There’s so much to look forward to: chicago.com is starting to unfold in different parts of the city, and our new residents will start our pilot virtual residency. Plus, you know, Halloween and autumn leaves. Welcome to fall! 🍂🎃🥧

Announcements and events

• Speaking of the residents, we got over 600 applications for our Entrepreneur in Residence pilot program! We think the public and moral imagination of these emerging leaders has been under-invested in, and we’re excited to continue lifting up prosocial innovators and entrepreneurs. More about the program and these new residents will be coming soon!

• Announcing the first pilot communities for chicago.com, powered by Roundabout and Chicago Public Media: Avondale, Bronzeville, Edgewater, Evanston, and South Shore. Each pilot will be supported by a local community steward who lives in the neighborhood and serves members as a trusted community leader and caretaker. Alongside Kasiana McLenaghan, interim General Manager for chicago.com, the stewards are already sharing great ideas about how to build an online space that’ll best serve their local communities and — eventually — all of Chicagoland!

• Following our last newsletter with Jonathan Stray and Renée DiResta, New_ Public’s Head of Editorial Josh Kramer walks us through MySky, a tool that not only lets you customize your feed but also shows WHY certain posts show up in the order that they do (available just on Bluesky, for now):

• October 7th | New_ Public Co-Director Deepti Doshi is one of five prosocial builders joining the Pro-Social Tech Showcase: Tech Designed to Strengthen Human Connection, hosted by The Workday Foundation.
  

• October 23rd | Builder, media thinker, and Friend of New_ Public Ben Werdmuller will be speaking at A Free Press Needs Free Protocols: Building Collective Power Through Open Technology as part of News Product Alliance’s summit. He’ll be joined by Andjela Padejski and Frank Sharpe from Chicago Public Media, who will share about chicago.com.
  

• October 29th | New_ Public Co-Director Eli Pariser will be one of the speakers at All Tech is Human’s Responsible Tech Summit. The theme is From Principles to Power: Embedding Accountability in the AI Era.

Links I would Slack you

• We couldn’t agree more with The Jersey Bee: It shouldn’t take luck to know what’s happening where you live. Simon Galperin is the Founder and Executive Editor of The Jersey Bee, a nonprofit local news service for New Jerseyans. He writes about why the news closest to us is often the least accessible:

Our communities have no dedicated way to communicate – whether it’s about the week’s food delivery, where to get help with a utility bill, or news about the business opening down the street. There are no public pipes for the flow of civic news and information. The Jersey Bee exists to be exactly that: local public infrastructure for the people who need it most.

• Giorgia Lupi’s NYT opinion piece, “In Defense of the Detour”, makes the case that the “slow part” of discovery, listening, and thinking can’t be outsourced or made more efficient with AI. But AI can support creative work after humans do the thinking and discovery.

• The Psych of Tech Institute invited Vardon Hamdiu from Sparkable, Filip Gaman from Monnett, and Jonathan Stray from MySky to answer the question: Can Social Media Make Us Social Again? They each shared demos of their products and discussed financial incentives around social tech, how to bring users to alternative platforms, and bridging algorithms.

• Meta (yes, the same Meta that recently settled its child safety case with nearly every state and territory and that is reportedly using data centers to avoid paying taxes) just launched a new product: a personal AI agent, Muse, that can act as your personal assistant — and also apparently gain access to your unshared personal information. 🙃

Digital Space Spotlight

We like to use this space to remind folks that not only are there great alternatives to mainstream social media apps and tools out there, we have a directory of over 300 of them that anyone can submit to!

A treat for (alleged) bad texters, pen pal writers, Merlin Bird ID users, or maybe all of the above: Roost is a messaging app where messages travel at the speed of … a turtle, snail, carrier pigeon, or any other bird you’d like to send from your digital rookery. 🐢🐌💨

Roost was intentionally built with slow technology in mind:

Slow tech is about choosing when technology gets your attention, not giving technology up. We aren’t anti-tech at Roost. We love technology most when it earns its place: when it helps two people find each other, carries something meaningful between them, and then gets out of the way.

Similarly, we’re also big fans of the concept of calm technology.

New_ Roundabout Feature

Members of Roundabout, our local community app, have been successfully building community, neighbor by neighbor. But a new problem emerged: now that Roundabout offered access to a wider network of neighbors, there was an increasing need to connect one-on-one within the platform, with folks looking to schedule coffee chats, arrange free item pickups, and offer personal referrals. While the Roundabout team didn’t want members to have to share personal or sensitive information in public, they also didn’t want to create a system, like traditional direct messaging, that could become a vector for spam and abuse.

In response to these community needs, the team’s elegant solution has recently launched across all Roundabout communities: Direct Replies. Community members can now choose to answer a post or thread directly to the person they’re replying to, without it being visible to everyone in the space. Every Direct Reply still runs through our AI-powered pre-moderation, where users always have the option for human, steward review.

Now members can arrange to give things away on Roundabout. Stewards are also really appreciating the flexibility to be able to send a private note, and some began using the feature immediately. As more and more people try out Roundabout, the team continues to evolve the platform and deliver more useful and helpful features.

We’re excited to continue building in public and sharing our learnings!

Digital Delight

So happy we stumbled upon InternetHistoryRoulette.com 🎲 A tribute to the early internet, the spinning wheel drops users onto a random archived page from the 1990s and early 2000s thanks to the Wayback Machine archive. It’ll also show you little pop-up facts about the site you’re on — be sure to have sound on for peak nostalgia. 🖥️ 🌐

Insert your own dial-up internet sound here,

–Nina Joung

Maybe this stuff is far more plastic and changeable than we all thought. So why should the companies get to decide how you experience these apps?

We find ourselves in a moment where increasingly there are new options for customizing “the algorithm.” This is what we’ve been saying: open web protocols and AI-powered tools are making a ton of new, exciting research and innovation possible.

Case in point: Jonathan Stray, a senior scientist at UC Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible AI, and Renée DiResta, Associate Research Professor at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, have a new tool that lets you see inside your own feed and change it like never before. This is the culmination of years of work on the Prosocial Ranking Challenge and elsewhere.

Below, Jonathan and Renée take you into MySky, which you can try out for yourself by logging in with any Bluesky account!

For more, Jonathan will be on a panel with our friends at the Council of Tech and Social Cohesion and the Neely Center this upcoming Tuesday, September 22, 12:00pm to 1:30pm ET.

–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

Try MySky!

One thing is remarkably consistent across social media: the platform decides what you see.

Facebook, TikTok, X, Instagram — you can follow people, mute them, swipe, like, block, and occasionally choose between a couple of feed modes, such as “following” or “favorites” on Instagram. But there’s tremendous power in default settings.

The machinery that actually assembles your information environment is mostly out of reach. You cannot usually inspect its priorities, change them, or ask the app why it made a particular decision. If you don’t like something, well … you can give the machine signals and hope it takes the hint.

Recommendation algorithms make choices about whose voices receive attention, which subjects dominate a conversation, what kinds of behavior get rewarded, and what each of us comes to understand as important. In other words, they perform some of the basic functions that shape a public sphere.

So what would it mean to give people real control over those algorithms?

That’s the question we’ve been asking for a long time now, in research and in public commentary, and it’s why we’ve built MySky: a modern algorithmic feed with a full set of user controls — a panel that shows you the whole pipeline, top to bottom, exactly as it runs. We now have more than 60,000 daily active users, and we’re just getting started.

The point is not that we’ve discovered the most correct set of values for an algorithm. It’s that there is no value-free algorithm in the first place.

MySky currently runs on Bluesky by way of AT Protocol, the technology underneath, but the larger goal is not to create a particular feed on a single platform. We’re envisioning expanding MySky to other platforms as well, to ensure we reach diverse user communities. This test aims to create a different relationship between people and the algorithms that mediate their attention.

Dialing in your algorithm to match your values

Most recommendation systems work in three stages: First, the system finds a pool of possible posts. Then it ranks those posts according to some definition of value. In many cases, Big Tech social media algorithms are often optimized for engagement, which is closely tied to the platforms’ business models. Finally, the system makes adjustments — for example, preventing the same person or topic from taking over the entire feed.

These choices are normally buried deep inside a platform’s logic. In MySky, they are visible to you in a settings panel.

We’ve tried to be as transparent as possible, and to give users as much agency as possible. Open the controls by clicking the link at the top of your MySky feed, and you’ll see the three classic recommender algorithm stages, laid out in order.

Sources: Where should your feed look for material? Its job is to select a few dozen — hopefully good — posts out of millions of potential items. MySky can draw from people you follow, posts that those people liked, authors and subjects you have shown interest in before, and popular posts from across the network. You can decide how to weigh each.

Notably, increasing the influence of one factor decreases the others — you need to prioritize which factors are most important to you. You can also set the time window, from seeing only the freshest posts from the last few hours, or across a whole week to catch up on evergreen bangers.

The larger principle underneath these settings is that the composition of your information environment should not be a platform secret. You should control it.

Ranking: Once potential posts are collected, each post is scored in two ways: engagement (how likely you are to like, share, or comment on it) and how constructive it is.

Engagement is a key signal for every recommender system used by a Big Tech company today. Systems that relentlessly optimize for engagement can amplify outrage, clickbait, and falsehoods. Yet purely chronological feeds are not an ideal solution either: whoever posts most often gets to be the loudest, it’s difficult to discover interesting people outside of your network, and experiments with Facebook and Instagram actually found that chronological feeds increased the amount of untrustworthy content.

Hence some sort of algorithmic feed, including some consideration of engagement in content ranking, is essential to creating a good user experience. Without trying to figure out what you will “like,” the algorithm cannot adjust to your taste.

But engagement is not the only goal. We also score each post on how “constructive” it is. This is not a synonym for politeness! Passion and even anger can be constructive. What matters is whether a post contains features such as reasoned argument, personal experience, curiosity, respect, or a genuine attempt to communicate across difference.

Here’s a detailed description of how we classify the “constructiveness” of posts. This is what’s known as “bridging” — and in academic research, prior experiments we’ve conducted have shown that bridging feeds can actually improve relationships between people who disagree.

In the MySky feed, engagement and constructiveness are weighted equally by default. But that default is neither opaque, nor locked in. You can turn constructiveness down and get something closer to a conventional engagement-ranked feed. Or you can turn engagement down and ask the system to rank principally on qualities in the content itself.

Diversification: Finally, we apply penalties for repeated authors and repeated topics. This prevents one loud account or an exhausting news cycle from eating your entire feed. Soon, you will be able to adjust these weights if you want to see even more diversity or a narrower focus.

Every feed is already making choices about selection, engagement, and diversification. We would rather make those choices transparent and changeable by the user. You deserve to have agency over your experience. You deserve to understand why your feed is constructed in the way that it is.

Open Source and Open Science

MySky supports three different types of transparency: live explanations, open source code, and open science.

One of the central questions of algorithmic life is “Why am I seeing this?” Usually, the answer available to a user is something like: because the system thinks you will find it relevant.

That is not much of an explanation. A useful explanation should expose enough of the decisions behind what is served up by the feed that a person without a technical background can understand it — and, ideally, do something about it.

For any post in MySky, you can open a “Why Am I Seeing This?” panel. It shows where the post came from and how the different ranking and diversity components contributed to its position in your feed.

MySky is also open source, so you can inspect the algorithm for yourself. You can even join our Discord, where you can meet our team and chat with us about the project.

Motivated builders can run the entire stack themselves. However, to run MySky we pay thousands of dollars a month for servers to index the entire ATmosphere (all ATProto content), and we’re happy to take that on (if you’re a philanthropist or tech donor, we’d love to talk). We instead encourage experimentation through our API. Rather than a fixed feed algorithm, it’s a flexible system of search indices, candidate generators, and rankers that you can customize to your specific application.

We know that very few people are going to read thousands of lines of recommender-system code, understand how they interact, and calculate what those choices mean. Meaningful transparency therefore has to operate at several levels.

The code should be inspectable. The system’s decisions should be explainable. And ordinary users should have controls that correspond to things they actually care about. There is also a fourth kind of openness we think matters: open science.

MySky is designed for open science. If we want to understand the effects of platforms on people, we have to study real people using real platforms. Otherwise, algorithm design and policy-making happens in the dark. Commercial platforms constantly run experiments on their users but they don’t tell them they are being studied or share the results publicly.

Because the effects of feed algorithms are complex, we want to run experiments too, but with consent. How can we make these algorithms less addictive and polarizing, and more informative and overall better for your well-being? There is precious little high-quality public knowledge on these questions and theory only goes so far; the only way to know for sure is to try things out.

That’s why MySky is also a platform for open research, where researchers can study questions such as, “Can a feed be engaging without being addictive?” We will invite members of the ATProto community to participate in experiment design and analysis, and our results will ultimately be published in open-access journals. When we collect expensive survey data, we will train privacy-preserving open models to make future experiments cheaper and easier.

What would you ask your algorithm to do?

We are rapidly developing MySky and many features are coming soon. Sliders are just the beginning! We’re currently working on infrastructure to let you describe your ideal feed in your own words: “more local news, less sports,” or “keep the politics but drop the outrage.” The idea is to turn prompts in plain English into functional controls. Type a description of a type of content you want to see more (or less) of, and it will instantly create a new slider in your settings.

The open social web has already begun separating social technology from the companies that have owned and operated these platforms for decades. Protocols like ATProto and ActivityPub make it possible for different applications to interoperate over shared social infrastructure. We think algorithms should become separable too.

We want the MySky algorithms to serve you. Try the feed. Move the sliders. Break something and tell us. Transparent, controllable, state-of-the-art social media algorithms have been a long time coming, and we’re building them for you.

–Jonathan Stray and Renée DiResta

Try MySky!

Thanks Jonathan and Renée!

Heading out of town to spend the weekend on a houseboat,

–Josh

We hope you had a good summer ☀️ — now we’re in “back to school” mode and change is in the air. Let’s go! 🍂

Announcements and events

• 💡Entrepreneur in Residence: In case you missed it, applications are open for our new virtual residency until midnight PST on September 9th. See Managing Director Angelica Quicksey’s recent Q+A for more details. Now open to Mexico in addition to the U.S. and Canada.

• Chicago.com: Do you live in Chicago? Are you into public media? A fan of our local community app Roundabout? This recent Nieman Lab piece details our new partnership with Chicago Public Media, and if you’re a Chicagoan, sign up at chicago.com to join the community!

• Here’s Angelica with more about the Entrepreneur in Residence program 👀

• September 17 | Roundabout Founder in Residence Trei Brundrett and Chicago Public Media CEO Melissa Bell will be speaking about chicago.com at the International Symposium on Journalism in Austin. 🤠

• September 19 | 🏕️ An unconference hosted by BetaNYC, CityCamp NYC returns to collaboratively uncover the challenges of civic tech and imagine community-oriented solutions. Register and learn more about this year’s unconference. (I’ll be volunteering as a session scribe at CityCamp NYC on the 19th. Feel free to say hi!)

• September 24 | Also in Austin, New_ Public Co-Director Eli Pariser will be joining a panel on “Democracy in the Age of AI” at the Texas Tribune Festival ✨

• September 24 | Fall semester courses are live at Grey Area, with a mix of virtual classes and some in-person at their SF location. “Beyond Big Tech” is a mostly asynchronous online course that teaches creatives, designers, and community leaders the technical implementation of decentralized networks — register by the 24th!

Links I would Slack you

• Don’t miss Darryl Holliday on the state of social media and the promise of stewardship:

• Remember Vine, the six-second video platform? Friend of New_ Public Rabble has brought it back as Divine, a revamped, decentralized version of the old app, with an … intriguing collaboration with a major brand. 🌮

• Kids today are ghost-posting: sneakily posting to their Instagram grid, immediately archiving the post, and then unarchiving it later. The post still makes it to their profile grid, but stays off others’ feeds. A clever way to circumvent the platform and use the app for one’s own purposes!

