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Tobias Lim
Tobias Lim
Thank you for this letter. Please don’t apologise for “ramblings” - one of the benefits of letter-writing is that it’s more casual than a normal article, and ideas can flow and evolve as you go. Thank you also for being an early adopter. It’s been great reading your letters; it’s clear your interests are eclectic and deep. By the number of books you reference you seem a voracious reader - I’m inspired to follow your habits!You won't be surprised to know I agree with your description of LinkedIn and Twitter. I do still use Twitter occasionally - usually to waste time while waiting for a meeting to start. We also use Twitter for Collate marketing, which draws me in sometimes. YouTube is where most of my attention gets sapped. It’s crazy to observe myself get sucked in and out of different platforms. Last year I downloaded Instagram to start posting on the Collate account, having not had the app for years. Slowly it began to eat into my life and soon I was scrolling daily. But then I delete the app again, and the itch disappears. I know we have a lot to do on product development. Believe me… I know!! We are working as fast as possible to improve things and hopefully over time, you’ll notice big improvements that are being fed to you in small increments. Content moderation is a challenge, but I do think Collate will be better placed to take on that challenge once we scale because of the fundamental structure of the platform. On Twitter, an anti-vaxxer can tweet unhinged, gain a massive following, and have all those tweets retweeted. Even the rebuttals in the replies below and quote tweets are usually not visible to those who see the original tweets. Alternatively, on Collate, you can have a dialogue with an anti-vaxxer and your response will always sit alongside it. You won’t be able to see the letter without it. If it’s an open letter and the majority of people disagree, that majority is likely to produce some good letters in response - the best of which will sit with the original all the time. Our platform is better designed to self-police.Also, because Collate is a longer-form platform than Twitter or Reddit, and people are slightly more restricted on when they can write a letter (they can’t respond to a letter addressed to someone else) there will be less content on the site relative to the number of accounts. This should ease the amount of moderation required. Further, without comments, conversations are less likely to descend into vitriol - it doesn’t feel like there’s an audience when having a correspondence. But there is also something else which helps us: the people we bring onto Collate. You can still feel on Reddit a palpable tone to the comments and posts. This is largely due to the earliest users of the platform who set that tone. Collate can do the same. People like you and the others we are trying to attract are those who want to have interesting conversations, seek the truth, explore creativity, and don’t want to be angry and abusive. If we can find enough people like you, we will go a long way to warding off warmongering users. Maybe our business model will also help with moderation. We would rather be a slightly smaller platform with unprecedented quality than a mammoth social network with the same old problems. To that end, we plan to charge users at a very low price-point (like $2/month), positioning ourselves as a premium social network where members rub virtual shoulders with public figures while remaining cheaper than newspapers, Netflix and Spotify. How exactly we implement this is yet to be determined e.g. we could charge people to write letters if we have public figures in our midst guaranteed to respond, or do the opposite and charge only those who read. Finding mechanisms to compensate writers may also be necessary.I’ve learned a lot personally on this journey. I’m the sole founder of Collate and that can be lonely. I’ve learned that I gain energy from working with people and discussing ideas; I’ve learned that I have an interest in design and aesthetics; I understand more deeply why it’s common wisdom in product development to start as simple as possible and iterate - more features means less time refining each, and one great feature is better than three OK ones. I’ve also learned that good decisions are not based on following what similar businesses in similar situations did, but finding a practical solution to the problem at hand, no matter how simple or manual. I’ve learned that many of the lessons I’m learning seem obvious, but that all lessons worth learning seem obvious after you’ve learned them and that in business and in life it’s not complex genius ideas that bring success, but a series of simple lessons and ideas implemented well.It is only now that the possibilities of Collate are starting to fan out. Up to this point it’s just been about getting the product useable and getting some people using it. Now we have both, it’s time to start thinking about how to heed the desires our new members appear to have. For example, we are looking into ways of using GPT-3 to offer the ability to write to a famous person from history and have them respond from heaven (or hell). (Who would you like to hear from in history, by the way?) If this works well, we may also look at ways we can use AI to help people write, so they can write to a public figure quicker. There are more ideas in the pipeline, but I wouldn’t want to spoil all the surprises! Having mentioned some fun ideas, our objective still is to be a place for leaders to communicate with the public and each other. It takes time to attract public figures to our platform: it’s a snowball effect, starting slow but building up as more public figures onboard provide more credibility to get others. We, therefore, have to balance any new ideas with the patience to see through our current plan. Thanks again for your thoughtful letter. It’s helpful hearing your thoughts on what you think will be important for Collate. Please keep them coming if you have more thoughts! Ramble away please! I hope you keep enjoying the platform, I look forward to you boasting to friends of your early adopter status once we go big. Until next time,
Oliver Kraftman
Oliver Kraftman
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