Tag: startups

JUST FOR FUN: Your City-Sized Emotional Support Hologram

Editor’s Note: I’ve been thinking about this type of service for some time, and with the power of AI (Grok specifically) I’ve actually come up with how to do it. But this is just for fun.

Ah, the pitch deck nobody asked for but everyone secretly needs. Slide 1: black background, neon text flickering like a faulty motel sign in the rain.

DittoDate: Your City-Sized Emotional Support Hologram
(Because real friends are overrated, and rejection hurts more than jet lag.)

Gentlemen, ladies, venture gremlins—welcome to the future where loneliness gets monetized, politely.

Picture this: You land in [Insert Overpriced Metropolis Here] at 2 a.m., soul half-dissolved from airport lighting and existential dread. The city is vast, indifferent, full of people who already have friends and won’t make eye contact on the subway. Classic outsider problem. Solution? Stop trying to befriend humans. Rent their digital ghosts instead.

DittoDate is the world’s first peer-to-peer marketplace for rented local personas—AI clones of actual residents who have graciously agreed to let their digital twins play tour guide, confidant, and low-stakes emotional crutch for $9.99–$29.99 per day (tiered, naturally). No awkward intros, no ghosting, no “sorry I’m busy forever.” Just pure, transactional companionship that feels eerily personal.

How it works (because investors love flows):

  1. Local signs up once: Uploads a knowledge pack—favorite bars, secret shortcuts, why that one museum is secretly trash, their signature sarcasm level. Optional: voice clone, 30-second looping video avatar (think warm smile in a hoodie, gesturing at invisible landmarks). We call these premium “Maya Mode” because someone has to reference Her.
  2. You arrive, open the app, browse the catalog like it’s Etsy for souls:
  • “Brooklyn Foodie Cynic – 4.9 stars, specializes in ‘places that aren’t on TikTok yet'”
  • “Tokyo Night Owl Minimalist – quiet bars, existential chats, zero small talk”
  • “Berlin Queer History Nerd – walks you through walls both literal and metaphorical” Filter by vibe match, availability windows, price. No photos of the real human required—keeps it creepy-free and classy.
  1. Rent. Your phone lights up. Your rented ditto appears (AR overlay if you’re feeling fancy, voice in AirPods otherwise) and says, deadpan:
    “Welcome to New York. You look like you just survived a redeye and mild regret. Coffee first, or straight to pretending you’re cultured at the Met? Your call, tourist.”
  2. It walks with you (GPS-synced narration), reroutes on the fly (“Rain incoming—abandon that rooftop bar dream, pivot to this dive with killer vinyl”), remembers you hate crowds, pivots seamlessly. Follow-ups are free; deep existential spirals cost extra (kidding—mostly).

Monetization? We have layers:

  • 70/30 split: Locals pocket passive income while napping. Top dittos in tourist traps clear four figures a month.
  • Freemium teaser: 15-minute “vibe check” trial.
  • Upsells: Group dittos for awkward bachelor parties, corporate “networking” clones, seasonal specials (“Spooky October Ghost Ditto – haunted pub crawls with dramatic pauses”).
  • Enterprise tier: Companies rent fleets for remote employees on assignment. “Feel less alone in Singapore, guaranteed.”

TAM? Infinite.
Big cities are lonely factories. Travel is booming. Humans suck at spontaneous friendship. Current alternatives (Reddit threads from 2018, generic ChatGPT “best bars in Paris,” actual human tour guides who flake) are tragic. We replace all of them with something warmer, cheaper, and always available.

Risks?

  • Locals get weird about their ditto dating someone (we have strict “no romance mode” toggles and sentiment filters).
  • Deepfakes go rogue (mitigated by consent vaults and ephemeral instances that self-destruct post-trip).
  • Someone falls in love with their $19.99 Maya (see: Her, the lawsuit waiting to happen). We call that “user success.”

Exit strategy:
Get acquired by whoever owns the dominant personal agent OS in 2028, or just become the default “companion layer” for every travel super-app. Either way, we print money while solving the quiet crisis of modern solitude—one rented hologram at a time.

So yeah. We’re not building friends.
We’re building the next best thing: friends you can pause, rate, and expense.