• Here’s one we didn’t ghost-post 👻

Designs to Know

Every now and then, we highlight the research coming out of the Prosocial Design Network, a major resource for digital design practices that has shaped New_ Public’s work.

In the U.S. we value free speech, but again and again, research has shown that anti-social political posts aren’t just unpleasant, they can even be damaging to democracy. PDN says:

This can include posts and comments marked by insults, identity attacks, fearmongering, scapegoating, moral outrage, and antidemocratic or strongly partisan attitudes.

One solution is to downrank this type of content so it shows up less frequently in algorithmically-sorted feeds. Some platforms go further, upranking content that shows “compassion, respect, or curiosity.” LLM-powered tools are often used for determining the level of antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity.

Roundabout the neighborhood

Ever since we started exploring the idea of creating a local app, we’ve hoped that as people use what we build to get to know their neighbors, they might also find new opportunities to participate in democracy locally.

We saw some promising signs of civic participation in our North Chattanooga, TN, Roundabout community when, last month, the most-clicked link in one of their newsletters was the Hamilton County voter lookup tool, helping people find out where to vote.

This harkens back to our Civic Signals framework, and its “Act” building block — “how our behavior in digital spaces spills over into physical spaces and how we might become better citizens of the world around us.” It’s notably the final building block in our framework: starting with the foundational “Welcome” signals, followed by “Connection” and “Understand”. Meaningful action via Roundabout, even looking up where to vote, is an important milestone for us. 🙌

The more you know

Recently, Meta settled with almost every state and territory in the country, agreeing to create new platform features for kids and teens and paying out massive sums. Many details are still unknown and will likely come into focus in the coming months and years. Here’s Josh Kramer, New_ Public’s Head of Editorial, on one under-considered aspect of this news:

Meta has agreed to pay as much as $16.68 billion over 10 years. That is admittedly, not a lot of money for Meta, which last year topped $200 billion in revenue, a sum comparable to the entire annual USDA budget. But it is actually a ton of money for addressing some of the harms to underage users of Meta’s apps.

The settlement lays out 11 purposes that each state may use these hundreds of millions of dollars for, such as mental health programming and outdoor activities. I’m interested in the last one: “Investigation, litigation, and related efforts to improve teen safety on social media.”

I’m not a lawyer (feel free to sound off in the comments!), but I suspect that “efforts to improve teen safety on social media” could be interpreted to include investing in creating alternative tools, patterns, and apps.

Hypothetically, could a few states take $10 million and stand up a cutting-edge lab building open source tools and innovating in teen-focused platform governance? I hope so. As we’ve pointed out for our EIR virtual residency, there’s never been a better time to build this stuff. In my opinion, smart states will try to invest some of this money in creating a better future, as opposed to solely remediation.

Digital Delight

In this era of vibe-coded apps and renewed experimentation with what’s possible in CSS and HTML, who else remembers the simple but elegant web games from neal.fun?

One of Neal’s newer games, Wiki Spy, is an absolute feast for the eyes. Let us know where you wander in this truly delightful visualized rabbit hole of Wikimedia images.

Some of these are amusing or poignant visualizations, some are features with a larger satirical point, and some are just fun games (if you mildly panic trying to actually use your cursor outside the game, like I did, just hit the esc button to pause the game).

If you’ve never had the joy of seeing what you can make with Infinite Craft, you’re welcome, and please enjoy.

Resisting the autumnal urge to buy school supplies,

–Nina

Read the Nieman Lab article announcing our partnership with Chicago Public Media to bring Roundabout to Chicago!

Big things are happening around here. Public Spaces Incubator, our partnership with public service media organizations, is reaching new levels of collaboration and implementation. Meanwhile, Roundabout, our local community app, just announced a huge project with Chicago Public Media — one of the largest public media institutions in the US.

This has us looking ahead to the future. What’s the next Roundabout or PSI?

New_ Public Managing Director Angelica Quicksey helped launch both of them. Now she’s kicking off a new initiative: a virtual residency for prosocial builders called Entrepreneur in Residence.

We’re seeking two amazing residents. Applications are currently open for the pilot program, just for the U.S. and Canada for now. The deadline is September 9 at 11:59pm PT. Below, Angelica shares why we’re motivated to support founders, why now is the perfect moment for this, and who should apply.

–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

Check out the residency

Why AI makes us want to invest in humans:

Think back: what if New_ Public had existed twenty years ago when Facebook or Twitter started? What if we had people thinking and talking about where our technology should go and they didn’t allow it to take over our lives, communities, and communication infrastructure in the way that it did?

There was a moment where our Co-Director, Eli Pariser, was warning about filter bubbles in 2011, but nothing changed. We still ended up with the social media that we have now. It’s atomizing us. It’s pulling us apart. There’s misinformation. There’s conflict.

This new residency is very much tied to AI and our new research on After the Feed. Right now, we’re at this inflection point with AI, and there are a lot of ways that we could, as a society, shape where AI goes.

We don’t want AI to go the way of social media. We want it to power an information ecosystem and a technology of connection that serves our needs. Not one that manipulates us in ways that benefit the builders of these products at everyone else’s expense.

Why New_ Public wants to support entrepreneurs:

We believe that a healthier social fabric is made up of many different kinds of digital public spaces, and that requires many different people building those public spaces.

So for the last five years, we’ve done research on what works. We’ve built things ourselves, and we’ve brought on a Founder in Residence to launch a new platform for local communities. We want to keep doing that. We want to support folks who are building the next generation of social technologies.

We have always believed that people should have many alternatives. Now we’re trying to support the people who are building those alternatives, and building them in healthy ways.

The big opportunity of this moment:

AI-powered coding tools are dramatically lowering the cost of building software, let alone social software. A single product builder or a small team can build something now in a way that they couldn’t before. We think this is a really big change that enables entrepreneurship.

Consumer preferences are changing too. As our tech is transforming, people are seeking alternatives to social media feeds. They are rejecting “the algorithm.” They’re retreating to these smaller, trusted spaces like group chats. They’re experimenting with AI products that give them information that’s uniquely relevant to them. Or they’re going offline entirely and rejecting online life.

So as people’s preferences change, and what’s possible with technology changes too, this feels like a really important moment to enable entrepreneurs to seize that opportunity.

I’m also convinced that decentralized protocols like AT Protocol and ActivityPub make it possible to build social technology that’s different down to its bones.

That’s exciting, because between the AI coding tools and these decentralized protocols, entrepreneurship can look a little bit different. For example, the folks who won our Open Social Awards are building in different ways and creating different kinds of applications. It shows that we can have new ideas and new products in this moment.

The ideal builders for this new virtual residency pilot:

Our prospective EIR could be a developer who can build something quickly with their own technical talent and experience. But there’s also the non-technical founder who can build and test in a way that wasn’t possible before these AI coding tools.

One thing that distinguishes this program from others is that it’s for folks going from -1 to 0. The person exploring at this stage could be someone that has experience working in tech. Maybe they’ve founded something before and they’re ready to build their next thing, and they need a home to do that exploration.

Mostly, we’re looking for people who are very product-oriented. People who can see software-shaped problems, and also see users’ needs. They can marry those to build something that’s really compelling and that people want to use.

They must be able to relentlessly test their assumptions, including getting something in front of potential users and working through the ambiguity of all of these changes in technology and consumer preferences.

They can use this time to pinpoint the one thing they want to build that’s going to be useful to people: a new platform or application that’s prosocial, healthy, and supports human flourishing.

Going from hunch to plan:

This program is for someone who’s coming to us with a hunch, an idea, or an area of exploration. They will leave with a strong conviction about what to build.

When we started the project that became Roundabout, we started with more of a hunch that there was an unmet need in local communities and how people connect locally, but we weren’t sure what the need was.

We spent nine months doing R&D around that. We ran some experiments and we came to the end of that process with a clear conclusion that a new platform was needed. Then we formed the team and built Roundabout. This is more condensed than that. It’s three months of exploration to come to a conclusion about what the shape of your idea should be.

This is about finding a product opportunity and building confidence around that opportunity. This isn’t about writing a white paper or doing an academic exercise.

You’re not going to build a full-stack application during this three-month virtual residency. But ideally you are going to build multiple prototypes, test those prototypes, and get to something that you feel confident about by the end. You’ll have a clear picture of where your product idea stands — what’s working, what’s not, what it would take to get to the next stage. Then, we’ll work with you to identify the next steps.

The focus areas for the virtual residency:

One is humans connecting to humans, and the other is local and civic information environments. These build on areas where New_ Public has a ton of expertise.

We’re interested in social products that bring people into real, meaningful contact with one another. These can be AI-native products, but at the end of the day, we care about humans connecting to humans, not bots.

The other piece is local and civic information environments. What we care about here is that the old distribution channels are changing — they’re weakening. Local news outlets are shutting down. People are turning to other places to get information. They’re increasingly turning to social media and content creators. But people still socialize to make sense of the world around them and internalize information. So what else could that look like?

If you have a wild idea that looks nothing like what’s come before, but is still about humans connecting to humans or local and civic information environments, that’s awesome. If you’re trying to reimagine how people communicate with one another using technology, great! Everything shouldn’t be Facebook-shaped.

What this virtual residency provides:

For three months, residents will get a stipend. This is intended to support builders who might not normally have the opportunity or space for this kind of exploration.

We will bring in external experts throughout the residency around specific topics — everything from thinking about public space and the philosophical roots of this work, to much more hands-on conversations around go-to-market and concept testing.

Residents will also have access to our research. We have five years of research that’s directly applicable to founders building in this space, as well as a massive network, including product teams at major platforms and researchers at leading universities. We want to make introductions to support residents’ work.

You will kick off your three months with us at our in-person team retreat in Philadelphia in October. Throughout the virtual residency you’ll have regular programming, access to office hours with our team, connection time with the other resident, and time and space to build and explore.

This is also a pilot for us, so we’re looking for this first cohort of two people to also help us build the program. Your experience is going to directly shape how this Entrepreneur in Residence program works going forward. We’ll be adjusting in real time, so it’s not going to feel as polished as it will for future cohorts, and we want folks who are going to be comfortable with that.

The long-term vision:

It would be really disappointing if in ten years we’re continuing on the trajectory that social media has put us on: being less social, people trusting each other even less, and basically renting our technology from a couple of large platforms.

The long-term goal of this program is to support many people building things that have a real shot at being successful. I just don’t believe that today’s social media platforms are the only version of social technology that is possible.

At New_ Public, we know that we’re not the only people with great ideas. While we’ve done a ton of work and uncovered a lot of insights, there are so many people with exceptional talent and big ideas out there. We want to support those people.

Thanks Angelica!

Check out the residency

Looking forward to cooler fall weather,

–Josh

This month’s Bulletin Board meanders across different approaches to AI, new research resources and opportunities, and local communities — both IRL and online. We encourage wandering: it’s how you find what you didn’t know you needed.

Announcements and events

• Calling prosocial design researchers: The Prosocial Design Network announced two convenings and new mini research grants for researchers and practitioners building alternatives to Big Tech social media. They want to fund research on fostering connection, community, and social cohesion. Reach out to Julia at the link for more info about their event focused on the open social web in Spring 2027.

• Roundabout in Portland podcast: Hays Witt, part of the Roundabout team and also a community steward in the new Southeast Portland Roundabout space, went on a local podcast to talk about what’s been working — SE PDX is now our biggest and most active space, by far.

• A milestone for Roundabout communities 🎉:

Links I would Slack you

• Watch Nathan Storey — Director of Data Governance at NYC’s Office of Technology & Innovation and the creator of Civic AI Tools — share his vibe-coding setup at this Show & Tell from Civic Tech Field Guide. Also, check out their crowdsourced collection of thousands of democracy tech projects from around the world!

• A cool project to keep an eye on: writer / researcher Erin Kissane is working on what she calls A Cloud Atlas for the ATmosphere, an ecosystem map of everything built on top of AT Protocol, the open social web standard that powers Bluesky.

• Wow: here’s a library of over 2,000 pieces of evidence cited in lawsuits against social media companies across the United States.

• Tech communicator Baratunde Thurston had New_ Public Co-Director Deepti Doshi on his podcast “Life with Machines” to talk about AI vibecoding in local communities, as well as Roundabout, our local community app. Baratunde is genuinely excited about Roundabout.

Public spaces you love

We ask new newsletter subscribers about their favorite public places, and sometimes we get great responses! 🗺️Carolyn in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, told us about the two-block-wide complex near her house:

It includes Brower Park, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, and a public elementary school. I find myself at Brower Park at least 4 days per week. I go there to read, meditate, meet a friend, grab ice cream when the Mister Softee truck is out front, or simply sit on a park bench and watch the world go by.

This public space is a gathering ground and an information hub, and is a lifeline in my neighborhood. This space helps me learn more about where I live, discover new community groups, and meet people I might not encounter otherwise. It’s the kind of space that could inspire digital elements or platforms.

We hope this inspires you to share your favorite public space with us — reply in the comments or send us a note through our contact form.

• What’s your favorite public space, and why does it matter to you?

• Is there a way to translate some of those elements into digital spaces?

Leave a comment

We asked you…

In last month’s Bulletin Board, we asked if you thought AI tools are inherently parasitic. It’s a topic the New_ Public team is continuously reflecting on, as we work on research like After the Feed and think about our AI policy.

This question makes me think of AI and datasets where scale is not the objective, an idea I was introduced to by artist and researcher Aarati Akkapeddi during their public talk on handmade datasets.

Aarati highlighted other small datasets like AIxDesign’s chapter on Small AI and Small Batch: A Dataset Farmers Market that put community at the center of the technology. Seeing AI projects at this smaller, community level makes AI feel less artificial and more like an active archive.

A connection is made

Occasionally we get requests that might be a great opportunity for someone in our larger community. Let’s see if we can make a connection!

Lauren Mecca is growing Tech/ish, a network of hosts gathering diverse groups to understand AI together. Events range from a creative installation to a monthly salon series. Tech/ish aims to promote broad AI literacy and inspire togetherness across views. If you’re interested in (or already!) hosting events that help communities build resilience through the AI transition, reach out to Lauren.

Want to get in touch with Lauren? Use our contact form and put “For Lauren M.” at the start of your message. We’ll pass along your messages. Or, if you have a request to share in the next Bulletin Board, also please send that along.

Digital Space Spotlight

We like to use this space to remind folks that not only are there great alternatives to mainstream social media apps and tools out there, we have a directory of over 300 of them that anyone can submit to!

A quick shoutout to PeerTube, a decentralized, peer-to-peer distributed online video-sharing application that’s funded mainly through grassroots donations and European government grants. No ads, no algorithm, no tracking! Here’s more from the Association for Progressive Communication’s interview with PeerTube.

Digital Delight

Mari Hsu, on the difference between being efficient and being effective, in the context of urban planning:

Shifting from efficient to effective may not be popular. Community engagement efforts are messy, time consuming, and expensive. But so are curb cuts - without them, we fail to meet ADA standards and leave wheeled folks literally in the gutter. It may be less efficient to plant trees when repaving a sidewalk, but without them the space is unfriendly and uncomfortable for pedestrians. This simple language change can drive larger systemic changes in modes of thinking, and in the effect our work has on communities. We can be part of positive change if we put our minds to it effectively.

Yours inefficiently,
Nina Joung

PSI’s robust toolkit is now in use by its pioneering public service media founders around the world!

Public Media Alliance hosted a recent panel about PSI, with leaders from some of our public service media partners. Robert Amlung, Senior Innovation Advisor at ZDF in Germany, says:

I think the strength of these tools is that they offer a lot of different possibilities for the editorial people at ZDF. Which means that if you are really coming from the news part, for instance, and want to increase your journalism, you can do that by inviting people into a reasoned debate and having arguments put forward that actually help the journalistic work and that enhance the whole product. That’s one possibility.

