Our Core Values

Steady.Social is not a platform.

We need social networks that actually are about the things social networks claim they are about. They claim that they allow people to “keep in touch,” but let’s be honest: that’s a side effect, not the product. Your eyeballs are the product. Your data is the product.

If keeping people in touch with each other was the goal, the whole concept of social networks would be a lot simpler. No “public” posting that turns people and companies into “influencers.” No conversation threads that turn into places for people to rant at each other, no features built to have you constantly coming back to check for more. “Keeping in touch” doesn’t have to mean “constantly being prodded about every update.” Everything points back to the same conclusion: that the prior generation of social networks are fundamentally flawed for the purpose of strengthening relationships, and the claimed purpose of a social network doesn’t and cannot match with its design.

Steady.Social, by contrast, is a social network that is meant to help you keep in touch with your friends and informed about what’s going on in their lives, and nothing more. The prime directive of this new social network will be that it should never ask for your attention more than once a day, and ten minutes should be enough to find out what’s going on in your friends lives and move on with yours. This social network will be a passive, once-a-day experience to keep up to date with the lives of your friends. And absolutely nothing more than that.

It will only allow you to post a single, journal-like update per day, with the hope that this will discourage people from using the network as a means to distribute a flood of propaganda, and turn the network into a place where “influencers” can become famous and followed by people they don’t know. Instead, my hope is that the single post a day experience will help people to slow down and summarize what is actually important to them. To treat it more like a daily journal that they are sharing with friends. If someone wants to use it for other purposes, the single post a day will hamper their ability to flood feeds with a barrage of propaganda and self advertisement.

It will never have a concept of “sharing” someone else’s post or making a post “public” beyond friends who have accepted your association on the network, with the hope that this will further discourage people from making posts that are not with the intent of updating people about their own lives. These daily entries are meant to be personal and about your own life, and are meant to be read strictly by your friends who you have chosen to associate with on the network. People who want to use it instead to make a post for gaining popularity, attention, or generating outrage will find the experience frustrating - and purposefully so - because they will be unable to distribute their propaganda widely.

It will never have the concept of a “comment” thread, with the hope that this will further hinder the pathways where propaganda has turned interactions between friends into stumps for conspiracy theories. It also forces interactions with your friends on the network to be more private, and less about sorting through the opinions of their larger group of friends, who may be commenting for any number of reasons that are irrelevant to your personal friendship with that other person. The entire concept of this new social network is that it allows you to keep up to date on your friends’ life. If you have thoughts about what a friend is going through, the network will instead give you an easy path for contacting them directly via other means: sending them an email, texting them, or calling them on the phone. Your discussions with your friend about their life will not turn into a group discussion on our network.

It will never have features that allow groups of friends to communicate with each other dynamically, in hopes that this network can remain purely about keeping up with what’s happening with your friends’ life at a leisurely pace that doesn’t demand your attention. Interactive chat - including messaging, commments, “groups” etc… - would defeat that purpose. If you have a tigher-knit group of friends that you have chosen to allow to demand your attention on a more regular basis, look into integrating an app like Telegram into your friend network. We will keep this social network laser focused on a more passive, once-a-day experience.

These are the core values on which Steady.Social was founded. If this idea sounds appealing to you, please join our experiment at https://steady.social.