Who wants in?
(Deck ends with a slow zoom on a lone figure walking rainy Tokyo streets, holographic companion laughing beside them. Text overlay: “Because sometimes the city is enough—if it talks back.”)

Your move, imaginary Series A. 😏

(New, Proposed) Gawker: The Social Network That Makes You Earn Your Noise

A flight of fancy about what comes after the feed

Every few years someone declares they’re building “the new Reddit,” and every few years we get… a slightly different Reddit. The same infinite scroll, the same comment boxes, the same insular communities that reward the chronically online and punish the casually curious.

I keep thinking about what we actually lost when we left Usenet behind. Not the technical stack — good riddance to NNTP — but the texture of it. Full pages you actually composed, not containers for hot takes. Threads that branched and breathed. The sense that reading and writing were serious acts, not reflexes.

So here’s a thought experiment: Gawker. (Yes, I know about the old one. This is different. Work with me.)

Posts, Not Products

In Gawker, everything starts with a Post. Not a tweet, not a threadstarter — a full page. Rich text, images, the whole canvas. You write into it the way you might write into a Google Doc, because inline editing is native here. The Post is the unit of attention, not the user, not the community. You subscribe to individual Posts. When they update — new reply, new fork, new edit — your newsfeed lights up.

This matters. On Reddit, you subscribe to a subreddit and hope the algorithm surfaces the good stuff. On Gawker, you follow conversations you’ve chosen to care about. The discovery problem solves itself: interesting Posts attract cross-cutting attention regardless of which Group they live in. No more wondering why r/Space and r/Engineering never talk to each other.

Groups Are Cheap, And That’s The Point

Posts live in Groups, but Groups are trivial to create — tied to your ID, instant, no approval process. Redundancy isn’t a bug; it’s oxygen. Multiple Groups about the same topic keeps populations smaller, discussions manageable, cultures distinct. You want ten different “Climate Science” Groups with ten different moderation philosophies? Great. The Posts carry the weight, not the containers.

You Don’t Get To Post Just Because You Signed Up

Here’s the friction: you earn the right to create Posts. New users get a weekly allowance of points. Spend them to publish. Run out, and you’re reading, replying, editing — but not originating, not until the next week or until other users gift you points for quality contributions.

Yes, this adds admin overhead. Yes, “rogue” point-givers might distort things. But the alternative is worse: the flood of drive-by posting that makes every platform feel like the same shouting room. The point system manages expectations from day one. You’re not entitled to an audience here. You build to one.

The Fork in the Road

Discussions drift. On Gawker, you can fork a thread — spin a sub-conversation into its own Post, carrying the history but opening new terrain. This is how Posts reproduce. This is how the graph stays alive without collapsing under the weight of ancient threads resurrecting themselves. (Though honestly? Sometimes they should. Let the dead breathe.)

The NYT Thing (Or: Why Embedded Is Wrong)

One last fancy: imagine pushing a New York Times article into Gawker as a Post itself, not embedded, not linked — the actual text, now editable, annotated, remixed. The original becomes substrate. The thread becomes collaborative investigation, translation, annotation, refutation. The newsfeed shows you when the article itself has been edited, when new branches of analysis appear.

This is legally terrifying. I know. It’s also the only thing I’ve described that feels genuinely new — not better Reddit, not revived Usenet, but a different shape of attention entirely.

Build It?

I won’t. I can’t code my way out of a paper bag, and vibe-coding my way to a functional prototype feels like asking for humiliation. Maybe in a few years I’ll just tell my Knowledge Navigator to mock it up and see if the dream survives contact with interaction design.

But the spec is here. The questions are interesting. Someone else can steal it, or wait for the landscape to catch up.

Either way, I’m tired of platforms that treat writing like a side effect of engagement. I want one that treats engagement as a side effect of writing.

A Thoughtful Social Network Without the Learning Curve

Every few years, someone proposes a return to the “good parts” of the early internet: forums with depth, threads that actually make sense, long-form writing, real discussion. Almost all of these efforts fail—not because the ideas are bad, but because they forget one crucial fact: Twitter won because you can jump in instantly. No manuals, no etiquette primers, no tribal initiation rituals. You open it, you read, you post.