Below, Catherine reminds us of the urgent need for these tools and shares some notable, exciting examples of them in action.

–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

Learn more about PSI

I served as President and CEO of Canada’s public broadcaster, CBC/Radio-Canada, from 2018 to 2025. Today, I’m mostly focused on how to make sure that the public service principles that have been the underpinning public broadcasting for decades are more squarely adopted and enshrined in digital environments.

When the U.S. government eliminated federal support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2025 — direct hits to PBS and NPR — it felt like a deathblow to a public utility, a public good, that all of us in the public service arena should mourn. But, as worrisome as these cuts to funding are — not just in the U.S. but to public service media worldwide — more troubling has been the steady decline in audiences, especially younger listeners and viewers, to legacy and public media over the past two decades.

COVID didn’t help, super-charging the mass exodus of younger consumers to the more alluring feeds of information and entertainment on social media and other online destinations.

During this same period, all traditional broadcasters noticed an accompanying rise in toxic comments on our digital sites — racism, misogyny, homophobia, antisemitism, islamophobia — you name the hate, we saw the rants. As the costs of moderation surpassed millions of dollars at CBC/Radio-Canada, we felt a responsibility to protect our audiences, and so, we decided to shut down many of our comments sections. Many of our public service media colleagues around the globe did the same.

It felt like a double jeopardy for the democracy that public broadcasting aims to hold up: the deterioration of public discourse on our digital services and the loss of our future audiences to other platforms.

This was why I worked with New_ Public on creating the Public Spaces Incubator. We enlisted close colleagues at three other public broadcasters (RTBF Belgium, SRG SSR Switzerland and ZDF Germany) in the first ever digital collaboration between multiple public media partners. Our goal was to join forces and take on this ambitious, risky project and build tools to support citizen engagement and democratic discourse in our respective online environments.

That was early 2023. Since then, PSI has expanded its ranks to include ARD Germany and ARTE, among others. It is now well-advanced in rolling out a toolkit of digital products that support inclusive exchanges, encourage diverse viewpoints and promote greater empathy and understanding, without suppressing perspectives or ideas.

The PSI Toolkit in Action

Each broadcaster has implemented tests of the toolkit in ways that make sense for their audiences. But the operating principle is the same: how do we encourage respectful conversations online? And if we do so, can we deepen audience engagement? We know that in today’s world of online creators, users — especially younger users — are looking for more authentic connection with their sources of information, be they content creators or journalists.

After many test cases, it is exciting to witness how the PSI Toolkit has a real impact, not only on the quality of online conversations, but also in the many ways the product design teases out more nuanced perspectives in online exchanges. Where journalists or news desks have embraced the PSI tools, the results are impressive.

Audience members demonstrate curiosity and clearly appreciate the access and proximity to journalists. The PSI tools have been designed with optional, adjustable automated moderation functions, so the burden on human moderators can be reduced. Finally, conversations can outlast a single article and, in fact, can occur across multiple articles, TV programs or radio shows.

Proximity to Journalists

After a period of research and prototyping with the PSI public media partners and focus groups that included younger audience members, the team settled on a handful of tools to implement. In each instance, the online conversation associated with an article or radio / tv content is anchored in a question, rather than the presentation of a blank or open space for “free-for-all” comments.

For example, a Radio-Canada journalist posed a question related to a news story about Quebec’s Motor Vehicles Insurance Agency (SAAQ). The question – “What do you think about the SAAQ situation?” elicited numerous comments and observations from audience members. The strong topicality of the subject, combined with a dedicated expert journalist who responded to the majority of the questions, resulted in a high-quality exchange, free from insults and toxicity.

Interestingly, this PSI instance can be directly compared with a third-party moderation company’s comments section on the same subject. The out-sourced moderation service’s comments tended to be shorter and more negative than the PSI discussion.

The journalist, Jean-Francois Theriault, concluded that the PSI toolkit allowed him to enrich his coverage, go deeper in response to real citizens’ concerns, and actually explore new avenues of investigation raised by users. One commenter thanked Theriault for offering a clarification on his previous comment. Theriault also produced a subsequent explainer video to provide the audience greater clarity on the complexity and stakes involved in the SAAQ inquiry.

Higher Quality Conversations

In Belgium, RTBF launched a conversation series alongside its show “Let’s Talk About Solutions” to invite viewers / listeners to engage on topics of civic interest such as employment, housing, and commuting. RTBF posed the question, “Is your car indispensable?” and the audience responded with a wide range of points of view on the challenges of public transportation. By framing the conversation with a question, the audience is primed to respond thoughtfully rather than to simply express their feelings of frustration, or even hostility, regarding the issue.

In most cases, the broadcasters utilize multiple entry points into a conversation, from a button saying “Join the Conversation” on multiple online articles, or QR codes on TV shows pointing to a live PSI conversation. Users can upvote questions they’d like answered; they can situate their position on a “comments slider” that offers a scale rather than a binary choice on a particular issue; or they can participate in a poll on an issue. The goal is the same: higher quality conversation, and more nuanced and respectful conversation.

Perhaps the most touching example of the PSI toolkit in action was a public conversation that occurred during the Artemis II lunar space mission earlier this spring. Audience members of Radio-Canada were invited to ask their questions regarding the mission and they were answered by a variety of leading journalists from the public broadcaster.

Over 1200 audience members participated, with one standing out as the most memorable: “Hello, where is the capsule’s door? Which way will the astronauts exit? Beatrice, 10 years old”

In response, Radio-Canada journalist Catherine Legault described the exact location of the exit and how it would be used when the astronauts came home. As a believer in public service media as an underpinning of our democracy, this exchange between a 10-year-old and her public broadcaster provokes a heart-swelling moment of optimism.

For years we have heard that younger audiences have abandoned legacy media for social media feeds rife with misinformation. The Reuters Institute report on how the majority of younger audiences find their news and information — mostly on social media platforms — is chilling for career journalists trained in the principles of trustworthy and accountable newsgathering and reporting. But if Beatrice has joined the conversation about an important global news event on her local public media platform, then not all is lost!

There is no doubt that healthy democracies depend on open and safe public debate, free from violence and hate. The work of New_ Public and its partner public broadcasters is important because the PSI tools respond to a real world problem: how do we reverse the decline of healthy public conversations in digital spaces? And how do we build new muscles in our journalism and news organizations to engage audiences, younger audiences, in civil online exchange?

In fact, in my opinion, I would go one step further: can these PSI tools be integrated into the apps and websites of other traditional media organizations and other public institutions (libraries, museums, government agencies, universities)? All public institutions are struggling to connect with the public and to engage in healthy and productive online conversations with their constituents. To date, the PSI toolkit has been tested on sites that the public media partners own and operate. I think that the next milestone is to imagine how to ensure that it is available more broadly through an open-source solution.

As entrepreneurs innovate new forms of social media on open, interoperable protocols, I think that public media should be at the forefront. That’s why it was heartening to see ZDF, one of our PSI partners in Germany, sponsor the Open Social Awards. As the world turns away in horror at the degraded experience of the social platforms that were supposed to democratize the world, introducing public media to a new open prosocial web would be a welcome solution.

–Catherine Tait, Expert-in-Residence, New_ Public

Learn more about PSI

Thanks Catherine!

Enjoying the slightly cooler very hot days,

–Josh

This month’s Bulletin Board is a healthy mix of what’s new on the prosocial web (a new community moderation feature, the Pope’s IRL thoughts on AI) and a bit of nostalgia (taking the AI out of your Google search, retro tech archives).

Announcements and events

• New_ Public Co-Director Eli Pariser recently joined Ben Smith and Max Tani in conversation on Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast. Their conversation ranged across the decline of feed-based social media, the threat AI poses to summarizable news content, the difficulty of distinguishing AI from human-generated writing, and the potential for more decentralized, community-driven digital spaces to emerge in the post-feed era.

• “Where are AI agents going to interrupt the town square and where are they not?” Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic and host of The Most Interesting Thing in AI podcast, and Eli explore what will remain social in the AI era, Eli’s previous work with Upworthy and filter bubbles, and what social media that isn’t engagement-maxxing can look like.

• July 8-12 | The open social web is broad and only growing 🌱If you can get to Berlin next month, check out DWeb Camp to gather with builders actively pursuing alternatives to Big Tech social media! This year’s theme is “Root Systems.”

If you know of any prosocial, tech-adjacent events that you want to share with the New_ Public community, reach out to us through our contact form!

Links I would Slack you

• Michael Foster, Director of the Newsmast Foundation in London, Grand Prize winners of our Open Social Awards, calls on the open social web to connect existing community spaces — aka, let’s build with community leaders and the strong foundations they’ve cultivated.

• For those still meaning to read Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas on artificial intelligence: Hugging Face created an annotated version of the encyclical to help contextualize this substantial text, linking to relevant peer-reviewed papers and books on AI!

• Open Alternative is a massive directory of open source (aka free, collaborative and secure!) alternatives to popular software for nearly everything, from messaging and collaboration tools to AI software, by way of The Conscious Citizens’ resource library.

• AI is currently in its “Wonder Bread” era:

The more you know

New_ Public’s Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, on how search is changing forever:

In May, Google announced that their AI Overviews — that AI summary at the top of your search results — has “over 2.5 billion monthly active users.” Even if people have mixed feelings about this feature, a lot of them are using it. What does this mean for you, trying to find what you need? And what does it mean for people and groups that rely on Search for referral traffic?

Google seems committed to turning Search, a mainstay of the internet for over two decades, into something far more agentic. If you explored our recent research on how AI is changing the internet, this will seem familiar, even expected. But while some change is inevitable, we don’t have to accept Big Tech’s vision on their terms.

Bigger solutions towards making sure that the AI-mediated internet is prosocial and public-spirited are complex and will require time and coordination. But in the meantime, in this awkward transitional era, you still have options and agency. Want to use and support a search engine that’s based outside the U.S., or not going all in on AI? Here are some ideas. Or, if you want to use Google without AI Overview, here are some suggestions.

Poll

Speaking of AI, in Eli’s recent speech at the Vatican, he argues that AI tools themselves are capable of being parasitic or prosocial:

Many of the worst, parasitic outcomes with AI – replacing your friends, your therapist, your sense of reality – are not baked into AI, they’re decisions made at the very end of the training process. The business models, and the economic incentives, are not locked in yet. Sycophancy and antisocial incentives aren’t the cake, they’re the frosting.

Do you agree? We want to hear from you. We know that AI is a divisive and emotionally complex topic. We’re grateful for your answers in the poll below, and for respectfully replying in comments with thoughts or questions:

Prosocial career growth

For those looking for a career pivot, support, and aligned community, She Shapes Digital is a cohort-based 5-week mentorship for women aspiring to work in responsible tech, digital rights, AI governance, and civic tech. The program was founded by two social impact tech professionals who met while working at the United Nations. They’re excited to welcome the next cohort of women seeking community, mentorship, and coaching in their social impact tech career:

As layoffs and the cultural backlash are hitting women worldwide hard, we are very driven to share with communities our offer. Our course covers confidence building, career clarity coaching and community building. You can find our website here:

https://www.sheshapesdigital.com/

Check out their website to sign up for the next cohort cycle. Scholarship options are also available.

And as always, you can always share opportunities like this as well as requests for support in our contact form.

New_ Thing to try

We love to experiment and learn about new things. This New_ Thing to try comes from New_ Public’s Abby Bajuniemi, Staff Researcher for Public Spaces Incubator:

In early June, Substack announced Reply Rules, a feature that gives authors a way to enforce their desired community norms in the comments of their posts and newsletters. Rather than relying on the platform’s rules, the feature allows authors to write rules in regular, conversational language, for their subscribers to follow in replies. “The system,” presumably powered by an LLM, uses those rules and also “learns” what an author tends to hide and then attempts to preemptively hide similar posts.

What’s really great about this is that it allows authors control over how they shape the community they’re building. One-size-fits-all moderation guidelines don’t always work for every community, especially when those communities use what linguistics professors like me call “reclamation,” terms and phrases that, from someone outside of the community, would be considered slurs or vulgar language. But when used for reclamation within the community, this language works as community bonding, as empowerment. I have optimism that Reply Rules will work well to hide obvious abuse, but I am less confident it will do a good job hiding posts that are covertly or subtly abusive, and I wonder about how it will deal with useful or desirable reclamation behaviors.

Digital Delight

Has this ever happened to you: You check your PC from 2011 in search of a fake Super Mario 64 tutorial video that has been considered lost or hard-to-find, and not only do you find the video, but you also find that your hard drive has over 5,000 archived YouTube videos from 16 years ago thanks to a browser glitch!!

This is the story of Lost Media Wiki user Peter, and now the digital magazine Etheria is excitedly asking folks to check their old computers to help source missing pieces of internet history.

And in the same vein of lost media, here’s a collection of screenshots of retro software perfect for your digital scrapbook.

Signing off with a truly full-circle moment: my boss’ research on agentic interfaces being used to create AI-generated punk metal music 🤖🤘

— Nina Joung

Angelica sits at the heart of what we care about here: she has an urban planning background and has developed tech products for private firms, city governments, and for us! Since she’s been here, Angelica’s played an important role in every New_ Public project, standing up our work with public broadcasters and our Local Lab, which has evolved into Roundabout, our local community app.

Now, she’s looking to the future: where are the next, emerging, important tech products that will move us past Big Tech’s social platforms?

As part of that work, Angelica recently helped create the Open Social Awards, which we awarded with our partners in early June at the PublicSpaces Conference in Amsterdam. Here, she talks about why we wanted to give out awards, and she goes deep on the impressive and inventive winners.

– Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

See the OSA Winners

You could be forgiven for thinking that X (née Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok are the whole social internet. That the places where we spend time online are getting creepier, more hostile, more full of ragebait, and even worse. It’s easy to feel like there is nothing to be hopeful about in the future of the internet.

But there is, in fact, a whole world of product development happening that is separate from the big social media empires and their platforms with billions of users. In this world, you’re not locked in. You’re not funneled into the profitable but ultimately empty calories of existing social media. This is the open social web — an ecosystem of products that are built on decentralized social protocols, like AT Protocol for Bluesky, and ActivityPub for Mastodon. In this world, the underlying principles and infrastructure support independence and agency rather than lock-in.

There’s already a ton of great stuff: music platforms, event tools, photo and video sharing, newsletters and much more. By default, you own your data (messages, content, etc.) and can take it and your followers with you.

This ecosystem is still young. Earlier this year, when we began working together on decentralized social, my colleague, Catherine Tait, compared the burgeoning open social web to the independent film movement in the ‘90s. She would know. Catherine is the former CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada and a giant in the worlds of North American film, broadcasting, and public media. She was instrumental in developing our partnership with public broadcasters around the world and now serves as an Expert-in-Residence here at New_ Public.

Before the independent film festivals took off and became the dominant culture-makers that they are now, before iconic filmmakers were churning out masterpieces like “Moonlight” — which went from Telluride to Best Picture — there were a lot of talented artists who lacked financing, distribution, and recognition. That insight led Catherine to help launch the Gotham Awards in 1991, and it’s why we launched the Open Social Awards this year.

Protocols providing a foundation

With the inaugural Open Social Awards, we are bringing attention to the social technologies of the future — the ones that are human-first and resist enshittification.

We received 74 applications across a wide range of projects, from multiple continents, from small teams and solo founders, both for-profit and non-profit organizations. The majority were built on either ActivityPub or AT Protocol.

ActivityPub is the older of the two and is the protocol behind Mastodon, a trailblazing, federated community application that is celebrating its 10th anniversary, run by a non-profit. Each Mastodon community can make its own rules and control the flow of data on its own terms. These servers, or “instances,” are “federated” and can push and pull content back and forth. This is why the larger universe of apps and websites running on ActivityPub are often called “the Fediverse.”

