If there is one certainty of social media in 2025, it’s this: Rage clicks rule. Hyperbole, hate, cheap shock—it’s all par for the course—and often rewarded with virality.
But Sez Us, an app just launched by veteran Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, believes it’s possible to change that by punishing users who shitpost for the sake of provocation.
The timing may be just right. America is entering an age of oligarchy with a rising wave of right-wing extremism taking hold of global politics. Platforms like Truth Social and X now operate as effective propaganda machines, recasting culture-war issues over immigration, DEI, and trans rights as boogeymen in President Trump’s new vision of America, which is really just a very old version of America. As the next era of social media comes into view, emerging platforms also have an opportunity to rise to the moment. Can Sez Us, which is positioning itself as the antithesis to X, facilitate a better way forward?
“If you bring back responsibility, ownership, and reputation, then suddenly all the incentives that we have in the real world are back,” says Yevgeny Simkin, Sez Us’ cofounder and chief product officer.
Even as online discourse has devolved into rabid spectacle, platforms like Bluesky have shown there is an appetite for a more civil kind of conversation. Rather than boosting any post that’s getting rage clicks, Sez Us uses what its creators call a “reputation engine,” a feature that allows you to rate another user’s posts on the platform across five key areas: approval, influence, insightfulness, relevance, and politeness.
On the app, ratings determine a user’s reputation score and overall visibility. The higher the score, the more reach you have in the community. Users control who replies to them based on a person’s score, with low-scoring users penalized by having less influence. All posts are visible but you can block users from replying to you, for example, if they don’t have high-approval ratings. Ultimately, ratings are designed to deprioritize engagement based around viral moments.
“It’s not about the moderators coming in and saying ‘you’re bad,’” Simkin says. “It’s about the community saying ‘we don’t like what you’re saying.’ Then I know that I have to temper how I say things. I have to be more polite. I have to be less bombastic.”
In the race to perfect social media, there has never been a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to moderation—for those who still bother with it. Scale can make this task even more difficult as a platform’s user base grows. For Simkin and his team, the idea was to build a platform that would “bring to the fore all the ways in which social media should be running rather than the way it has been,” he says. “The camel’s back was broken by the straw of Elon [Musk] buying Twitter,” and suddenly a whole new world seemed possible.
The fracturing of Twitter, since rebranded as X, kicked off an arms race among techies who had all sorts of ideas about the next phase of social media, and how to define it. It was during this period, in 2022, that the concept for Sez Us was born, grounded in the lofty goal of bringing back civil discourse.
Returning constructive debate to online discourse is important to Simkin. “I have a particular view on freedom of expression and freedom of freedom because I’m familiar with what it means not to have either,” he says. In 2022, as the Russia-Ukraine war escalated, Simkin, who was raised in Soviet Russia before immigrating to Canada, built Samizdat Online, an anti-censorship platform that allows citizens in totalitarian societies to read news by banned outlets without fear of being tracked and persecuted.
Similar to Bluesky, another new-ish app that has emerged as an alternative to Elon Musk’s X, Sez Us does not own any of your data. It was built using a decentralized social networking protocol, which allows users to move their assets and content across platforms. Bots are kept off the app through mobile verification. Low scores likewise prevent bots and individuals with bad intentions from gaining traction.
“Numbers aren’t the holy grail of this thing,” says Akshay Gupta, the chief operations officer. “Just because you have a massive score doesn't mean you're winning on the platform. It just allows people to know what type of reputation you have.” Even if that is true, reputation scores do ultimately matter in the end. The lower the number, the less reach a user is allowed.
When I mention to Simkin and Gupta that the idea behind its moderation-based scoring reminds me of an episode of Black Mirror, they push back. “We’re not defining what’s civil. It's the Overton window of the community. Whoever is there gets to participate and then those metrics will move,” Simkin says.
Many startup founders have tried, and failed, to design their own version of a digital Elysium. The main obstacle working against emerging social platforms that have launched in the past three years is TikTok. They don’t have its cool, reach, or strange wonder. But that is also their advantage. What the next age of social connection calls for—one of the many things, at least—is not more super platforms but instead purpose-driven communities. It calls for digital rallying grounds of all sorts, ones like Reddit but also like BlackSky, a Bluesky community for Black users, which already mirrors a version of what Sez Us wants to accomplish.
“No new endeavor is going to be dead on out the gate,” Gupta adds. “We’ve got an intention. We have a North Star. And we’re starting to see the behavioral elements of it work. Disagreements are great. We’re not stopping anyone from coming on the platform.” All backgrounds, religious affiliations, and political perspectives are welcome, they say.
It’s hard to know if any of this will work. Right now, Sez Us only has 10,000 active users. And Simkin has measured expectations for what they can accomplish. “I’m not looking to improve humanity,” he says. “That’s somebody else’s job.”
By incentivizing healthy discussion, he says, the plan is “to move technological discourse to a level where people can engage as themselves. The key is to help everybody recognize that we're actually not enemies.” Whether a critical mass of people wants that remains to be seen.
