We’ve been on the internet a long time. Long enough to remember ICQ, then AIM, then MSN, then Skype. Long enough to have had a GeoCities page, a Xanga, a MySpace. Long enough to have run our own phpBB forums, to have moderated them, to have stayed up too late talking with strangers about things that didn’t matter, and to have come away from those discussions with new friends.
We want to say up front: this is not nostalgia. We are very aware of how easy it is to put on rose-tinted glasses to look back into the past, and we’ve gone back and checked our work. The old internet was good. It wasn’t perfect or utopian, just good. People showed up because they wanted to be there. They left when they didn’t. There was an intention to it. A quiet agreement that you were participating in something, not being processed by it. If you didn’t enjoy a place, you went somewhere else. Nobody was being held in a room against their will by a feed engineered to keep them there.
The internet today is, by almost every measurable metric, an astonishing thing. It is faster, more accessible, more convenient, and more capable than anything we could have imagined twenty years ago. We are not here to argue that progress was a mistake. We are here because somewhere along the way the internet stopped serving us and started having its own personality, its own rules, its own gravity. And we, all of us, quietly accepted it.
You can hear it in the way people talk about social media now. That’s just how it is. You can’t post that, they’ll tear you apart. What did you expect. We have been trained to accept, online, behaviors and tones and dynamics that we would find genuinely unacceptable if they happened in a coffee shop. We’ve been trained to expect that strangers will be cruel, that posting an opinion is volunteering for a fight, that anonymity is a license, that participating at all is a risk. None of this is normal. We’ve just been doing it long enough to forget that.
The worst part isn’t the toxicity. The worst part is the indifference. We are walking around with the sum total of human knowledge in our pockets, available instantly and for free, 24 hours a day, and we use it mostly to look at porn and call people assholes. It was recently reported that for the first time in recorded history, the latest generation of children has a measurably lower IQ than the generation before them. There is no mystery as to why. We know why.
The platforms know why too. They just have boards and shareholders to answer to, and engagement is engagement, and outrage performs. Look at restaurant reviews on Google sometime. You are dramatically more likely to leave a review after a bad meal than a good one. That asymmetry isn’t an accident of human nature, it’s a feedback loop the platforms have been training us into for fifteen years. Negativity is engaging. Outrage is engaging. Pile-ons are engaging. And every metric on every dashboard at every one of these companies is pointed at engagement, regardless of what kind it is. So that’s what we get. More of it. Forever.
What we want to describe is a society with infinite potential, infinite knowledge, and infinite reach, watching itself get dumber and meaner in real time, and shrugging. Telling itself that’s just the way it is. That lie gets sold to us by lazy peers, by people with strange motivations, and most of all by the very companies that profit from our outrage staying turned on.
We are a small group of engineers in Kansas City. We have been frustrated by this and confused by this and talked about it amongst ourselves for years. For a long time we talked ourselves out of doing anything about it, for the reasons everybody talks themselves out of things: it’s hard, it’s unlikely to work, you can’t compete with a trillion dollar company, you’d be a fool to try. Those people are not wrong. It is incredibly unlikely that something like this works. You probably do have to be a fool to try.
But we’ve decided that “this is unlikely to succeed” is a poor reason to not give it a shot. If everyone accepted things exactly as they were, society would just roll backwards down a hill. Innovation would die. So would, eventually, everything else. We did our best for years to keep using the platforms as they exist. We tried to participate gracefully, contribute thoughtfully, find our people, hold our own. And we kept finding that despite our best efforts the rule sets kept getting harder, the niche communities kept getting more hostile, the volunteer moderators in their own little fiefdoms kept getting more capricious, and the whole thing kept becoming more difficult to navigate at all. Add the recent flood of AI-generated content into the mix and entire communities are now functionally unreadable. An internet where you have to question every move and every motivation of every person you ever interact with, and an internet where you have to constantly second-guess your own actions and words, is not an internet that produces a smarter, kinder, more connected species. It just isn’t.
So this is not a rant trying to dress itself up as a startup pitch. These are real problems. They are not “content moderation problems” or “platform problems,” they are problems with the texture of being a person right now.
Rhyme is our best honest attempt at doing something about it.
Rhyme is a topic-focused social platform built around a few specific ideas, all of which exist in direct response to the things we just described.
One canonical room per topic. Subjects don’t fragment into twenty competing communities you have to guess between. Rhyme builds and maintains the topic structure itself. Want to talk about the Kansas City Chiefs? There’s one room for that. Not seven. Not seven hundred. When something is happening in the world, the discussion happens in one place, where everyone can find it.
Topics are hierarchical, and posts can live in many of them. A post about the AirPods Max lives loudest in AirPods Max, softer in AirPods, quieter still in Apple, and as a whisper in Technology. A post about Columbus Park surfaces in Kansas City and Jackson County too. You don’t have to guess where to put a post. You don’t have to cross-post manually. The structure does the work, so the conversation finds the people it should find.
Moderation is global, not feudal. Communities are not run by random volunteers with personal grudges and their thumbs on the scale deciding what you do and do not get to say. The rules are the rules. They apply everywhere. They are clear, and they are the same for everyone.
Thumbs up and thumbs down exist, but the counts are private. The voting still helps the system understand what’s worth surfacing. But you don’t see the score on a post, and neither does anyone else. We are trying very hard to break the dopamine-chasing scoreboard dynamic that has made the rest of social media into a slot machine. Post because you have something to say. Don’t post for points.
You decide what your feed is for. Every post gets analyzed for things like intent and quality of conversation: is this someone asking a real question, sharing news, telling a story, or picking a fight? You choose what you see. Want only educational content? Done. Only funny stuff? Done. No politics, no doom, no rants? Done. Rhyme is a tool. We want you to use it like one.
The shorter version: we are trying to make a social platform that incentivizes the things social platforms used to incentivize, and disincentivizes the nonsense we have all gotten used to.
A note about expectations, because it feels honest to include one.
We don’t know how this is going to go. That’s probably not what you’re supposed to say in a launch post, but we’d rather just tell the truth. We don’t know how it’ll be received. We don’t know how it’ll grow. We are confident we have identified some real problems, and we have a good idea of how we want to address them, but we are also six strangers with a website. We are going to learn things along the way. We are going to get things wrong and have to fix them. We will be listening. Closely, carefully, and as openly as we can, to the people who choose to show up early.
Today we are opening Rhyme to a small group on an invite-only basis, and we’ll be adding people every day. If anything you read above sounds right to you, if you share the frustration, the confusion, the small low-grade dread about where all of this is heading, we’d love for you to join us. Either as a participant, or just as someone watching to see what happens.
Thanks for reading.