It seems like every few months new social networks pop up and then disappear. Remember Artifact? Or Gas? Or Mastodon?
Well, now comes Maven. An AI driven anti-social network that gets rid of likes altogether in favor of organizing information based on your interests. Will it having staying power? Maybe. If you believe in the power of serendipity like Kate Beckinsale.
Wired explains:
“The platform eschews likes and follows in favor of letting pure chance play more of a role in what appears in users’ feeds. Maven’s lead investor is Twitter cofounder and former CEO Ev Williams, who also founded Medium. Other backers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Maven is built around a concept called open-endedness, pioneered by computer scientist and AI researcher Kenneth Stanley, one of the startup’s three cofounders. In most areas of computing, programmers write code or train an AI model to achieve specific objectives, such as driving a car without crashing or generating humanlike text. Stanley creates systems that instead evolve, seeking novelty for its own sake. These systems sometimes discover stepping stones toward solutions that couldn’t be achieved via a direct path of optimization. While working in Uber’s AI lab, he and collaborators used this approach to neural networks that could play Atari games and control a virtual robot better than previous systems.
In 2015, Stanley and a collaborator, Joel Lehman, published a book called Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned that applies the philosophy to life outside the lab, encouraging people to seek serendipity in their everyday lives. It gained a devoted following, and for years readers have been telling Stanley how optimizing for objectives like grades or salaries or grants, which can disincentivize exploration, has marred their lives.
Maven sprang from Stanley’s concluding that the best way to create more serendipity in people’s lives was through a social network—and then by chance crossing paths with Williams. In the middle of 2022, he left OpenAI to get started. Stanley teamed up with Jimmy Secretan, a former grad student who had worked on open-endedness in Stanley’s lab at the University of Central Florida, and Blas Moros, a like-minded entrepreneur. They founded Maven together, with Stanley as CEO, Secretan as CTO, and Moros as COO, and formally announced it on Twitter in January. It’s available for Apple and Android devices, and also via the web.
Stanley argues that most social networks suffer from the weight of objectives, because of the way they incentivize likes, follows, and attention. It turns people into brands and creates flame wars. On Maven, you don’t have followers, so you don’t have to worry about what your followers want to hear from you, or how to gain more of them. If you have a question about, say, washing machines, Stanley says, you can just post it, no stress, and let the platform find an appropriate audience.
On Maven, users follow interests such as computers or consciousness, each of which has its own profile on the service. When someone posts something, algorithms automatically analyze the text and tag it with relevant interests so it shows up on those pages, which also show other users who follow that interest and a list of related interests.
The main feed in the Maven app shows posts from all the interests a person follows. The platform doesn’t simply show the most popular. Posts need to clear a certain bar for engagement—an example of what Stanley calls a ‘minimal-criterion mechanism’ that he says also explains part of biological evolution and increases diversity—and then their probability of appearing is based on how closely they match a user’s interests. The app also has a serendipity slider from ‘Only show my selected interests’ to ‘Show me everything.'”
The problem with starting a social network is one of scale. The more people use your service the more engaging it becomes and the more other people want to use it. Eventually, you reach a critical mass and you’re off to the races but It’ll be hard for Maven to get off the ground if everyone is still on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. Same as it was for Mastodon and Artifact and Gas.
But there is promise behind the premise of Maven. Helping you to find relevant information and interesting articles about topics that you’re interested in, powered by like minded individuals, without the need for changing who you are in order to build a brand, cultivate an audience, or cater to an algorithm. A purer form of social media. Driven by serendipity not status. Interests not influencers.
You know what? I kind of like it.
Is Maven the Greatest Idea Ever?
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