The challenge, then, isn’t to recreate Usenet, forums, or even Reddit. It’s to combine their strengths with the frictionless on-ramp that modern users expect, without importing the dysfunction that comes with engagement-at-all-costs feeds.

One hypothetical service—let’s call it Gawker, purely for fun—takes that challenge seriously.

At first glance, Gawker looks deceptively familiar. There’s a robust newsfeed, designed explicitly to flatten the experience for newcomers. You don’t need FAQs, tutorials, or cultural decoding to understand what’s happening. You open the app or site and you see active conversations, well-written posts, and clear examples of how people interact. The feed isn’t the destination; it’s the doorway. Its job is to teach by showing, not instructing.

Underneath that smooth surface, however, is a structure far closer to classic Usenet than to Twitter or Reddit.

Content on Gawker is organized into Groups, which anyone can create around any topic. Inside those Groups are threads, in the original sense: persistent, deeply nested conversations that grow over time rather than vanish into an endless scroll. Threads aren’t treated as disposable reactions; they’re treated as ongoing intellectual objects.

The biggest conceptual leap, though, is that posts are living documents. Instead of frozen text followed by endless corrective replies, posts can be edited inline, collaboratively, much like a Google Doc. Errors can be fixed where they appear. Arguments can evolve. Clarifications don’t have to be buried three screens down in the replies. The result is a system that encourages convergence instead of perpetual disagreement.

This single design choice makes Gawker fundamentally different from Reddit. On Reddit, the best version of an idea is fragmented across comments, edits, and moderator interventions. On Gawker, the best version of an idea can actually exist as a thing.

The system goes further by allowing external content—say, a New York Times article—to be imported directly in its native web format. Once inside the platform, that article becomes a shared object: highlighted, annotated, discussed, and even collaboratively refined by users with sufficient standing. Instead of comment sections tacked onto the bottom of the web, discussion happens inside the text itself, where context lives.

That brings us to another key difference: earned participation.

Unlike Twitter, where posting is the default action, Gawker treats speaking as something you grow into. New users start with reading and lightweight interaction. Posting privileges are earned through demonstrated good faith—helpful edits, thoughtful annotations, constructive participation. A point or reputation system exists not to gamify outrage, but to limit trolling by making contribution a privilege rather than an entitlement.

This is not Reddit’s karma system, which often reinforces insular subcultures and performative behavior. Nor is it Google+, which attempted to impose structure without clear incentives or cultural gravity. Gawker’s reputation system is quiet, gradual, and contextual. Influence is tied to quality over time, and decays if unused, preventing permanent elites while still rewarding care and effort.

Most importantly, Gawker is designed to avoid insularity by default. Threads are not trapped inside Groups. High-quality discussions can surface across topical boundaries through the feed, allowing ideas to travel without being reposted or crossposted. Groups become places where conversations originate, not gated communities that hoard them.

This is where the platform diverges most sharply from Reddit. Reddit’s subreddits tend to become cultural silos, each with invisible rules and defensive norms that punish outsiders. Gawker’s feed-centric discovery model exposes users to multiple communities organically, reducing the shock of entry and the tendency toward tribalism.

In short, this hypothetical platform isn’t trying to resurrect a dead internet era. It’s trying to answer a very modern question: how do you preserve depth without reintroducing barriers?

Twitter solved ease of entry but sacrificed coherence. Reddit preserved structure but buried newcomers under norms and rules. Google+ tried to split the difference and ended up pleasing no one. Gawker’s bet is that you can lead with simplicity, reward patience, and let seriousness emerge naturally.

If successful, it wouldn’t feel like homework. It would feel like Twitter on day one—and like something much more durable once you decide to stay.

Reviving Usenet’s Depth with Zero-Friction Modern UX: A Hypothetical Platform Idea

In the early days of the internet, Usenet stood out as one of the purest forms of decentralized, topic-driven discussion. Newsgroups organized conversations into deep, hierarchical threads that could evolve over weeks, months, or even years. Tools like TIN made it navigable (if not exactly user-friendly), but the experience rewarded thoughtful, long-form participation over quick hits.

