Making Social Posts Easier Makes Them More Boring
The posts that take the most work tend to be the most interesting, and that leaves founders with no comfortable middle.
Medium · So You Want to Build in Consumer Social: A ManifestoEvery new social app needs the same fuel: posts from regular users that other users actually want to read. A founder who spent about 10 months building a list-making app for books, movies, and TV says that need traps founders in a dilemma with no comfortable middle.
Start by making the app useful for one person alone. You remove every extra step, so organizing your own lists is fast and painless. The problem is that you almost never ask the user to post, and most people rarely post on their own. You get very few public posts, but the ones you do get tend to be good and interesting, precisely because they took work.
So start the other way and push for posts first. You add tools that make posting almost effortless, like Instagram's engagement stickers for stories or LinkedIn's suggested replies for comments. More people post, but the posts are boring, because anyone could have made them.
Two smaller social apps show the trap. Beli turns a private chore, ranking a restaurant for your own list, into a public post, so users spend almost no extra effort. But nobody writes anything or posts photos, and the feed becomes announcements like Kogi Gogi moving from a friend's third favorite restaurant to second, which gives no reason to linger. An earlier version of an app called swsh turned data from apps like Spotify and Apple Health into guessing games among friends, like who climbed the most stairs or replayed the same pop star the most that day. It was posting with almost no effort, and almost nothing worth reading.
Questions people ask
Why don't most people post on their own?
Posting takes time, confidence, and a sense that someone will care, so most people read far more than they share. Social apps have long seen roughly 90 percent of users lurk, 9 percent comment occasionally, and 1 percent create most of the content. That is why an app has to push or reward people to get them to contribute.
Can an app escape the tradeoff by paying creators?
It can get more posts, but payment does not fix boring. TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube all pay or share ad revenue with popular creators, and they still depend on a small share of users making distinctive videos. For a new app, payments also burn cash fast before it knows whether anyone will stay.
What does single-player utility mean?
It means the app is useful even if none of your friends ever join, like a notes app, a to-do list, or a personal ranking of restaurants. Founders like it because one person can adopt it without waiting for friends. The downside is that useful solo tools give users little reason to post for others.