Subter

The Problem

Modern social media optimizes for engagement - keeping you on the site longer so you see more adds - over providing real user value. The various algorithms want you mildly interested so they can show you ads instead of letting you know what Uncle Joey or your friend Penelope are doing.

The Inciting Incident

A friend of mine was in Europe and I had no idea. The group chat moved too fast and I missed the message.

The Problem Statement

How might we connect people without putting an algorithm in the way? Secondarily, how might we do so without incentivizing extreme material through engagement metrics as validation?

The Solution

The core tenant of Heyyo is the status message. A status message is whatever a user was thinking or doing at a given moment. I wanted to keep room for creativity in a each status, so there's the capacity for minor rich text (bold, italics, underline), links, and gifs.

Since historical statuses would require some sort of sorting algorithm, the second core tenant was that statuses are ephemeral. When a user changes his or her status, the old status is gone.

The third tenant was a user ought to be able to sort their buddy list into whatever buckets they want, thus determining the order in which the status of their buddies is displayed. So, groups can be created and destroyed and buddies can be moved between groups.

I'm still experimenting with how to how responses to a status in ways that don't encourage like-farming and rage-baiting.

Heyyo Status Creation

Heyyo Buddy List

Join Heyyo

Join the Heyyo private beta