PLATO5 stands for platonic relationships based on the Big 5 personality traits. It's a clever app with transformative potential. Its modus operandi zooms in on the pipeline from online connection to IRL friendship, how these relationships form, and what foundations they're built upon. Call it self-destructive or perfectionist, but recently I took the web app down to rebuild the app from the ground up, refocusing exclusively on the aforementioned pipeline, integrating AI into everything, and molding PLATO5 into something with a much cleaner value proposition and directly addressing the loneliness epidemic that PLATO5 seeks to remedy.
The pipeline from online connection to IRL friendships isn't only a descriptive slogan, but the vision for PLATO5 and the proposal that this project puts forward for helping alleviate the problems that Web 2.0 helped create, including, but not limited to, the loneliness epidemic that is significantly worse in the younger generations. PLATO5 has a simple system on face value: get a match of 4 people total based on personality, interest, and location, chat with them in an AI-integrated groupchat, and when the group feels a certain level of comfort with each other, they can utilize the Nearby applet to find events to attend together virtual or IRL. Most social apps aren't this focused and many don't even have a direct path to finding new friends to share experiences with in the real world. If a social app does have a method to accomplish this aim, it's usually secondary, indirect, or not prioritized. Think of the social media apps of the past decade; they were primarily focused on continuous app usage to increase eyeballs on ads and not particularly worried about creating lifelong friendships despite their pontifications.
Web 2.0 was not truly 'social'. It sought a large user base and perhaps had good intentions, but regardless, how can we claim victory when the social outcomes get worse and worse and 'social media' bred all sorts of negative offshoots from incel subcultures to algorithmically-enhanced body dysmorphia and eating disorders. We are siloed, dependent on parasocial relationships, politically polarized, and alone in the world as a generation. 'Doomscrolling' is a term often used to describe the Infinite Jest circumstance many people find themselves in these days, with users being funneled into their own algorithmically constructed cultural tubes of content that many people become addicted to. Algorithms focused on engagement to help out advertisers and boost profits are an obvious culprit.
I like to make a distinction between traditional 'social' media and my concept of a social engine. A social engine is more of a tool than a content platform. The only engagement we care about is engagement that provably leads to good, healthy relationships and positive social outcomes. Sounds over-optimistic? Look at the pipeline specifics I've laid out above. This isn't an opaque project or a front for another dystopian social app. This is a project designed to create online connections that are being effectively moved to the real world. That's what separates PLATO5 from social media. This pipeline and its effectiveness is the yardstick with which we measure the usefulness of our service. You might ask, 'Well how do you plan on monetizing this service? Surely advertisement is mixed in here somewhere?' And I don't deny that ads may be a necessity for profitability in the future, but our audience will be built on the effectiveness of the service and the ability of our service to send users through the pipeline laid out in the beginning of this article and the positive feedback loop that this generates, not algos that push engagement at all costs.
To take a detour to explain the AI component here: the AI may seem like a disconnected or unnecessary factor in the description of the project that I laid out, but lend me your reading/listening faculties for a minute. Zen, the AI Chat Manager that I've built, is a facilitator of connection and interaction embedded in the groupchat. In a way, Zen makes humans more human and helps them articulate themselves in an intimidating social environment. Groupchats also alleviate the intimidation factor of 1 on 1 matchmaking scenarios. Zen works passively and actively, meaning that anytime chats are sent, Zen will coach and help users organize their thoughts within their groupchats and with access to public user data, Zen will also field questions about discussion topics to introduce and, if prompted, write a chat in the voice of the requestor. Zen also dynamically organizes and tracks conversation branches and ensures that no one in the chat is excluded.
With PLATO5 V2 (relaunching soon), we may actually be able to provide something good to a generation at the whims of social tech giants and facing massive challenges in the years ahead. I hope that's the case, as this issue is personal to me, and I foresee very little change being championed in a world where engagement is king and data is godly.