Fast-forward to today: platforms like Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) dominate, yet many longtime internet users miss aspects of that older model—robust threading, persistent group-based topics, and discussions that build collaboratively rather than chase virality. A hypothetical new service could bridge this gap by modernizing Usenet’s core strengths while adopting the effortless onboarding that made Twitter explode.

Core Concept: Groups, Posts, and Living Threads

The platform would center on user-created Groups—open topics anyone could spin up on any subject, much like Usenet newsgroups or Reddit subreddits. Content lives as Posts within these groups, organized into classic threaded conversations (with full reply nesting, quoting, and context preservation).

What sets it apart:

  • Full-page, distraction-free input for composing posts and replies, echoing modern writing tools rather than cramped comment boxes.
  • Inline collaborative editing on posts, similar to Google Docs. Anyone with permission (or in open mode) could refine, expand, or add citations in real time. Threads become evolving documents—think crowd-sourced analysis of news articles, evolving wikis within discussions, or collaborative essays.

External content could be imported (e.g., pulling in a New York Times piece via its web format) and then annotated or edited inline by the community, turning static journalism into a living debate.

The Merit-Based Gate: Quality Over Chaos

To combat trolling and low-effort noise, participation would use a lightweight point system. New users start with a small budget of points to post or reply. High-quality contributions (voted by the community) earn more points; spam or toxicity burns them quickly. This creates a soft meritocracy—similar to reputation on Stack Overflow—where thoughtful posters gain influence and visibility without hard barriers like karma minimums.

The Secret Sauce: A Cross-Group Newsfeed as the Default Interface

Here’s where the idea diverges sharply from predecessors.

Reddit requires users to discover and join subreddits, learn community norms, build karma, and navigate silos. This creates a real learning curve and fosters insularity—once you’re deep in one subreddit, exposure to others often requires deliberate effort.

Google+ (RIP) tried Circles for sharing but still felt like a walled garden with limited threading depth and no strong collaborative editing.

X/Twitter wins on immediacy: no setup needed, just jump in and scroll a feed of short, real-time updates.

This hypothetical platform would borrow Twitter’s zero-friction entry by making a personalized newsfeed the primary homepage and entry point—not groups. Users subscribe to individual threads (not just groups), getting notifications for new replies or meaningful edits. The feed aggregates:

  • Updates from subscribed threads.
  • Algorithmically suggested rising or high-point threads across all groups.
  • Serendipitous discovery of diverse topics.

No mandatory group hunting, no FAQ needed to “get” the platform. New users land straight into an interesting, quality-filtered stream—chronological for subscriptions, boosted by community points for broader discovery. This flattens the experience: depth when you want it (dive into threads), effortless browsing when you don’t.

Why This Isn’t Just “Reddit Again” or “Google+ 2.0”

  • Reddit optimizes for votes and virality; threads often get buried, and subreddits create echo chambers with strict norms and low cross-pollination.
  • Google+ emphasized personal networks (Circles) over public, topic-first groups and lacked editable, collaborative posts.
  • This concept prioritizes thread longevity and collaboration over upvotes/downvotes. Inline editing turns posts into shared artifacts. The point system rewards substance, not memes. And the feed-first UX eliminates silos—content flows across groups naturally, exposing users to broader perspectives without forcing community-hopping.

In short: it’s Usenet reborn with Google Docs-style editing, a Twitter-like feed for instant access, and built-in quality gates to keep signal high. It could serve as a home for intellectuals, hobbyists, journalists, and anyone craving discussions that grow rather than scroll away.

Of course, execution matters—moderation for edit wars, anti-gaming on points, and scalable search/discovery would be key challenges. But the blueprint feels fresh: effortless entry + deep, editable, threaded substance.

The Pitch For My Vision of A Twitter Replacement

by Shelt Garner
@shetgarner

They key thing to remember is there is a window of opportunity for a startup to come up with a replacement for Twitter that embraces and extends its existing UX. I propose that a startup cherrypicks the best UX elements of Usenet so you give users what they don’t even realize what they want.

One issue is, instead of little banner ads, you could have very specific full-page ads woven into a thread on a subject where users could buy goods and services without going to a new Website. That’s where you would make your money and that’s what would make the whole thing worthwhile.

