On the morning of November 5th, just hours before I was hit with the sickening feeling that the world was once again about to become increasingly difficult for me and the people I love, I got a call from Wildr CEO and Cofounder Kunal Lonavat. Received an email from, which is an app. I’ve been described as a “troll-free, text-only” social media platform. “Given today’s historical import, I had to reach out,” he wrote, and I immediately wanted to say outrage.
I often receive emails like this from startup founders. This is the app that solves everything.I promise. They toss around words like “game changer.” They highlight what they have created as a “turning point”. Rarely do they guarantee that 70 percent of startups fail between years two and five—and the urgency only reveals what’s really going on, which Zuckerberg probably can’t see: these The idea is just not that innovative, no matter how much they dress it up in mechanical clutches.
Technologies have been trying to create a “healthy” social media platform for decades now, whether it’s hiding anonymity, hiding likes, getting rid of bots, even building networks. only In Bots Wildr’s case, it’s AI (of course): the app promises a “back to basics” take advantage of a text-only format that, as I understand it, captures the best parts of Reddit, Medium, and early Twitter. Will merge. Open communication. Strong dialogue. Zero troll. And it’s all monitored by AI that “nudges” users to post “frictionless” content. It’s a big, maybe impossible task — and one I wanted to hear more about.
As the election results made clear, Lonavat’s utopian dream was hard to come by. America was addicted to Trump. Trade wives and truth-social acolytes want to get high on mass deportations and fluoride-free water. The trolls had won.
But then I caught myself. Faced with the reality of what the next four years would unfold again, and perhaps wanting to avoid the complete and unending hysteria of it all, I emailed him back.
My big question for Lunawat — and maybe yours, too — is what, exactly, is a troll-free platform. Social media by definition is meant to foster connection, but more than that, the bright hope is that, even now, connection opens up: a roadmap for learning from and challenging each other. These challenges sharpen our understanding of the world, and can even change our minds—and that’s a really good thing. Where, then, is the line between trolling and simply pushing back against someone’s opinion?