Meanwhile, Bluesky is a public benefit corporation. They have built a Twitter-like app of the same name, as well as the underlying AT Protocol. Bluesky, the app, recently surpassed 43 million users, but a much larger “Atmosphere” of apps run on AT Protocol. AT Protocol works a bit differently than ActivityPub: data, identity, and applications are all on separate layers. Because identity and data are decoupled from the hosting server, you can move your account between providers without losing your followers or content.

Apps that really matter to people

While these two larger platforms continue to grow, the remarkable potential of their underlying protocols remains largely unknown to most users. And that might be OK! Returning to the indie film metaphor: When most people go to the movies, they’re rarely thinking about the role the film plays in the larger ecosystem — they just want to see something good.

As Erin Kissane said in her beautiful and prophetic talk at the PublicSpaces Conference, “people don’t adopt new technologies and platforms because we lecture them into it.”

That’s why, with the Open Social Awards, we prioritized finding and celebrating products that people already find really useful, as well as infrastructure that simplifies things in helpful ways. For the jury, it was important that the winner bring decentralized social media beyond the existing community of developers, policymakers, and early adopters, to the millions of people who are frustrated with Big Tech but haven’t yet found a compelling alternative.

Our international jury of six experts in technology, media, and digital policy — Audrey Tang, Johannes Ernst, Laurens Hof, Melanie Bartos, Mike Masnick, Robin Berjon — selected projects that had the originality to stand out, the viability to grow, and the potential to bring open social to people beyond our existing community.

But it’s about more than that. Just before the awards were announced, Blacksky Algorithms founder Rudy Fraser asked the audience: What is open source if not a multigenerational sharing of knowledge and a promise to preserve the commons that grew you? And Audrey Tang charged the conference with treating community like soil, an abundant, renewable resource, as opposed to the traditional data extraction of social media companies. Community can be something we tend to and help grow.

The open social ecosystem is about a different approach to building, deploying, and tending to social technologies, with an eye to the past and the future.

The 2026 Open Social Awards Winners

The Newsmast Foundation, led by Michael Foster, is a non-profit helping mission-driven organisations (newsrooms, community groups, civil society) build independent digital spaces. The standout proof point is their work with CAMFED: 355,000 members across six African countries migrating to the open social web.

Rudy Fraser helped create Blacksky Algorithms, powering the largest Black community on the open social web, with community-governed algorithms and moderation. They’re now building shared infrastructure, Acorn, so other communities can do the same.

Solo builder Tyler Fisher is solving a real mainstream problem with Sill — doomscrolling! Sill surfaces interesting links from your feeds, without advertising, algorithmic ranking, or engagement incentives.

The Open Social Awards jury determined that beyond the three winners, five additional projects merited an honorable mention: Bounce | Dandelion | Streamplace | Leaflet | Bonfire Networks.

You can find more information about the honorable mentions at newpublic.org/OSA.

See the OSA Winners

We hope you get to know all of the winners’ work and maybe even take them for a spin. The Open Social Awards were presented in partnership with PublicSpaces and Waag Futurelab in Amsterdam.

The awards were sponsored with generous support from both Bluesky PBC and ZDF, one of Germany’s public broadcasters and a longtime collaborator of ours in Public Spaces Incubator. We thank them for their commitment to these bold builders and innovators. We also want to thank the Modal Foundation, Save Social, FediForum, and ATmosphere Community Fund for supporting the Next Socials programming at PublicSpaces.

– Angelica Quicksey, Managing Director, Strategic Initiatives, New_ Public

Thanks Angelica! We’ll be back later this month with another Bulletin Board newsletter.

Trying to stay cool,

–Josh

Tomorrow at 3:30pm ET / 12:30pm PT, join Angelica Quicksey for an Ask Me Anything on our new research about how AI is changing social media.

Last Friday I sat in a hall in the Vatican with my daughter, Ara, and listened as Pope Leo XIV described the problem I’ve spent the last fifteen years on: digital spaces that reward “quick emotions” and discourage “the effort required to understand and reflect.” It was a truly extraordinary life moment, and also a big moment for all of us who care about ethical, prosocial tech.

This week, he released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, cementing his reflections on artificial intelligence as official teachings for Catholics – nearly one fifth of the world. The main challenge with AI, says Pope Leo, is not technological, but anthropological.

I couldn’t agree more – and I’m grateful for the Holy Father’s moral clarity and vision in this critical time for human dignity and human community.

In my remarks I focused on the fact that many of the worst, parasitic outcomes with AI – replacing your friends, your therapist, your sense of reality – are not baked into AI, they’re decisions made at the very end of the training process. The business models, and the economic incentives, are not locked in yet. Sycophancy and antisocial incentives aren’t the cake, they’re the frosting.

That means that AI can also be prosocial: encouraging friendship, building bonds, meeting your neighbors. This is a big piece of the work for New_ Public in this new era, and the focus of our new research on AI. We don’t have to relive the worst disasters of social media: we have a window to get things right this time.

Below, you’ll find my entire remarks at the Vatican. I’m very grateful to the Dicastery for Communication for the invitation, and to the other speakers for the lively conversation, including Kashmir Hill of The New York Times, who is referenced below. The work continues.

– Eli Pariser, Co-Director, New_ Public

See the research

We are capable of great connection… When we are in the right structures

I had a strange and unexpected experience recently.

I was invited to a conference organized by a group called Leaders in Tech with some people working on AI.

When I arrived at the retreat center nestled in the redwoods, it turned out that the plan was a little different than a normal work conference. We were going to sit in a circle for 30 hours, over four days, with no topic or agenda.

Also, I had a roommate. I haven’t had a roommate for 20 years, and he was a former Meta executive, who in our first conversation told me he had gotten cynical, and kind of given up on people. What had I signed myself up for?

They divided us up into three groups and encouraged us to experiment with how to relate to each other better.

For the first day, honestly, it was awkward. Nobody knew what to say.

But the next day, people started to be a little brave. We began sharing a little more of our struggles. We started reacting more honestly to each other. And each time someone let themselves be fully seen, it was like there was a little bell ringing in the room – and the tone began to shift.

I often feel obliged to be positive. But I decided to share my real fear that we are not doing enough to change course, that I’m worried about where the future is headed. Around this room of AI professionals, heads were nodding. “You’re not alone in worrying about that,” one said. “Many of us see that too.”

Over the hours, I watched as every single person in that group became more fully realized, more alive, more true, more connected.

By the end, the feeling was overwhelming – a profound recognition of each other as human beings that still gives me chills to remember. It was, honestly, spiritual.

I want to acknowledge – for me, this was a revelation, and for many of you, here at the Vatican, this is just Sunday. But in my day to day life as an agnostic Jew in Brooklyn, this kind of thing does not normally happen.

But what amazed me was how quickly and how deeply 12 strangers could connect with just a little bit of space, structure, and support.

At the end, I was sitting with my roommate (who turned out to be a lovely guy). “I feel weird saying this,” he said, “but that restored my faith in humanity.”

“If it was just one group of 12, you could chalk it up to the people in it. But the same thing happened in every group. And that means a more connected way of being together is available to all of us. We’ve just lost sight of it.”

Reading the Holy Father’s essay, the truth and beauty and spirit and love for humanity came shining through. “Each of us possesses an irreplaceable and inimitable vocation, that originates from our own lived experience and becomes manifest through interaction with others.” Yes.

We are our best selves when we’re not just selves. We are our best when we are in relationship with, in service to, each other. Thank you for reminding us of this basic human truth.

I. We’ve failed ourselves in digital space because of the economic incentives that govern it.

So afterwards, I kept wondering: if we are capable of this, and it’s not that hard – why are we so bad at it? And especially, why are we so bad at it in our digital lives? Why are we so dramatically failing ourselves?

I think there’s a simple answer: It’s not happening because the structures that we’ve set up for ourselves are not built to make it happen.

I’ve spent the last 15 years fighting the design of a set of spaces, social media, that did not connect people. That told people they were being connected while driving us apart, making us lonely, making us alienated, and eroding our shared sense of reality.

The people in these companies – like my roommate – aren’t intentionally malicious people. And in fact, we’ve learned a lot about what would make social media more healthy and conducive to people. So it’s not that we don’t know how.

But what I want to underscore is that the problems of social media aren’t solved by individual moral choices.

They are a result of the fact that we have decided to live our digital lives inside of machines built to maximize attention and engagement and ultimately sell advertising to profit their parent companies. From this perspective, things like filter bubbles – algorithms showing people what they want to see to keep them engaged – aren’t a bug, but a money-making feature.

Practically, what this means inside these companies is that every time someone has an idea about how to help humans connect better and communicate better, it gets weighed against its economic impact.

And the result is that again and again, our better angels get crowded out by the next quarterly profit report.

What we’ve learned from social media is that the hardest and most harmful problems are not technology problems, they are economics and governance problems.

II. Like social media, the worst problems of AI aren’t technology problems.

And the same is true of AI.

There’s no question that AI can erode human relationships – there’s a new study about this every day. In fact, there was one out just a month ago from MIT and OpenAI showing that higher daily usage with chatbots was linked to “higher loneliness, dependence, problematic use, and lower socialization with real people.”

But here’s what I want to emphasize: AI is capable of supporting human connection or eroding it. There’s nothing inherent in the technology that says which of these directions we will head. In fact, some of these problems emerge at the very end of the process of making AI models.

Take sycophancy. Labs spend billions of dollars and extraordinary amounts of computing power training, baking these models. And when that’s done, the models are not particularly sycophantic. As Kashmir and others have reported, sycophancy is not primarily a result of the baking, it’s the frosting on the cake – it mostly comes in post-training, when the companies are fine-tuning their models to ensure that they are maximally engaging to users.

To me, this is good news. If AI was rotten to the core of its technology – if its worst consequences were built in – that would be one thing. But there’s another path available to us.

AI can be engineered to be parasitic – or prosocial.

Let me tell you a little story to illustrate this – and since we’re here at the Vatican, I feel like I ought to confess a sin. A few months ago I was sitting next to a shy, programmer-type guy on a plane back from San Francisco. And I noticed that he was talking to ChatGPT. And I beg his and your forgiveness, I peeked.

He was processing something. He had been chatting with a girl on a dating app, and she had stopped responding. And he was unhappy about that.

I felt conflicted. On the one hand, part of me wanted him to be reaching out to a friend to talk about this. I felt like ChatGPT might be cannibalizing his friendships.

On the other hand, I was glad he had somewhere to process those feelings. And in this particular case, ChatGPT was not trying to become his girlfriend – it was trying to help him find one. “That’s painful,” it said, “but it’s good to know early if it’s not a match before you sink too much time into it, and there are lots of other people out there. Keep trying.”

AI is fully capable of dragging us away from connection – what the Holy Father meant, I think, when he said “we substitute relationships with others for AI systems that catalog our thoughts, creating a world of mirrors around us, where everything is made ‘in our image and likeness.’”

But because that isn’t inherently baked in, and this tool is equally capable of supporting it, when someone’s depressed …

Parasitic, at best: I’ll be your therapist, pour out your heart and worries to me. At worst: Why don’t you take this supplement I’ve been paid to promote.

Prosocial: You’re trying your best and really struggling – you need to talk to someone. Let’s look at your friends list – who could you talk to about this? What’s standing in your way?

Someone’s lonely…

Parasitic: I’ll be your friend. (Mark Zuckerberg explicitly endorsed this path, saying that there would be demand for his chatbots because “the average American I think has, it’s fewer than three friends, three people they’d consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends.”)

Prosocial: Let’s get you into a community. I know you like biking – here’s a biking group that meets right down the street Saturday morning.

Which way this goes, multiplied by billions of humans, will have an enormous impact on the future of human life. A parasitic path will deepen our loneliness, our separateness. A prosocial path could support a new era of social connection. And I think that’s why we’re here today. It’s an extraordinary juncture.

III. A positive vision.

Now, you might be thinking, if this tool is so dangerous, and so capable of social harm, why not just stop things.

I think it’s really, really important to flesh out not just our fears, but also what it could look like to get this right for human connection and flourishing.

Stop is a natural reaction, especially when we hear the horrors of what Kashmir’s reporting has revealed.

But I don’t think this is going to just stop. And I worry that if the choices are stop or go, we’re going to go, and we’re going to go to a very bad place.

We need another choice between stop and go.

We need a positive vision of human sociality that co-exists and is supported by a world with powerful AI.

Connection is going to be key to make it through the changes that are coming. And partly that’s because if we don’t completely stop it – we’re facing a lot of change.

AI is going to be a bigger shift than social media. My daughter Ara is here, and I think her world as she grows up is going to look dramatically different from ours.

What the holy books and the psychology books both teach us is that change, for humans, is hard, and that one of the most powerful and effective ways to stay resilient is to stay connected to other people.

So we need prosocial AI to help hold us together through the change wrought by AI.

IV. We have to get this right. And we can.

OK, so we need a vision of what it looks like for AI to support prosocial AI, and “a potent alliance,” as the Holy Father’s text calls for. And there’s one brewing – from here at the Vatican, to parts of both sides of the political spectrum in the US, to Europe – to make that vision happen.

Across the world people understand what is at stake. They understand that social media did not serve us well. They’re ready to do something different.

And it’s early. The business models aren’t set. ChatGPT may be turning on advertising, but other companies are taking different paths, and nobody knows how this ecosystem will look in five years. This doesn’t have to be social media all over again. It can’t be.

As citizens, that means standing up for rules that make AI’s incentives transparent and oriented, as the Holy Father says, not “solely by the criterion of profit maximization, but by a forward-looking vision that considers the common good.” As consumers, it means understanding those incentives and choosing tools whose economics and governance match our aspirations. And it means investing in the research to show how AI can support the prosocial path, not the parasitic one.

The text says we have a “task of preservation” in front of us – to keep human connection and human communities alive, to keep remembering how possible human connection is, if we only create the structure and space for it.

In doing so, we can redeem ourselves and each other. I believe that is the work ahead.

See the research

It’s a really exciting moment: we just hosted our virtual event on the future of social media and released new research on AI agentic interfaces.

See the research

As we look ahead: what if we made this the summer of building – building hyperlocal online spaces, building resources for stewards, building an AI future with real humanity? Bring on the heat!

Announcements and events

Thank you to the over 200 folks who joined New_ Public Co-Director Eli Pariser as he presented new research — in partnership with Managing Director of Strategic Initiatives Angelica Quicksey and AI Fellow Arnobio Morelix.

If you missed the event, with awesome guests Ben Smith (Semafor) and Jasmine Sun (The Atlantic), here’s a one-page readout of the event, and the video is here. This is a great intro video to the deck. The chat at the event was electric, and in typical New_ Public fashion, folks connected over shared interests right in the comments and were taking steps to collaborate with each other after the event.

Folks were energized by our central hypothesis: how AI will transform the way we connect to information and to each other. As friend of New_ Public Ben Werdmuller posted:

I think we’re going to be referring back to this presentation. It encapsulates everything brilliantly and comes to conclusions that I think are both right and actually pretty optimistic. There’s an opportunity here but not if we cling to the past.

There’s so much more to say about this research — let us know what you think of this work and the questions it raises for you! Sound off in the comments or reply directly to this email.

• May 20 | Join Bach Bui, Senior Engineer for Roundabout, at the Council of Tech and Social Cohesion’s Global Expo. In his session, “Bringing the social back to social media: design choices of emerging platforms,” he’ll be speaking about Roundabout, our local community app, alongside folks from Monnett and Sparkable 😀

• May 21 | Last year, the Prosocial Design Network and Roblox partnered to ask, “​How can we foster connection in social gaming spaces?” This Research Roundtable explores the potential of implementing these ideas. 🎮

• May 27-29 | If you’re in SF for the Human Algorithm Summit or Media Impact Forum, say hi to New_ Public Co-Director Deepti Doshi, who is hosting the session “Reimagining Public Media for the 21st Century” at MIF and attending both events. 👯

• June 4-6 | We’ll see you soon, Amsterdam! At PublicSpaces Conference, we’re hosting the Next Socials programming track and the Open Social Awards, with a keynote from Erin Kissane, as well as from Rudy Fraser of Blacksky Algorithms — check out their new community-building platform, Acorn. 🖤

Links I would Slack you

• “Neighborism” is here, in a big way. In this post-pandemic, politically-fraught world, people want real connection with the folks living around them, and more folks are starting to notice. Hey, we’re obviously big fans of local community, conversation, and connection.

