the app, scores decide a person’s popularity rating and total visibility. The upper the rating, the extra attain you’ve gotten in the neighborhood. Customers can even management who replies to them based mostly 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. Finally, scores are designed to deprioritize engagement based mostly 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 excellent social media, there has by no means been a one-size-fits-all answer in the case of moderation—for many who nonetheless trouble with it. Scale could make this process much more troublesome as a platform’s person base grows. For Simkin and his group, the thought was to construct a platform that might “deliver to the fore all of the methods wherein social media needs to be operating slightly 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 abruptly 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 section of social media, and the right way 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.