The Post-Feed World

The solved problem

For most of the last two decades, the technology industry operated on a fairly simple assumption: give people better access to information, better tools for finding things, and bigger networks to communicate across, and they will end up more connected. It was a reasonable bet, and in many respects it paid off. Knowledge that used to require expertise or proximity became available to anyone with a phone. Search made information cheap. Social networks made communication effortless.

So the industry can fairly claim to have solved discovery. We are now very good at helping people find restaurants, events, communities, products, and one another. A lot of money and talent went into lowering the cost of finding things, and it worked.

But a strange pattern showed up alongside that success. The better technology got at helping people discover possibilities, the more obvious it became that discovery was rarely the thing holding them back.

The gap

Most people don't struggle to find restaurants they'd like. They struggle to actually get dinner on the calendar. Most people don't struggle to find events worth attending. They struggle to pick one and figure out who to go with. And most people don't struggle to encounter potential friends or partners or collaborators. They struggle to turn an introduction into a relationship.

The gap between being aware of something and actually doing it is much wider than the industry tends to admit.

That gap matters, because industries have a habit of solving yesterday's problem long after it stopped being the binding constraint. Recommendation engines keep improving. Search keeps improving. The volume of available content keeps climbing. Meanwhile participation - the part where someone actually shows up - has not gotten meaningfully easier. We've built a world full of possibilities that never become experiences.

We've built a world full of possibilities that never become experiences.

What AI changes

AI doesn't change the direction of this trend so much as speed it up. The public conversation about AI fixates on productivity and content generation, but its quieter and possibly more consequential effect is to strip even more friction out of information itself. A question that once meant a search now gets answered directly. A recommendation that once meant browsing now arrives unprompted. Discovery is becoming something that simply happens in the background.

And as discovery becomes automatic, it becomes less valuable. That's just how abundance works. When one thing becomes cheap, attention moves to whatever is still scarce. When information is everywhere, judgment is what's worth something. When content is everywhere, trust is. When recommendations are everywhere, the scarce thing is action - the willingness and ability to actually do something about all of it.

This is why I think the coming decade will look genuinely different from the one behind us.

After the feed

The defining products of the last era were built around the feed. Their job was to hold attention by serving an endless stream of updates and recommendations. The feed won because information used to be scarce and engagement was profitable. Both of those conditions are weakening. As intelligent systems take over search, retrieval, and recommendation, there's less reason to sit and scroll for things. People can just ask.

The obvious question is what comes after the feed. My answer isn't another social network or another content platform. Those were built for a discovery problem that is, for the most part, solved. The opening is somewhere else: in coordination.

The next generation of consumer products will be the ones that help people move from intention to action - that help someone organize a plan, pull a group together, make a decision, and end up in an experience that otherwise wouldn't have happened. The goal won't be to maximize time spent. It'll be to increase participation.

The goal won't be to maximize time spent. It'll be to increase participation.

Real becomes heavier

This gets more important as the line between real and synthetic online experiences keeps blurring. AI will create enormous value, but it will also make the internet a shakier place to look for authenticity. Images, reviews, conversations, even personalities are becoming trivially easy to fabricate.

The physical world doesn't have that problem. It's hard to fake. A dinner either happened or it didn't. A concert was either attended or it wasn't. A friendship either formed or it didn't. The more convincing digital experiences become, the more weight real ones carry - not because the technology is failing, but precisely because it's succeeding. As machines get better at imitation, the things only people can do together start to matter more by comparison.

There's a real opportunity in that, and it's specifically about how technology serves social life. For years, social products have mostly helped people present themselves, follow each other, consume content, and keep tabs on what everyone else is up to. Useful, but mature. The harder and less-solved problem is helping people actually spend time together.

What WithMe is for

I don't think the future of social technology is bigger audiences. I think it's stronger participation, measured less by impressions and engagement and more by attendance, relationships, and experiences that actually occur.

That's the world WithMe is being built for.

We don't think of ourselves as a social network, and we don't think of ourselves as a local discovery app. Both of those assume the core problem is finding people or finding places. We see it differently. The core problem is the distance between interest and commitment - between something being possible and someone actually participating. The moments that matter most in people's lives rarely fail to happen because the information wasn't there. They fail because the coordination never did.

Technology spent the last twenty years helping people discover what's possible. The next twenty will belong to whoever helps them do something with it. That's what we're building toward.

The next twenty will belong to whoever helps people do something with what's possible.