• And a gentle reality check to your friend who wants to vibe code his way to his first billion … we can build the future of the internet without the toxic “founder industrial complex”.

A connection is made

This space is for you – New_ Public’s friends and readers – to seek support, collaboration, and insight from others! Anyone is welcome to share a request, and this month’s comes from Jack-Lucas Chang by way of All Tech is Human’s Slack.

In his writing, Jack-Lucas uses fiction to explore how AI systems shape behavior and relationships. For example, he looked at the recent film “The Drama” to examine how AI models handle morally ambiguous situations. Here’s his request:

I’m looking to connect with editors familiar with social tech who can help sharpen my framing, or researchers interested in co-writing something at the intersection of responsible AI and platform design. If that sounds like you, reach out. I’m also taking movie suggestions!

Want to get in touch with Jack-Lucas Chang? Use our contact form and put “For J.L.C.” at the start of your message. We’ll pass along your messages, and the door is open for future Bulletin Board requests for connection!

Advice by Stewards, for Stewards

When we started learning from community stewards of online groups, we found out that this role isn’t really something you get to train for, it’s more of a “learn on the job” kind of thing (in addition to your paying day job). Recognizing the value of stewardship, and the lack of resources available, we created this guide for local community stewards, “Creating a Flourishing Digital Public Space for Your Local Area.”

The guide is full of fun, easy suggestions for fostering community. One fun tip for building a flourishing local digital space 🏆: Post a trivia question about your local area! Whether it’s weekly or monthly, it’s a great, consistent way for people to connect around the little known facts about their community.

Here’s what Johnny, a steward of a local Facebook group, had to say about his success with trivia:

I started a “Trivia Tuesday” that slowly built a small following and is doing well now. I think it does foster community engagement in our group because we have so many transplants that don’t know the full history of a very historic city … My last trivia question had several people thanking us because they never knew why a local school was named after one of our very own former residents.

It’s really satisfying to see this come full circle: now that we’re piloting Roundabout in different towns and neighborhoods, stewards are trying trivia on Roundabout too. Kyle, a steward in Lincoln County, Wisconsin, has picked up the torch.

Digital Delight

Admittedly, there is a wide definition of “the good ol’ days” of social media. (For some, it was that one year of BeReal …) But, Friendster, which shut down in 2015, is one of the original social networking sites, predating even Facebook. Now, Mike Carson bought the domain and is doing something very prosocial with it:

I created an iOS app for Friendster, and I made it so that in order to connect with someone as a friend, you have to actually tap phones together in real life.

And even better, Carson says, “I don’t really care about making money from Friendster.”

Double checking that my middle school FB photos are hidden,

–Nina

On May 12, at 1pm ET, join Eli Pariser, as well as special guests Ben Smith and Jasmine Sun, for an event on how AI will shape the future of how we connect online. RSVP here.

On May 20, Join New_ Public’s Bach Bui for a panel at the Global Expo from the Council on Tech and Social Cohesion, online and in Washington, D.C.

It’s been a minute since we announced Roundabout, our local community app, now in private testing in five communities throughout the US.

These have been busy months! Below, along with my colleague Sam Liebeskind, I’ll share some updates that the team is really excited about, including how people have been using Roundabout and what we’ve been building for it recently.

Learn more about Roundabout

Why build Roundabout?

We know that half of American adults already use local digital spaces — online groups for their town or neighborhood — to find local news and info. There are some existing options, including Facebook Groups, which is used for the vast majority of local digital spaces.

So why make an app at all? We continue to hear that people want a healthy, useful local digital space, but the existing options aren’t meeting their needs. (Read more about the origin of Roundabout here.)

Our recent conversations with Roundabout members have confirmed this. We’ve spoken with folks like the busy doctor who’s new to town and interested in local community events, but struggling to keep up with the flow and chaos of a Discord where he was looking previously. Or the long-time resident looking for local news that’s more “comprehensive and informative” than what the local newspaper has to offer. Or the highly-skilled young person who can’t find a place to volunteer, even after actively searching with Google and ChatGPT and digging through church websites.

We think Roundabout, full of conversation between neighbors and curated by stewards, can make a real difference.

As a reminder, Roundabout is:

• For building real relationships in your community, online and off

• Easy, useful, helpful, and fun

• Shaped and run by neighbors, including trained, local community stewards

• Informed by years of research

• Built by a team with deep experience building prosocial technology

It’s not: optimized for growth and surveillance, owned by a billionaire, or a top-down, one-size fits all platform being imposed on people.

The people using Roundabout

To keep things manageable and focused, we’ve started with pilots in five local communities. (Our colleague Hays Witt describes them each here.) As of now, more than 800 people have accounts, ranging from pastors to firefighters to student newspaper reporters. It’s been really fun to see the ways people are starting to use these spaces, some of which we expected, but with some surprises too.

Here’s just a sampling:

Neighbors are turning to Roundabout for important resources, like where to shelter during a tornado warning, and where to recycle tricky items. We’ve seen communities create all kinds of guides, including a great one in Burlington that brings together women’s care, support, and community resources in one trusted place. These aren’t necessarily the kinds of posts that go viral, but they really help people.

People are also using Roundabout to quietly share needed local info and news with one another: Stewards are summarizing local government meetings so neighbors can follow decisions that affect their lives. Community members can follow along with municipal issues and participate in shaping them, like proposed roadway changes and local elections, from school board to mayor.

And when folks need a recommendation for a trusted carpenter, a dentist, or someone who alters clothes, Roundabout is becoming a place they can turn, knowing that the people there are local and trustworthy. Bagel shops, coffee shops, perfumeries — the small businesses and third spaces that make a neighborhood worth living in — are getting spotlighted and supported. Neighbors are elevating each other’s service and generosity. On Roundabout, people show up for each other. One user summed it up pretty perfectly: “good for local info … without the drama of Nextdoor.”

Some early insights and iteration

We’re continuing to work to make Roundabout both a valuable part of people’s local lives, and a joy to use. Because we believe in sharing our progress and building this growing field of alternatives to Big Tech social media, we want to share what we can.

Let’s stop and take a closer look at some new, specific features:

Magic calendar and events imports

Finding out about events near you is something we’ve identified in our research that people really want, and we’ve heard from early users that this is a major draw for Roundabout. But for people who are looking to share events, entering all the details into a form (the location, the date, who’s invited, etc.) can be a drag.

To help lower the lift, we’ve developed an AI-powered system where users can now just paste in a URL, upload an image or screenshot, or take a photo of a flyer around town and Roundabout magically imports all the relevant data for quick editing and posting.

Logan, the steward of Roundabout North Chatt, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, says, “What usually took about 1-2 minutes per event from going back and forth now allowed me to blow through all of the events within five minutes!”

So far, users have added 910 events to calendars in Roundabout spaces — this comes to roughly 182 events per month, or more than one per day per community, and the pace is increasing.

Now, with a greater volume of events, we’re also exploring some ideas around filtering by topic or theme that would help people more easily find the kinds of things they’re most interested in.

Content-oriented emails

We know that not everyone is going to automatically open the app regularly, and that’s ok! To help make the information being shared in Roundabout spaces more accessible, we’ve added a cadence of weekly emails with real, informative, timely content that’s valuable to members. We’ve found that folks who receive them really appreciate the highlights and often come back into the Roundabout spaces themselves, where they can get more info and participate further.

Sending digest emails is a tried and true engagement tactic for social platforms, but you can see for yourself the contrast between the event roundup email below with the absolutely chilling emails that Nextdoor sends you. We have a high bar for what we send to people.

So far, more than half of email recipients open the email, and about 15% click on a link — way higher than industry averages, but with smaller sample sizes. And some folks are even asking us for a daily digest. We’re not sure where we’ll land on this, but we want to give members control over what kinds of things they want to be notified about and how frequently. We’re already starting to dream about a future where other people within a community could curate and remix what’s being shared in the space into other formats too.

AI-powered moderation assistance

We’ve long been interested in the potential for AI systems to support the work of stewards and reduce their workload, especially when it comes to monitoring the quality of the conversation. We’re focused on deploying these tools in an ethical, responsible way, in accordance with our AI policy, that always keeps a human in the driver’s seat.

Currently, when a user composes a post on Roundabout, a “small language model” from Zentropi compares the text of the message against the community’s agreements. Based on our co-design with stewards and years of research into prosocial design, we know that communicating the rules and expectations up front is really important, and sometimes a reminder is all it takes to get someone back on track.

While we haven’t (yet!) seen many attempts to violate the spaces’ community agreements, we know that as Roundabout spaces get larger this will become more of a challenge. To anticipate this, we’ve been building out this system further, including adding support for the pre-moderation of images. We’ve also shifted some of the language in the system, from a pretty formal message:

Our automated system thinks this post may not meet our {agreement name} community agreement

To a more friendly, humble one that doesn’t feel as definitive or accusatory:

Before this post goes live, we’d like to review it to make sure it’s aligned with our {agreement name} community agreement. Want one of our community stewards to take a look or would you rather make some edits first?

If the system thinks a user’s message may not meet community standards, like it’s inflammatory or obscene, they can’t post it right away. However, users always have the ability to go around the automation and have a local human steward review their message. This is important because the AI might not be correct, and it gives appropriate agency to users and stewards.

Where Roundabout fits in

We’re seeing, already, that people are finding what they’ve been missing on Roundabout. One Roundabout Richmond user told us:

There’s the bookshop, maybe close to a year old. I live on the other side of town, so I just haven’t been … but what got me over there is that [Richmond’s steward] Liza had posted that there was going to be a new free [community] newspaper there. That’s actually what brought me over there. It had been on my list forever to go to the bookstore, but now that I had a reason and a free Saturday, I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll actually go over there.’

This is the kind of symbiosis we are building with Roundabout: deliberate, beneficial, human. And still definitely a work in progress. Thank you for coming along on this journey.

We are building this slowly and carefully, but always with an eye towards thoughtful expansion. If you want to help bring Roundabout to your town or neighborhood, please go ahead and sign up at JoinRoundabout.com.

Learn more about Roundabout

Signing off from DC and Amsterdam,

–Josh and Sam

From inspiring talks about cheese to community gatherings around the world, many of this month’s gems were brought to us by readers, team members, and friends of New_ Public.

The month’s edition was put together by New_ Public’s Social Media Fellow, Nina Joung. Thanks Nina!

Reminder that you can share a request or update in the comments section or use our contact form.

–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

Announcements and events

• Applications for the Open Social Awards are due May 1! New_ Public, PublicSpaces, and Waag Futurelab are seeking teams of builders with MVP products built on open protocols. A Grand-Prize (€10,000) winner and two Excellence Award (€5,000) winners will be recognized during the PublicSpaces Conference 2026, held in Amsterdam, June 4-6. Learn more at newpublic.org/OSA

• To keep up with relevant events, we heartily recommend the Prosocial Tech Collab community calendar. PTC supports builders of prosocial tech, as well as researchers, journalists, artists, and community organizers who are working on projects that advance the goals of prosocial technology. (PTC’s creator, Julia Morris, started their Slack during a New_ Public virtual event!)

• Our friends at Design It For Us, a youth-led coalition advocating for better social media, just announced their new Innovators Circle. This is an inspiring group, including friend of New_ Public Rudy Fraser of Blacksky.

• April 28-30 | Join FediForum, the global online unconference dedicated to the Open Social Web. They’ve also just announced FediForum Connect, a curated product and service directory for organizations, communities, and creators on ActivityPub and beyond. More here.

• April 22 | Living Room Lectures will be at Index Space in Brooklyn, NY in conversation with AI policy expert and poet Serena Dokuaa Oduro. The talk will encourage attendees to reimagine AI by uncovering the political and social forces that shape it, exploring the question: “Do we need AI or do we need Black feminisms?”

• April 25 | Londoners are invited to join an Internet Infrastructure Walk (for Earth Day) guided by a research fellow and artist. Together, you’ll walk through the ubiquitous but often invisible infrastructure that enables millions of Londoners to stay connected.

• May 8-10 | New Yorkers should not miss Media Party New York 2026, a three day convening with workshops and keynotes, including from New_ Public Co-Director Eli Pariser on Friday, May 8. This year’s core themes touch on topics close to our hearts, including how local journalism intersects with AI and content creators.

Links I would Slack you

• Author Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight, shows how engagement-hacking has basically de-evolved social media spaces. He reflects on the “peak eras” of platforms like Facebook and X, and how engagement-hacking has led to incredibly unhealthy online ecosystems.

• Social media researcher Jonathan Stray shares promising results from the Prosocial Ranking Challenge, an open competition that encouraged the creation of better social media algorithms. Two of the five algorithms that were tested showed statistically significant depolarization effects.

Word from the web

We highly recommend this talk from Blaine Cook, Principal Software Engineer for Roundabout. (Blaine also built this web tool to host the recordings, transcripts, and an index. That’s the Open Web for ya!) At this year’s ATmosphere Conference, Blaine spoke about Roundabout, cheese, and ecological computing:

If a single centralized approach can’t preserve the diversity of cheese, one of the simplest living systems that we know how to cultivate, then consider what we attempted over the last 20 years with human culture. The first generation of the social web tried to pasteurize human culture.

And the thing that I want us to reckon with is not just that it failed, it is that it could not have succeeded … because the architecture made it structurally impossible to preserve the thing that it was trying to protect.

Designs to Know

Every now and then, we highlight the research coming out of the Prosocial Design Network, a major resource for digital design practices that has shaped New_ Public’s work. Recently, they added a new intervention to their library: Quality Scores.

Audrey Hingle, Comms and Community Lead at Prosocial Design Network and Editor-in-Chief of Internet Exchange, shares with the New_ Public team:

Social media platforms almost all use popularity signals alongside content – number of likes, reposts etc. – which can amplify and increase engagement with divisive and otherwise unhealthy posts. A new survey experiment suggests a way that platform can counter that negative effect of popularity cues by also including a quality score. In the study, participants who saw quality scores next to popularity cues were more likely to say they’d repost more prosocial content (judged by an LLM). We give the intervention a “tentative” rating for now, but see it as a promising approach worthy of testing in more naturalistic settings.

A connection is made

Let’s see if we can make a connection within our larger community! This latest call for support comes from Jennifer at Govdirectory, a “crowdsourced and fact checked directory of official governmental online accounts and services.”

Help improve your local government directory as an individual contributor or leader in your community. We are particularly seeking volunteers to add data about U.S. states. Connect to the project by adding your Wikipedia username to the list of participants. If you don’t have a username yet, you can create an account here.

You’re also welcome to join an online Collab Hour, held weekly at 8PM Thursday and 9AM Friday (EDT), to learn more.

If you have a request to share in the next Bulletin Board, let us know using the New_ Public contact form or replying to this email. In last month’s newsletter, we got over a dozen people reaching out to Aaron Bear Berger. (Thank you to everyone who did!)

Digital Delight

Rich Speeney and Tyler Heath are two friends offering anyone $50 to host a pizza party for their friends or neighbors through their super simple website, wednesdaynightpizzaclub.com

While experimenting to find the best way to encourage people to gather, Rich and Tyler realized that a lot of barriers could be resolved by keeping the purpose “stupidly simple.” Read here about their eight year journey to Wednesday Night Pizza Club, a great example of a prosocial design process in action.