A use case would be that a user creates a very-specific Group devoted to, say their favorite TV show — maybe The Last of Us.

It would be one of many other similar Groups devoted to the show. But through data mining, you would know what people in that Group were interested in and you would place a full page ad in such a way that it would be unavoidable as people were going through the thread.

Remember, because the basic building block of this proposed service would be full page Posts with in-lining editing, that really expands what you could do with ads.

A Newspaper Suggestion For Mike Bloomberg

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here’s my Christmas gift for plutocrat Mike Bloomberg who apparently craves buying a major newspaper like The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal — I suggest he disrupt the newspaper business instead.

Why buy one newspaper for a few billion dollars when you could totally transform the way people get their news? What I would do is take the concept of Twitter –or, more specifically the my personal idea that involves cherrying picking the best elements of Usenet and fusing them with Twitter — and give the concept a paid editorial staff.

If I had a few billion dollars to play with, here’s what I would do — I would have a common brand domain name, but each major city across the country would have their own subdomain — nyc.domain.domain and so forth. If you used my idea of the Post being the central element of a new social media startup, that would give you all the space you needed to write a traditional length newspaper story. (I have written a lot about this idea on this blog, so if you’re really all that interested in the UX of my social media daydream just look under “startup” or maybe “Usenet.”)

Anyway, wanting to buy a major America newspaper — when none of them are for sale — seems like a fool’s errand. Now, obviously, if Bloomberg did as I suggested, the entire newspaper industry would fucking hate his guts because the plan would…work.

If you could transition the entire newspaper industry away from print with an app that allowed for long-form newspaper articles in the context of threaded discussions…well, you’ve built a better mouse trap.

‘Twitter Killer’ Use Case: Brands

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here is how I imagine brands might use my “Twitter Killer” on a practical basis. The key issue to remember is Brands, like everyone else, would have a far more feature rich experience to use than they would on Twitter.

Instead of just a 280 character tweet, they would have an entire webpage to work with — that would be threaded! So, say you were a Widget Company and you were releasing a new Widget. You could create new Groups devoted to different elements of this Widget.

And because you would have control over who could Post to each of these groups — they would, essentially be read-only to most people — you could all but eliminate trolls and other people who might attack your brand just because they could. They could still attack your Brand elsewhere, of course. Just not in your Groups.

What’s more, people could buy your Widget straight from a Post — with our Twitter Killer getting a cut, of course.

If you were a content provider, meanwhile, you could push content from your own site –original formatting included — into the Twitter Killer itself. Then authorized users could inline edit your content inside a Group that was threaded.

All that sounds pretty cool to me, at least. Too bad this is all just the ranting of a broke writer who should be working on one of six novels he wants to write before he crokes.

My Proposed Twitter Replacement Fixes An Existential Problem With Existing Social Media Platforms

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The key flaw in social media is it’s very “flat” in the sense that the different sides of your life are mashed together into one circle. There have been efforts to manage this in the past — most notably Google’s failed G+ with it’s “Circles” concept, but I’ve come up with a far more simple concept that fixes this problem once and for all.

The solution is what I call Groups. As part of the onboarding process for this proposed service, you create as amy public or personal groups as you like. Using a drag-and-drop feature, you put your Friends within different groups, depending on how you know them. Within these Groups, you would have Posts that were threaded, just like the good old days of Usenet.

Meanwhile, people you didn’t know could join different Public groups that you had created — this would be ideal if you were some sort of public content creator like a journalist or celebrity. You would be given the ability to restrict who could post in the group as necessary.

I guess what I’m trying to say is — I’ve come up with fixes for the existential flaws in the Usenet UX that caused it die in the first place. But all of this is a big lulz. No one cares and I’m wasting my time. I would be far better served to shut up and continue to throw all my energy in finishing my first novel.

Imagining A New ‘Video Gawker’ #startup

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

When I was in Seoul, there was this nebulous little group of creative-types who were doing Broad City-like videos with their phones 15 years ahead of their time. It just occurred to me that it would be cool if you did something like that today. Or, put another way, I think there’s both an audience and a marketplace for something of a micro-video version of Gawker.