Let us know if you end up joining the 🍕 Club, and thank you, Tyler, for sharing this with us!

Scheming ways to embarrass my brother at his doctoral ceremony,

– Nina Joung, Social Media Fellow, New_ Public

This newsletter strives to be a space to find the best of what the public-spirited internet has to offer while building connections between New_ Public readers.

This only works with community input, so we’re opening up this space for your requests! Share anything you’d like to see here, from an event you want to amplify, to help finding support or collaborators for your project. You can share your request in the comments section or use our contact form.

– Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

Announcements and events

• Watch New_ Public Co-Director Eli Pariser’s talk at CreativeMornings NYC on why we desperately need alternative solutions that center communities, not the profit incentives of large tech companies.

• March 26: Join a virtual talk with four of New_ Public’s team who are working on Roundabout, our local community app — Trei Brundrett, Blaine Cook, Adit Dhanushkodi, and Sam Liebeskind. We’re excited to dig in with our friends at Prosocial Design Network!

• March 26-29: If you’re coming to the ATmosphere conference in Vancouver, we’d love to see you! New_ Public’s Deepti Doshi, Blaine Cook, and Angelica Quicksey will be there, as well as Expert-In-Residence Catherine Tait. Join us for a Meet & Greet session next Friday at 1:30pm.

• March 27: Our friends at the Relational Tech Project, (Deborah Tien, Josh Nesbit, and others) are doing really important, experimental work in local communities:

Relational technology is not about endless feeds, addictive features, or growth at all costs. It’s about thoughtfully crafted tools that help neighbors care, collaborate, and build trust. The best relational tech is itself co-created in a way that deepens relationships with people around us.

Join in as they continue to test out their new Relational Tech Studio platform in this virtual session. Bring your project ideas and build them into something functional in real time!

• March 31: In this conversation at Columbia University, Ava Smithing, Gen Z host of the Left to Their Own Devices podcast, joins Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of bestseller The Anxious Generation. They’ll discuss what changes when young people get a say in the laws that shape their digital lives, followed by a Q+A with the audience and a community organization showcase.

• June 4-6: We’re excited to share that at this year’s PublicSpaces Conference in Amsterdam, we’ll be presenting The Next Socials — sessions on developing new platforms and products for the open web. More details to come, but save the date!

Links I would Slack you

• Here’s a really useful piece on how to think about AI-based fraud in user research on digital platforms, and what researchers and builders can do about it (from New_ Public’s Staff Researcher, Abby Bajuniemi).

• We’re in good company as co-signers of New Civic Future’s open letter:

We’re committed to a new civic future where people feel agency over their lives, where neighbors are connected through relationships of trust, and where communities have the power to shape their own futures.

• A surprising stat: “it’s harder to stay informed about your neighborhood than about another country.”

The more you know

In a recent study, researchers had 15 Bluesky users customize their feeds using natural language-based prompts. The results were what many of us crave: participants were able to focus on info they were interested in, discover relevant related content, and engage with their social media feed intentionally.

This sort of thing might be coming to a feed near you: some of the biggest social media companies have begun tip-toeing towards giving users more agency and choice, if only temporarily.

A connection is made

Occasionally we get requests that might be a great opportunity for someone in our larger community. Let’s see if we can make a connection!

Aaron Bear Berger offers:

I’m building a map-based platform that makes local music scenes visible, accessible, and financially supportive. Instead of relying on algorithms like Spotify and social media, it lets people explore real artists in their area based on what’s happening now with new releases and upcoming shows. Each artist has a simple profile where fans can listen to a track and directly support them, creating a more intentional, community-driven way to discover and sustain local music.

I’m primarily looking for collaborators right now and pressure testers, especially folks who understand building community around local culture/arts. Funding might come later, but right now I’m focused on finding partners to build this out with. Honestly, creative brainstorming / ideation could be fruitful.

Want to get in touch with Aaron? Use our contact form and put “For A.B.B.” at the start of your message. We’ll pass along your messages. Or, if you have a request to share in the next Bulletin Board, also please send that along.

Digital Spaces Directory spotlight

Roomy, described by Laurens Hof in this recent newsletter, is an experimental Discord-like group chat built on top of AT Protocol, the infrastructure that powers Bluesky. Founded by friend of New_ Public Erlend Sogge Heggen, Roomy allows for group chats to become gardenable digital spaces. While the platform is still a work in progress, Roomy will be used to connect attendees at ATmosphere next week in Vancouver.

Want to find more prosocial digital spaces, products, and tools? Our Digital Spaces Directory is a list of spaces that have taken at least some notable steps to build a public-spirited user experience, embody at least one of New_ Public’s Civic Signals, and/or implement creative new design patterns. You can submit a digital platform to the DSD here.

New_ Thing to try

We love to experiment and learn about new things. This New_ Thing to try comes from New_ Public’s Tori Sgarro:

I’m excited to try out a new Beta feature in Figma, called “slots.”

As New_ Public’s designer for Public Spaces Incubator, a large part of my job consists of maintaining a mature design system that we share with our consortium of partners. Recently, I’ve been thinking about how to allow our partner designers and developers creative freedom to explore without breaking the structure that supports a coherent end-to-end experience in our product. Seemingly just in time, Figma released slots, which “give you the ability to customize components without breaking the system.”

It will require some design system refactoring in Figma, but I’m excited to see how slots can specify areas of customization in our design system, making it more flexible to work with.

LMAO

Kudos to the Norwegian Consumer Council, not just for this actually funny “A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator” sketch, but also for pushing policymakers to take action against Big Tech “degrad[ing] their services without fear of consequences.”

Ready for biking around in the springtime,

–Josh

We’re thrilled to support the upcoming ATmosphere Conference, in Vancouver, Canada from March 26-29. Register to attend.

Last summer we welcomed Blaine Cook, Principal Software Engineer for Roundabout, our local community app. Blaine goes all the way to the beginning of Twitter, and he has been hard at work with the Roundabout team creating this brand new platform, which we’re now piloting in communities throughout the US.

We’re using AI in this work, informed by our AI Policy. We remain humble and alert to the risks posed by these tools, but also curious and open to experimentation. If we might be able to use new AI tools to bring an open, useful, human internet to more people, we’re going to try. That’s what Blaine’s piece is all about. What are we trying to do with these tools?

Reminder: send your plugs and requests for the next Bulletin Board.

– Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

Within the larger movement to build better, public-spirited apps and websites for the social internet, the conversation around using AI usually defaults to a familiar set of applications. There is a safe, incremental approach to building prosocial software where we use large language models to address a limited set of features:

• Provide moderation and safety

• Improve ranking and sorting

• Help with content management

We should do all of these things, but this framing reflects a deeper assumption inherited from large social media platforms — that the primary role of AI is to extract value from centralized data and optimize what is shown to users.

That assumption is worth challenging, because these tweaks are not the most exciting possibility for AI and the social internet.

At New_ Public, and in the design of Roundabout specifically, we start from a different thesis: social value does not emerge from technology. It emerges from people — real, local, invested participants who curate, organize, and care for their communities. The risk of the dominant AI framing is not just that it recentralizes power, but that it actively disempowers users by treating social life as something to be optimized for them rather than shaped by them.

The more transformative opportunity is to give more people the ability to do what early adopters are already doing today: not AI as an invisible hand guiding social life, but AI as a tool to help restore agency to communities themselves. Instead of legacy fixes that preserve the status quo, we should be encouraging and supporting each other to build tools for our own communities, like our friends and peers at Blacksky are doing on AT Protocol.

While this remains inaccessible to many in the short term, there’s a clear trajectory. We should provide robust, reliable, and trustworthy core infrastructure, in the form of open services built on and supporting decentralized protocols. At the same time, we should radically expand who gets to participate in shaping this ecosystem. That is a future worth running towards and fighting for.

LLMs Should Not Curate Our Social Lives

Large language models are extremely good at “data munging”: transforming text, summarizing content, extracting structure, and accelerating software development. That’s why it’s no surprise that the dominant platforms have been eager to insert these models into existing moderation and ranking systems. However, they are less good at having taste.

One of Roundabout’s core principles in using AI is that nothing should reach the site without meaningful human involvement and decision-making. This is an ethical stance, supported by New_ Public’s AI Policy, but we’ve also found that it leads to higher quality and more prosocial outcomes. I often think back to a sign at a friend’s office: “If we betray your trust by giving you inferior candy our loss will be greater by far than yours.”

Take event curation as an example. Using today’s LLMs, it’s easy to automatically search the web, find events that are happening in a community, and compile them into an event calendar. With Roundabout, we’ve tried experiments to this effect, but they consistently miss the nuance, taste, and trust signals that can only come from the people who make a community.

Indeed, it’s acts like organizing, debating, and celebrating that often creates community. Even if we have the good intentions to automate and remove genuinely tedious administrative work, we must be relentlessly focused on which processes we replace and why. Making communal acts of mutual devotion obsolete is a soulless stripping of our humanity, and the opposite of what we’re trying to do with Roundabout.

This distinction is critical. LLMs shouldn’t decide what we see, but they can help us build the tools we need to support our communities.

The Real Opportunity: LLMs as Tool-Builders, Not Social Arbitrators

I’ve spent a lot of time with Claude and other AI coding tools over the past year, and talking to other experienced practitioners who have done the same. I think it’s fair to say that LLM-assisted coding has dramatically lowered the barrier to creating bespoke software. The consensus is that building simple one-off tools is now trivial; a little experimental app rarely takes longer than fifteen minutes in the right hands. That said, it’s also true that building high-quality and reliable software for wide audiences will remain a significant undertaking.

Even though code is now effectively free, polish and depth takes time. Our team has spent thousands of Claude-assisted hours over the past ten months building Roundabout. The hard part, as it has always been, is deciding what to build and making it good.

Even if this pace accelerates to the speed of thought or beyond, Jevons Paradox applies to software, too. The backlog of features and integrations any social platform might want to build is effectively infinite. No centralized team — even one moving quickly with AI — can keep up.

We’re still early days with this line of thinking, but we’re doubling down on this at Roundabout. Rather than building a product that accretes and monetizes all of the value and knowledge of the people who use it, we want Roundabout to help foster the creation of robust, shared prosocial infrastructure that community members can build on top of and use to address their own needs, on their own terms.

For now, this looks like calendars, guides, and other features that community stewards and members can shape for their own use. But this is just the beginning — we believe that combining open infrastructure with the enabling aspects of LLMs could help unlock the creativity inherent in communities.

One example that I personally hope to see is that a group helping with emergency coordination, like Watch Duty, could build tools that integrate directly with Roundabout. Having personally experienced a major wildfire, I know firsthand how important these tools are, how complex and context-specific they can be, and how often they are only available for the highest-profile disasters.

Roundabout as an API for Communities

It might be helpful to think in terms of another piece of digital infrastructure — APIs. Application Programming Interfaces are protocols that shape how data flows through the social internet, but there are important decisions to make about who and what controls that flow.

Facebook once offered APIs, so third parties could build on top of Facebook data, but they were fundamentally extractive. Control and consent ultimately resided with the platform, not with users, allowing Cambridge Analytica to harvest user data on a massive scale — a predictable outcome of centralized power paired with opaque data access.

Decentralized networks like the AT Protocol, which powers Bluesky and also underpins Roundabout, create the possibility of flipping this dynamic. When combined with AI tools, consentful protocols — where users control the flow of data — could enable a new model. Users could create tools that interact with their data, compose services across systems, and, if necessary, revoke access when trust is broken.

As a small example, our Roundabout community stewards were requesting a post scheduling feature. We quickly built that with LLMs, and we’ve added that open source code back into the AT Protocol ecosystem, and made it available for the 41+ million users of Bluesky. It can be modularly adopted by any user, or instantly disconnected.

If Roundabout prioritizes consent as a requirement for accessing community data and interactions, then it would become possible for end users — not just professional developers — to safely create bespoke tools for many aspects of civic and social life:

• Event aggregation and promotion

• Community-specific moderation workflows

• Governance tools

• Local advertising and sponsorship experiments

• Political and civic organizing

• Emergency management tools

• News and reporting tools

• Analytics that communities control and understand

The audience for Roundabout, then, is not only end users, but a potential ecosystem of tool-builders embedded within communities themselves. These folks might not think of themselves as developers, but the neighbor who organizes a block party knows more about their own needs than we do, let alone any number of teams at Silicon Valley tech startups. (This is the premise of what our friends at the Relational Tech Project are working on.) Given the right tools and agency, we’re sure the things they’ll build will be remarkable.

My long-standing hope has been that we’re able to move past the extractive, monopolizing, and competitive phase of social networks, and into a new era of creativity, collaboration, and diversity. I believe we’re poised to see a Cambrian explosion of new ways to interact online, and there’s evidence to suggest that it’s already happening: just today, I saw three new apps to share what you’re reading and watching with friends, each with their own unique take on the subject!

In this light, LLMs may be a killer app for decentralized networks — and decentralized networks may be the missing constraint that makes LLM integrations safer, more legible, and more aligned with user interests. It’s a symbiosis, and I believe we need both pieces. Rather than trying to integrate LLMs with everything, I think that deliberately bounded, consent-driven integrations will produce better outcomes.

None of this lets AI companies off the hook for the harms they have and will inflict — at the same time, our ability to build more flourishing digital public spaces depends on the strength of our networks and our communities.

In contrast to so many enshittified companies with rallying cries of “aut Caesar aut nihil,” at Roundabout we believe in a resonant internet, where we work with our peers to support and enable people in our communities. A lot more is possible if we build it together.

– Blaine Cook, Principal Software Engineer, Roundabout

Thanks Blaine!

Looking forward to the cherry blossoms, azaleas, and rhododendrons,

–Josh

Ideally these newsletters should be a curated invitation to connection, conversation, and community. Find info about upcoming events, some of the best links we’ve shared online lately, and provocative quotes and questions about the volatile, shifting sands of the social internet. Plus, updates from what we’re working on, and requests for assistance from other readers!

Next time we’ll return to the classic newsletter format, and we’ll send another Bulletin Board in about one month.

– Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

Announcements and events

• If you missed it, we recently announced the start of our Expert-in-Residence program, where we’re bringing in expert practitioners who excel in their field to work with us on a specific project. Our first two XIR are Catherine Tait (former president of CBC/Radio-Canada) and Will Nelligan (social entrepreneur, most recently at the National Trust for Local News)!

• If you want a brief primer on Roundabout, our new local community app in closed beta testing, you can watch Roundabout’s Principal Software Engineer, Blaine Cook, present about it at this event hosted by DWeb, starting at 25:15.

• If you liked our newsletter on the indie web, the author, Alexandra Ciufudean, recorded a video tour of some of the funkiest and most interesting websites she featured in the piece.

• Baratunde Thurston, on his new show Life With Machines, explains what makes our new app Roundabout different:

This Friday, Feb 27: Join New_ Public Co-Director, Eli Pariser for CreativeMornings. Sign up to watch the livestream, or if you’ll be in NYC, you can grab free tickets to attend in person tomorrow at 11am EST.

March 2: Sign up for FediForum’s virtual session, “Growing the Open Social Web: An Online FediForum Un-Workshop”, hosted by friends of New_ Public Johannes Ernst and Mike Masnick.

March 26-29: We’re thrilled to support the upcoming ATmosphere Conference, in Vancouver, Canada. We’re funding travel stipends specifically for European attendees, so they can join this global conference for those working on ATProto, the technology powering Bluesky. Register to attend.

Links I would Slack you

• Some thriving spaces and powerful ideas that give us hope for 2026.

• A list of new governance tools for online spaces from our friends at Metagov.

• We love to send people to Prosocial Tech Collab, a great community if you want to get more involved in socially-responsible tech and improving digital public spaces.

• In case you missed it, Anil Dash reflects on Wikipedia’s “unbelievable collective generosity” upon turning 25.

Designs to know

What’s the research actually say about how to make social media better? From time to time we’ll use this space to showcase interesting digital features and patterns from the Prosocial Design Network, who use our Civic Signals to organize all the interventions they study.

Norms & Rules Setting: PDN recently updated this entry from “Reminder of Norms” to reflect the many different kinds of reminders about rules and norms that platforms use. These can be context specific, like not allowing personal anecdotes in the r/Science subreddit, or apply to the whole platform, like not allowing harassment or bullying on all of Reddit. Some platforms also prompt users with a reminder about how to behave, like being considerate to others.

PDN now breaks down the feature into three categories: “Community Norms & Rules”, “Platform Rules”, and “Civility Prompts”. PDN says that “evidence strongly supports the effectiveness” of the first two, which need to be enforced with penalties like suspensions or bans when not community-driven. “Civility Prompts are more uncertain,” says PDN. “They may help in some contexts but can backfire if users feel lectured or patronized.” Find much more info on PDN’s website.

Something to think on

Friend of New_ Public Jasmine Sun has been on a roll lately with her reporting on AI and San Francisco’s tech culture. Recently she investigated the growing populist backlash against generative AI, and traces it back to a familiar source:

On this issue especially, everyone is acting out of the wounds of social media. AI plugs easily into the snowballing civil society campaigns against smartphones and Facebook. Sure, plenty of people use ChatGPT—but are we any happier in the world they made? I’d reply yes for myself, but many disagree, arguing that sky-high usage stats are not proof enough of benefit. They feel that they were suckered, that social media’s dominance was a mistake, and they are determined not to let Big Tech get away again.

What do you think? If you want to say more than the answers in the poll below, reply in the comments.

New_ public ideas

Our team is always learning. From time to time, we’ll use this space to share some behind the scenes updates or explain our thinking on something we’re building.

Roundabout: When we ask people why they’ve joined a Roundabout Space (we’re currently piloting in five different local communities), “discovering local events & activities” is one of the top reasons (just over 40%). So we’re currently working on further improving the Community Calendar and the experience of discovering local events within Roundabout. Other top reasons for joining fall into buckets that include “building community connection” and “staying informed about local news and updates.”

A connection is made

Occasionally we get requests that might be a great opportunity for someone in our larger community. Let’s see if we can make a connection!

Benjamin Radd teaches law and political science at UCLA, focusing on media and civic literacy. He offers:

I’ve recently built a very simple app that allows educators to create simulations of their own and utilize AI to enhance the experience. I’m looking to partner with organizations that are interested in the media/civic literacy space and want to support digital citizenship. The goal is to teach young people how better to engage one another online and in personal spaces, and minimize the toxic discourse that permeates our civic engagement.

Want to get in touch with Benjamin? Use our contact form and put “For Prof. Radd” at the start of your message. We’ll pass along your messages. Or, if you have a request to share in the next Bulletin Board, also please send that along.

Digital delight

We’ll send you off with something fun and unexpected. After all, there’s so much more to the internet than what you find on the big social platforms.

Prom.dev: This AI tool makes little lightweight widgets, or “drops,” based on text prompts. Whether or not you believe their provocation that “software is the new content,” it’s fun playing around with stuff like this little sequencer or this typing game. This really reminds me of the earliest wave of iPhone apps, or Flash animation games before that. Is this the start of a new wave of creativity, or is this a fun and silly sideshow?

Excited for the days getting longer,

–Josh

New_ Public is proud to support the ATmosphere conference, March 26-29 in Vancouver, BC.

Let’s get right to it this week. Journalist Jessica Furseth brings us an exploration of shared memory-making in the comments of YouTube videos that are often very old and very long. If you liked our newsletter on the indie web, I strongly recommend this one as well.

Also, a quick announcement: we are shifting our format a bit!

As we approach the milestone of having sent 200 newsletters, we are experimenting with using every other newsletter as a community bulletin board. We’ll be sharing links, info, and resources from New_ Public and beyond — stuff we don’t typically have space for alongside our regular excellent, in-depth essays and Q+A’s.

If you have any news or updates for February or March that you’d like to share with our larger community, please drop us a note and we may feature it in the newsletter.

– Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

Something wonderful is happening in the depths of YouTube: people keep returning to old videos and sharing heartfelt stories in the comments. Because when nostalgia strikes, we head for the YouTube search bar — and because nothing hits us in the feels like a tune we loved when we were young, we end up in the comments, which are often full of likeminded people, reminiscing together.

YouTube turned 20 years old in 2025 — ancient in internet terms, but the platform can still be evocative, deeply useful, and at times, quite moving. It’s embracing all sorts of new trends, like YouTube Shorts, shortform videos competing with TikTok and Instagram Reels in an online ecosystem increasingly favoring the quick and snappy, as well as video podcasts, livestreams, and membership models. But YouTube is still the undisputed king of longform video, and one of the few social media platforms that’s genuinely searchable. We can return again and again to that old theme song, that comedy bit, that political touchpoint — this is our cultural archive. And since this digital library comes with a comment section, it’s become a receptacle for a lot of reflections, memories, and feelings.

The phenomenon crops up in the strangest of places. There’s a ten-year-old YouTube video of Aphex Twin’s “#19” playing over a snow monkey in a lake which has 13 million views, far exceeding the song’s official music video. The comments are practically poetry:

I’m lying down next to a girl I think I’m falling in love with. She’s asleep and I’m listening on my headphones. Life is good and also weird and also confusing and I’m also unsure. What a trip.

It feels like an online version of a chat between friends in a café, or an artsy community notice board, or even a personal diary. But in the age of “enshittification,” where the offerings from social media platforms are degrading in the hunt for profits, it makes me very nervous to think we’re trusting this offbeat treasure trove to YouTube, owned by Google’s Alphabet, which can and will change anything at any moment.

Preserving a comment thread that’s still going after a decade is certainly not a priority, no matter how magical it may feel to stumble upon it. So where does this phenomenon fit within the complex ecosystem of YouTube? While the platform dynamics keeps trying to nudge our viewing behavior towards the most profitable, what does this organic outpouring of emotion say about what people actually want to find?

What the YouTube machine wants from us

The heartfelt sharing under these videos feels organic and accidental — it would be really hard to recreate it, and it would be an odd strategy even if you could. Growing slowly over time, these stories of love and loss can even feel unrelated to the accompanying video. It would also be hard for the algorithm to distribute them — I came across that snow monkey video on Reddit, and even as I’m playing it, my suggested videos contain nothing else like it.

YouTube is a social media platform that rewards creators in such a way that some of them can actually make a living, but that means creating things preferred by many, many people, and/or the algorithm. This is supposed to be one and the same, according to the official content creation strategy for YouTube Creators: “Our algorithm doesn’t pay attention to videos, it pays attention to viewers. So, rather than trying to make videos that’ll make an algorithm happy, focus on making videos that make your viewers happy.”

Yet the vast majority of YouTube videos get less than a couple hundred views. The algorithm is one of the biggest factors in what actually gets seen by large audiences: YouTube’s CPO said in 2018 that 70% of watch time is directed by algorithmic recommendations. Like all Big Tech algorithms, YouTube prioritizes engagement (views, likes, etc). And because controversy is one of the best drivers for engagement, people are often served increasingly nasty and misleading content simply because it will keep them watching for longer, and not because they went searching for it.

And even when the outcome is benign, the algorithm is far from a neutral force. “By optimizing for engagement, many social media feeds push us towards pieces of culture that are more Western, ambient, empty, cheap, and ephemeral,” New_ Public’s Josh Kramer wrote in a previous newsletter, referencing Kyle Chayka’s book Filterworld. YouTube’s goal is not to broaden our horizons — it’s to keep us watching, so they can show us more ads.

At least among the monetized YouTube channels, the desire to please the algorithm impacts everything from posting schedules and thumbnails to style and editing trends. But the past year’s surge in AI slop has resulted in a departure from fast cuts in favor of more light-touch, limited editing, which feels authentically human in comparison. “Social media users are getting fatigued by the overstimulating, brain-rot style of videos, where graphics and sounds appear every 1.5 seconds,” says influencer marketer Brendan Gahan. “No-edit creators are building deeper relationships with their followers.”

There’s always been plenty of YouTube channels that favor a calmer pace — lots of creators and viewers simply enjoy slower entertainment. My favorite YouTuber, Roaming Wild Rosie, posts just one 40 minute video every two weeks, sharing the progress on the cabin she’s renovating in rural Sweden. Rosie, who’s never posted a single Short, still makes her living primarily from YouTube views and sponsorships. With 300,000 subscribers, her videos have a thriving comment section where people discuss DIY techniques — I’m not a DIYer, but I love following this years-long project, showcasing one woman’s determination to do things her own way, living a life that’s so different from my own.

The push to Shorts is problematic for the slower side of YouTube. Nilay Patel, Editor-in-chief of The Verge, has pointed out that Shorts aren’t as likely to translate into followers, which is how creators make their money. But as Shorts is now more profitable for the platform than traditional content, the pressure will only grow. “I don’t think platforms have thought through what happens when they kill the creators,” warned Patel. If the creators disappear because they can no longer make a living on YouTube, it’s hard to see why we would go to there at all — the creators are what sets YouTube apart.

The unexpected human connection in the comments

So it feels refreshing to stumble upon these story-rich comment sections, which seem to exist in spite of the trends. As we’re increasingly turning to these platforms to fill time, not to connect, social media has become a lot less social — those old videos with vibrant comment sections feel like they fly under the radar, or actively reject new profit-focused trends.

The first comments I saw that made me sit back in awe of the outpouring of emotion were on a video that’s simply ten hours of driving in the rain. We see nothing but dark night and traffic lights, alongside the rhythmic sound of window wipers. The video has nearly 9 million views and beyond the standard pre-roll, there are no ad breaks. It’s become a repository of resurfaced sense memories, mostly of laying in the back of their parents’ cars as children:

I’ll never forget driving to Cornwall with my dad. I opened the window and rain was hitting my head. I used my dad’s jacket and looked into the night. I felt safe and happy. I miss you dad and I love you.

Rave sets are a particularly rich vein of the comment story genre, recalling nights out with friends, simpler times, and dancing until sunrise. Even though the internet is full of anonymous messages, where but in the YouTube comments is it this lovely?

Of course, YouTube, like any platform, also has its share of meanness and shitposting. People are often a lot meaner online than they would ever be in person, but the Online Disinhibition Effect can go both ways — the anonymity of being behind a screen can also prompt people to be more honest and open. It can feel good to share, and adding our own take can make us feel like part of something.

YouTube might actually be changing how we’re encountering and relating to our memories. A 2023 study, which looked specifically at YouTube comments, found that “social media has made instant online access to the recent past a normal part of daily life, making users more prone to expressing nostalgia toward relatively recent experiences.”

It’s hard to know why these comment sections grow to be so meaningful and resonant over time. Perhaps all it takes is one early comment to set the tone and model a graceful and empathic attitude. Or maybe these comment sections feel like safe places for people who grew up on the internet to build memories together. These comments mostly feel like messages in a bottle, left adrift in the hope that the right person will find them.

Despite the algorithm, our desire for connection persists

Nothing lasts forever on the internet. These gentler corners of YouTube may well survive as long as the platform favors engagement, but YouTube has pivoted before, and it will again. The archiving of YouTube comments has already started — Chiara Amisola, an artist from the Philippines, created Thesoundof.love to showcase “the rawness of human intimacy and confession” in the comments left under love songs. Amisola wrote on Instagram that she believes YouTube comments are “one of the last sacred spaces of the internet.”

YouTube will probably always mainly be a commercial, for-profit platform, but it’s lovely to see people using it in unintended ways to create something beautiful. It’s the same desire that fuels the renaissance of the indie web, with its focus on “authentic self-expression, and slow, intentional exploration driven by curiosity and interest,” as Alexandra Ciufudean wrote here.

YouTube is definitely profiting from these unusual uses of its comments, but the real value of this storytelling phenomenon lies elsewhere. It’s a reminder that no matter what the algorithm tries to prompt us to do, many of our human instincts are the same as always: we like to gather over shared interests and tell our stories.

If you want to find some more of these story-rich videos, go to YouTube and search for some songs that were big when you were young. Find a video that’s been up for at least ten years that has a lot of comments — it’s not always the official video. You could try searching for a Nirvana concert video, one of the hits from “Jagged Little Pill”, or the theme song to your favorite show — you may well find your people in the comments.

– Jessica Furseth

(2/11/26: A previous version of this piece mistakenly attributed Chia Amisola’s quote to The New Yorker, instead of her Instagram post.)

Thanks Jessica!

Soaking up sun in Honduras this week,

–Josh

Welcome new readers! New_ Public is a nonprofit product studio focused on reimagining community, connection, and conversation online. Our projects include Roundabout and Public Spaces Incubator.

Check out our new video tour of the indie web.

Sovereignty is in the news. President Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland has put a renewed spotlight on issues of territorial control, independence, and colonialism.

As Canadian PM Mark Carney points out, sovereignty isn’t just about what flag is waving over your land, it’s about having a choice besides what’s offered by hegemonic superpowers. This is true in international diplomacy, and also in technology.

Sure, you can leave Big Tech social media platforms… but where would you go?

In recent years, the promise of sovereignty has been leading people to create communities on open social media protocols like ActivityPub (powering Mastodon) and AT Protocol (powering Bluesky). In theory, decentralization offers communities a way to connect to a larger social network, but on their own terms.

We’ve seen this with Blacksky, a community centering Black voices, and Gander, a platform in development for Canadians — both on AT Protocol. Could this approach work for all of Europe?

Our friends at the brand new Modal Foundation are focused on this through their project Eurosky, which aims to build out the infrastructure that would allow over 450 million people in the EU to experience the social internet outside of Silicon Valley apps. Ivan Sigal, Modal’s Executive Chair, says:

Social media today is critical infrastructure for publics, and it needs to work for people, not exploit and mislead them. Social tech alternatives can’t just be a throwback to old versions of existing Big Tech platforms; they need to offer better user experiences, information integrity, and more algorithmic choice.

This vision for European digital infrastructure has been in the works for some time, and we think it’s connected to New_ Public’s larger mission of bringing digital public spaces within everyone’s reach.

Learn more about Eurosky

To get a better sense of the current challenges and opportunities, we enlisted Dutch data analyst Laurens Hof to survey the field. He reviewed data from 204 projects and analyzed the state of AT Protocol, or ATProto for short. Laurens also zooms into four case-studies of European projects built on this infrastructure. (We haven’t forgotten ActivityPub, which Laurens is working on now. We’ll be sure to share that when it’s ready.)

Here are a few events on this topic to keep on your radar:

• Join New_ Public Principal Software Engineer for Roundabout, Blaine Cook, at this DWeb virtual meetup, where he’ll be presenting about Roundabout!

• We’re thrilled to announce that New_ Public is supporting the upcoming ATmosphere conference, March 26-29 in Vancouver, BC. Join us!

• Also, you can submit an idea for FediForum’s Un-Workshop on growing the open social web before February 15, and attend virtually on March 2.

– Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

French President Macron made a speech on German Unity Day in October 2025, in which he made a passionate call for Europeans to take back control of their democracies in digital infrastructure. He said:

We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies.

To take Macron’s call seriously means that Europe needs to build its own digital democratic places, its own social networks that are controlled by Europeans, not by a few American and Chinese companies and oligarchs. While it is debatable whether it is even desirable to have a European version of Meta, it is clear that there is no will within Europe to do such a thing. For the people who want to take Macron’s call for European social networking seriously, that leaves working with open social networking protocols as the only feasible path forward.

ATProto represents one of the most concrete opportunities for Europe to create their own social networking infrastructure, because of a number of factors described below. ATProto provides an excellent base for public society to claim sovereign ownership over the social networking infrastructure, without it resulting in social media that is operated by governments.