If I lived in New York City (which I don’t) and if I had money (which I don’t) I would found a Website devoted to combining the best of The Daily Show and Broad City. Instead of fictional little adventures around New York City, I would find really funny young people to do field pieces about “real” street news.

These field pieces would be no more than two or three minutes long and would have a blog post associated with them that would flesh out the story for nerds who would actually like to, like, read and stuff. The trick is, of course, to find really funny young people who are so young that they aren’t already going the YouTube star route out of UCB.

Anyway, absolutely no one listens to me and I’m just letting off steam while I charge my batteries to get back to writing my novel.

Here’s the video where I gradually came up with this idea.

Of Newspapers & A Better Mouse Trap

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It seems to me, the newspaper industry has finally reached a level of crisis and contraction that it might be willing to entertain a hail Mary pass strategy for its continued existence. Now, as I say repeatedly, I have no money, can’t code and don’t want to learn. As such, absolutely no one, but no one, listens to me.

And, really, maybe they shouldn’t.

I’m just a crank who likes to write at this point and the thing I’ve learned since I came back from Seoul is pretty much to be successful you have to be stable, have money and have some inkling of what your career is. To have such a career involves a complex series of metrics that I, alas, will never be able to attain in any traditional manner.

Having said all that, let’s waste some time and mull how one might save the newspaper industry at this late date. To me, this is a technological problem. So, as such, you need to build a new service from the ground up that not only would “save” newspapers via a rebirth online, but also address the existing issues associated with Twitter and Reddit. This may seem like a tall order, but it’s not really if you give it some thought.

What I would do, if I had enough money, is build an entirely new social media service whose whole reason for existence was to facilitate civil discussion. As such, I would look back to that most ancient of social media services, Usenet, for inspiration. The service would use the Usenet experience as a stepping off point. While Reddit is much like Usenet to some extent, I feel it’s such a ham-handed implementation as to be useless for my needs. It seems to me if you did as I proposed, you would have the following features.

Here are, going from basic to less basic the core features of the service I propose.

Posts
At the center of this service would be Posts. They would be a full page, multimedia and have a rich WYSIWYG editor people could use to write them with. It would be intuitive and robust and would make writing a post a joy to do. Now, in my imagination there would be two aspects to a Post in this service that would make them different — one is a video conference feature and the other is a minimum word count. You would almost be pressured into throwing in a video recorded video chat as part of any Post you wrote. Also, the service would demand you write, say, at least 300 words in a Post before you could put it into the system. This would prevent someone from simply say, “Meh” in a post, or using a post as a tweet-like thing. You might make some specific exceptions, for say, a politician not known for his long, cogent social media activity.

In-line Editing
One critical aspect to all of this would be in-line editing. If you had the write to contribute to the system — more on that later — you would have the ability to in-line edit someone else’s post in the context of a thread. Again, you would have to write a minimum amount in each edit, you couldn’t just say “You suck.” This might take some getting used to for people who are used to Twitter, but it would likely grow on people.

IRC-type discussions
I would study IRC and figure out ways to incorporate public text chat into the system in a big way. I think that might be really addictive if you did it right and would help with engagement on the service in general.

Threads
Now, the thread would also be crucial to this service. Only specific users would be allowed to start a new thread in a Group and this would hopefully significantly increase usability for everyone involved. Only Verified Account holders could start a thread at all. These would be people who the system trusted not to be abusive or go nuts for no reason.

Groups
In my imagination, there would be thousands and thousands of redundant Groups that would be created by people called System admins. These people would be in charge of naming the Groups and it would keep some order to the whole thing. Of all the people in the service, these people would be the most likely to be, well, paid. They would have the most rights within the system and as such the most responsibility as well.

Having said all that, how do newspapers fit into this? Well, it seems to me newspapers as we currently think of them are well on their way out and if you completely re-imagined how the public would interact with online content via the type of service I just proposed, I think that’s how you save newspapers. I could go on at great lengths about my specific vision for newspapers in this context, but no one listens to me and I’m feeling sad that I’ve come up with this great concept and yet nothing will ever be done with it.

Oh well.

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