The state of ATProto

ATProto has moved beyond the experimental stage. The protocol is mature enough to be credible, as the technical architecture works, more than 41 million people already use it, developers are already building, and there are multiple other companies (beyond Bluesky, the original platform and team responsible for creating the protocol) with million-dollar-funding starting to build on top of it. At the same time, the network is still young enough that small funding interventions can shape its trajectory.

This time period will likely not last, as patterns and habits will get settled around how the new startups currently building on ATProto shape the network. This current state of the ecosystem points to challenges where intervention can meaningfully shift the development of the ecosystem.

The main obstacles for European projects are funding and regulation. Developers have shown that it is possible to build independent platforms on ATProto, yet suitable funding mechanisms are largely absent. Venture capital is not suited to open infrastructure, and existing European funds for open protocols have so far focused elsewhere, such as AI and data management. Regulatory frameworks written for centralised platforms also fail to account for distributed architectures like ATProto.

How these challenges are met can meaningfully shape how ATProto develops. Patterns of governance, funding, and infrastructure are still in formation.

Opportunities for ATProto in Europe

ATProto allows for modular unbundling: Projects like Microcosm (indexing the entire network for backlink databases on a Raspberry Pi), and Graze (feed builder and ad marketplace) are disaggregating traditional social media functions into independent services. This validates ATProto’s core thesis but creates a strategic challenge, which is most notably with ads. The value of advertising normally accrues to the platform operators, which use the profits to fund the cost of moderation and other vital services. In a modular system, with functions being spun out into separate services, it is unclear how to pay for everything.

Client-to-Platform migration as a viable growth path: Multiple successful projects (Flashes with 50K users, Skylight with over 100k videos uploaded) started as Bluesky clients and are now evolving into independent platforms. This gradual shift allows a project to start small, as a client reliant on Bluesky for services, content, and more, and over time become more and more platform-like, with their own infrastructure and services. This is enabled by ATProto’s modularity, which lowers technical barriers to entry and allows projects to build traction before making infrastructure investments. This pattern is unique compared to other open protocols like ActivityPub or Nostr.

Infrastructure innovation outpaces user adoption: The most technologically impressive projects, like Microcosm, or alternative software implementations for relays and AppViews, showcase the technological strength of ATProto. However, most user-facing platforms struggle to gain users outside of the developer community. A good example of that is Frontpage, a Hacker News-like platform that is well-designed and over a year old, but has minimal usage, indicating that adoption requires more than good engineering and an open protocol.

Digital sovereignty as international value proposition: Gander‘s explicit positioning as a “sovereign Canadian social network” represents international interest in ATProto as a path to social media sovereignty. However, their development roadmap, including building a sovereign social cloud for Canadian institutions over time, reveals that this dream is still a long way out. No similar platform is being developed for the EU market. The sovereign nation-state use case is aspirational but far from ready yet.

Case studies: Promising European ATProto projects

Interviews with four EU-based development teams show promising projects with real traction that operate at hobbyist scale.

Roomy 🇪🇺
Location: EU
Category: Platform
Status: Alpha
Scale: Commercial
Funding: self-funded with a one-time small grant from Skyseed
Team: Three developers

Roomy is a group chatting platform that has integrations with ATProto. The project is in an alpha stage, with demos available for testing. It takes some inspiration from Discord and other group chatting platforms like Matrix, but adds its own spin to it. Roomy places more priority on separate “threads” in the conversation.

Flashes 🇩🇪
Location: Germany
Category: Client
Status: Production
Scale: Commercial (100,000 downloads)
Funding: self-funded
Team: one core iOS developer, two Android developers

Flashes is an iOS client for Bluesky with an Instagram-like design. It is one of the most popular Bluesky clients, meaning that one can interact with existing photos and videos on Bluesky. There is significant interest from its user base in an Android version as well, which is now in development.

Sill 🇳🇱
Location: Netherlands
Category: Client
Status: Production
Scale: Commercial (1,000-10,000 users)
Funding: self-funded
Team size: one

Sill is a reader client that monitors your Bluesky and Mastodon feeds to find the most popular links in your network, especially links that have been shared by multiple people you follow. It then groups these links together to get an easy overview of what's currently popular. Sill monitors accounts on both ActivityPub and ATProto and aggregates the data in the frontend.

Wafrn 🇪🇸
Location: Spain
Category: Platform
Status: Production
Scale: Open source (1,000-10,000 users)
Funding: self-funded
Team size: one core developer, two major contributors

Wafrn is a Tumblr-like platform that started development using ActivityPub. Over time, it also has gained full support for ATProto. It is the first and only platform that fully integrates both protocols. The project has a strong vibe of casual, internet-first users.

Main recommendations

These case studies offer specific, actionable priorities for institutions and organizations that care about building open, sovereign social infrastructure in Europe. Here are where I believe investments could be leveraged to make the most difference.

Fund application developers directly: Supporting developers building consumer-facing applications represents the highest-impact opportunity. Funding in the €25,000 to €100,000 range matches actual needs and would enable multiple projects to move from hobbyist to professional operation.

Focus on European developers addresses their specific funding gap while building the developer community that European social infrastructure requires. Project selection should prioritise platforms where users get immediate value without requiring large existing communities, and those serving specific niche audiences rather than competing directly with Big Tech platforms.

Support infrastructure development: ATProto creates a separation of functions, but there is still significant room for even more decentralisation of the infrastructure. Some parts of the ATProto infrastructure (such as the app backend) can be quite technically demanding. Some projects are working to split up the function of network components even more, allowing for greater resilience and decentralisation.

This fundamental work improves the ecosystem but there are few commercial incentives to build such a system, and it is mostly done from personal convictions. Similar funding levels, in the range of €25-100,000, would enable focused work on components that lower barriers for other developers.

Digital sovereignty has become a central priority for European institutions, and the need for alternatives to US-controlled social media platforms is increasingly urgent given current geopolitical developments. ATProto represents one of the few technically serious approaches available that can support independent European infrastructure while maintaining global interoperability. The protocol’s modular architecture is particularly well-suited to European needs, by allowing regional control over data storage, content moderation, and platform features while users remain connected to a global network.

European developers are already building on this protocol and demonstrating its viability, but they operate without appropriate support structures. Strategic investments in this ecosystem directly advance sovereignty goals by establishing independent European capacity in social infrastructure, reducing reliance on US platforms, and creating models that other European organisations can build upon.

Supporting early European operators such as Eurosky offers a strategic opportunity. By investing in specific modules such as moderation or hosting, Europe can incrementally build sovereign capacity within an open global network, ensuring that European standards and values are embedded in the foundations of future social infrastructure.

– Laurens Hof

Learn more about Eurosky

Thanks Laurens!

Bracing for a lot of snow,

–Josh

Please help us by completing New_ Public’s annual reader survey

For decades now, the internet has enabled media organizations to distribute their reporting, analysis, commentary, and much more, across the world, instantaneously.

And it has also enabled instant feedback in the form of comments. Like any semi-public social space, comment sections can and do blossom and thrive, or turn inward and become messy or even abusive.

We believe in the power of commenting on online news. We’re hard at work on Public Spaces Incubator, a global collaboration between New_ Public and public media organizations that’s reinventing commenting from the ground up. And we also believe in stewardship: many publications rely on the nearly invisible work of community stewards to referee their sites.

Below we have a guest essay from Friend of New_ Public Ben Whitelaw, who as a former Communities Editor, led the team moderating comments for The Times of London. Ben is also the founder of Everything in Moderation, a weekly newsletter charting the forces shaping the future of online speech and the internet.

Ben, through his work regulating comments at a for-profit newsroom, and his expertise on moderation and Trust and Safety, has robust insights on this topic. There’s plenty here for builders of social spaces, stewards of online communities, and journalists of all kinds. As we potentially head into a new era of commenting, we have so much to learn from Ben, including his three essential lessons for newsrooms on comments.

– Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

In the 2010s, news publishers couldn’t shut their comment sections fast enough. The space “below the line” had become a noisy, thankless place to spend your time, where bile and bad faith arguments too often drowned out any genuine discussion or personal connection, or skewed the way readers thought about the journalism above.

Publishers saw comment sections as a reputational hazard and a cost centre and, by the middle of the decade, a dozen sites — including Popular Science, Chicago Sun-Times, Motherboard, Reuters, and NPR — had significantly reduced or completely disabled commenting features. Each argued, often without the data to back it up, that its readers preferred to discuss stories via social media. And so, what was once heralded as a new frontier of reader dialogue died a not-so-quiet death.

A decade on, something surprising is happening: reader comments are having a mini renaissance. After years of chasing social media engagement and being burned in the process, publishers have realised that commenting has a tangible value — to the broader public, yes, but also in terms of advertising and subscription revenue.

The Washington Post relaunched its subscribers-only commenting platform in late 2024, promising “meaningful and high-quality discourse” as part of an effort to create “a space where diverse perspectives can connect, engage and thrive.” After an initial outpouring of reader pushback, the commenting tools now seem to be fully integrated into the site.

The Financial Times now uses automated moderation tools to help readers have smarter discussions under articles and encourage comments from people who don’t typically engage. Meanwhile, WIRED touted a new commenting experience — where readers can connect with journalists and writers — as part of its new, improved subscription offering.

It might have taken the disappearance of digital advertising dollars, readers getting used to paywalls, social media becoming a cesspit, and the introduction of new powerful AI tools, but publishers are finally coming to realise that the best community has always been right under their noses.

A civilised ‘dumpster fire’

In 2010, The Times of London put up a paywall that many said would fail. As it did so, it also doubled down on reader comments, which changed some of the motivations for journalists participating in online discussions, and eventually, commenters too. As the editor responsible for reader comments, I saw firsthand what that looked like. Only paying subscribers could post and there was active moderation. How the audience reacted to a story was part of the journalistic process.

My small team of community moderators, most of whom had just started in journalism and were curious about how audiences behaved, attempted to ensure conversations stayed on track. We monitored comments on hot-button topics like Brexit, the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and one of the toughest discussions to oversee — one man biting another on the football pitch. They trawled through thousands of comments every day to highlight the most insightful ones and flagged to journalists comments with a valid question or that deserved a reply.

The operation was lean, with just six moderators covering 24 hours, seven days a week. I felt that we had both a responsibility to The Times’ brand as one of the oldest and most authoritative news publishers in the UK, as well a broader societal responsibility to keep the conversation civil and constructive. But that wasn’t always easy.

For starters, the software we used was clunky and made it difficult to understand the context of a post — increasing the chance of moderation errors. It was hard to showcase the best responses under an article. RIP Livefyre, you won’t be missed.

Then there was the challenge of creating and operationalising policies. Every day involved judgement calls: should we keep comments open under crime stories, knowing that a single careless remark could risk contempt of court? (As opposed to in the US, the UK bans certain kinds of pretrial crime coverage and reader discussion that might prejudice the jury.)

How could we guide conversations about immigration so they remained constructive rather than toxic? There were many grey areas. For example, users would use a derogatory term that we considered hateful, only to point out that a columnist had used it in a satirical piece. It took extreme patience to explain the difference but, frankly, sometimes I sided with the readers.

Naturally, our audience would dispute decisions that they didn’t like, with a handful sending us quotes of our policies to back up their rationale. We got to know the most avid commenters, particularly on the Sport section, where rivalries run deep and punches are not spared.

One infamously combative Times commenter posted under his real name because he felt that “people tend to be more accountable when they’re not posting anonymously”. By 2022, long after my time there, The Times had changed their policy and they now require subscribers to post under their real names. However, research has shown that this isn’t necessarily effective, and, ironically, that commenter who insisted on it was banned for flouting the rules one too many times.

But there were moments of magic too: Personal contributions on stories about men’s mental health and suicide received touching, heartfelt responses from other readers. People would get to know other commenters, building weak ties and sometimes friendships.

Some columnists used reader comments as the starting point for an article. One even called it “the most civilised dumpster fire on the internet.” On one occasion, we even selected the best politics commentators to visit The Times’ offices for a conversation with our Political Editor. It was like watching kids at Christmas.

But Christmas only happens once a year. Here’s what I’d do to ensure that goodwill lasts longer for both publishers and commenters, throughout the whole year.

What worked — and what didn’t

Lesson 1: Track the business benefits
Build the business case for commenting around reader engagement, but also customer satisfaction and subscriber renewal rates. If you can show that a healthy conversation keeps paying subscribers’ attention for longer — even if they’re reading and not actively participating — the investment becomes easier to justify.

Most journalists whose articles face criticism below the line may be surprised by the following statement: people who post a comment are more likely to return to the site and be loyal to the brand, even if the comment isn’t glowing praise.

We saw it in the data at The Times: regular commenters regularly read more articles, renewed their subscription and were more flexible when we made product changes. The FT has also found that comment writers are up to 48 times more engaged than readers who don’t comment.

Yet at The Times, we never cracked the business case for commenting. Even as evidence mounted that nudging people to leave comments was good for business, it was hard to argue for more investment because the returns weren’t plainly obvious to decision makers. That meant conversations asking for additional staff or replacing the clunky, unfunded commenting tech never went anywhere. I think that selling the business benefits of creating a community is as important as the community building itself.

Lesson 2: Make participation part of the proposition 
Don’t pay lip service to “creating a community” — treat replies from journalists, editors and informed readers as a core feature of the experience. Work with product, tech, and marketing teams to bake it in: make leaving your first comment part of the onboarding, build it into your marketing copy, and ensure commenting objectives are visible on all internal dashboards. 

Beyond the numbers, it was clear that the quality of the conversation was a differentiator for The Times. Our comment sections were worlds apart from the cesspits of other publisher competitors at the time, with our editor dubbing it a “community where like-minded people can communicate.” He also said that “most Times readers know far more than the journalists” so often that it became a running joke in the newsroom.

But we never quite made commenting a unique selling point of our product. The subscription pitch focused on access to journalism, not participation in it. “Join the debate” never made it onto the annual brand campaign, even though our audience research found that it was what made many readers keep coming back. In hindsight, this was a missed opportunity.

Lesson 3: Invest in the people
Moderation of fast-moving news stories requires a strong editorial eye, and that skill should be recognised and rewarded. As AI starts to enable better detection of policy violations, newsrooms should use that breathing space to invest in moderator wellbeing and career progression. Automation can reduce the noise but it won’t entirely replace human judgment or newsroom instinct for some time yet. 

The people running it were what made it all work. Our moderators were much closer to the role New_ Public often calls stewards. They also ran our social media output, acted less like ban-wielding enforcers, and more like hosts at a lively dinner party. They’d welcome guests, steer conversations, and yes, occasionally have to kick someone out. They were the newsroom’s eyes and ears among our readership, but too often they were stretched too thin, covering all hours with limited backup and little recognition. Many quit because they didn’t feel like there was a clear onward career path.

High turnover was inevitable, and in retrospect, we might have enlisted our more constructive commenters — who cared about our journalism as much as we did — as volunteer hosts on specific sections. They understood the culture and policies as well as anyone and had a personal stake in keeping it civil. We just never built the framework to let them help.

Looking back, it’s tempting to write readers’ comments off as a quaint relic of the early internet. But I believe in the comments, and I think they have a future. As of now, subscribers can still comment on Times articles. Within the shifting environment that digital publishers have found themselves in, it’s vital to reckon with the needs of news-consuming audiences beyond timely information. People are eager to connect and have real dialogue about topics that inform their lives. Comment sections need to change, but I think they can serve a vital role.

The challenge for newsrooms isn’t technological; rather, it’s a cultural shift that’s necessary; a move to appreciate contributions “below the line” and the value — monetary and otherwise — that they bring.

The comments are open again. Let’s not mess it up this time.

– Ben Whitelaw

Thanks Ben!

Have you noticed this mini renaissance in comments? Which news orgs are doing comments exceptionally well right now? Comment below or tell us on LinkedIn.

Definitely still writing “2025” on checks,

–Josh