The Future of Social Media is Pseudonymous
Opportunities in the post-identity web
It’s 2021, and over a third of the whole world uses Facebook every month.
In simplified terms, Facebook’s mission is to connect the world, and it’s done just that. Despite the younger generation’s righteous exodus from the platform, its user base to this day grows faster than the world population.
But even if every single person in the world got on Facebook, your network would still be mostly people you know in real life. While this is immensely useful for keeping in touch with friends and family who you’re away from, an identity-based social graph is fundamentally limited. Your Facebook identity and social graph are mere digital shadows of their physical counterparts, and little more.
Meanwhile, a new trend is beginning to take hold in the neglected gaps of this status quo. It’s a complete reimagining of what social networks could be—a future free from the limitations of physical identity.
The Tyranny of Identity
On Facebook and Instagram, we inevitably compare our real lives to our friends’ curated ones. Before them, MySpace and its top friends feature scandalized schoolyards across the world. Even though identity-based platforms try to faithfully represent real-life social dynamics, they often end up warping them.
Overexposure to friends’ digital lives has had a deleterious effect on users, especially teens. It’s no surprise “Facebook depression” became a hot search term as early as 2009. By attaching our real-world identities to everything we do, these platforms feel suffocating and unsafe.
Nowadays, you can’t just have a conversation about basketball or mental health without your entire identity on display. At a glance, you could roughly tell a person’s age, race, location, body type, sometimes even religion, socioeconomic level, and institutional affiliations. Notably, they’re the exact things we tell kids not to reveal about themselves to strangers online.
As a result, despite growing up with worldwide, instantaneous connections mere taps away, digital natives feel more lonely than ever, especially in an age when an errant comment from years ago could get you de-platformed. In real life and on Facebook, you’re always signaling information about yourself which may not have anything to do with the context you’re in.
So why is this the case?
Some say it’s because platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and the bygone MySpace are “simplified and diminished continuations of the physical dimension people reside in.”1
Despite these platforms having unfathomably large user bases, you tend to only connect with people you already know in real life. For Facebook users, this is the digital equivalent of only talking to existing friends at a party whose guest list includes literally a third of the world.
This phenomenon is fantastically catalogued in a 1992 HCI paper, Beyond Being There, which argues that technology tries too hard to imitate or replicate the experience of “being there.”2
The paper introduces the comparison between a crutch and a shoe. Whereas a shoe can help you run faster, a crutch is designed to support you when you can’t walk normally, to get you as close as possible. A crutch will never help you run faster; it’s just an imitative substitute when the real thing isn’t available.
In this sense, Facebook’s social graph is a crutch that imitates real-world relationships.
Platforms which 1) require or encourage using your real identity or 2) rely on existing social graphs (contacts, classmates, mutuals) merely imitate “being there.” By mirroring the real world, platforms like Facebook are ultimately limited by the very physical connections they seek to transcend.
How might we do better? How might we build a shoe rather than a crutch? How might we leverage the unique capabilities of technology to create new ways of connecting which go “beyond being there?”
The answer lies somewhere in the rise of alts, finstas, burner accounts, and entirely pseudonymous platforms like Discord. In the not-so-distant future, deliberately facilitated pseudonymity could give rise to a truly digital social graph, rather than the acquaintance-based graphs of today.
The Pseudonymous Web
Reddit started as a link aggregator, Discord as Skype but cool, and Twitch as internet voyeurism. Each platform has evolved over time to become the biggest pillars of today’s pseudonymous web.
Pseudonymity is, in short, the use of a username, or a pseudonym, rather than a real name. It’s related to anonymity, in that both imply a level of obfuscation, but whereas an anonymous user would not want to be identified at all, a pseudonymous user maintains a consistent persona across multiple interactions. A top Twitch donor, for instance, might seek recognition for their continued support in the form of a badge or shoutout.
The pseudonymous web is growing, and not just in the West. Last month, a Shanghai-based pseudonymous social network, Soul, filed for an IPO with the SEC.
If the West’s sad, lonely, and tech savvy Gen Z are increasingly flocking to the pseudonymous web, then their Chinese counterparts might already be ahead. Growing up without siblings, bearing the crushing weight of their family’s hopes and dreams, and living in a society that leapfrogged to mobile, China’s Gen Z just might be sadder, lonelier, and even more tech addicted. If China’s youth is any indication of where youth are globally headed, then Soul is an excellent case study for the future of social media.
First launched in late 2016, Soul is “a virtual social playground” that is “appearance-agnostic, interest-driven, decentralized and gamified.” Unlike identity-based networks and, well, real life, Soul envisions a space “free of the pressure that often comes with the complex and delicate social relations in the physical world.”
This is what “beyond being there” looks like. The types of activity supported by platforms like Discord and Soul are a direct result of deliberately facilitated pseudonymity, and could not be easily replicated on an identity-based platform.
As we’ll see, the following opportunities emerge on pseudonymous platforms:
Interest- and personality-based connections
Value-add monetization
Lowered barriers to content creation
For each, let’s see how Western incumbents capitalize, and how Soul takes it a step further.
1. Interest- and personality-based connections
Unbeholden to their real world identities, users on pseudonymous platforms are free to connect with each other on the basis of whatever they choose.
The first step of this has been the creation of an interest-based social graph, with Discord as its poster child.
Sitting at over 140M monthly users, Discord is completely pseudonymous for everyone who wants to be, and encourages users to pick any username they want by appending a visually de-emphasized number at the end. Discord hosts a staggering variety of interest-based servers, ranging from creator fandoms, to blockchain development communities, to gamer friend groups.
Similarly, Discord’s asynchronous older brother Reddit has become more like a social network over time. There’s a subreddit for any random topic or interest you can think of these days.
Many of these communities are conspicuously missing on platforms like Facebook and Slack, which feel too “above ground” or “buttoned up.” On those platforms, communities are gatherings of differentiated individuals; in contrast, Discord’s pseudonymity signals that the topic of the community is itself the focus, and that all individuals are defined in relation to that topic.
Soul takes all this a step further. On Soul, it’s not just about connecting over a shared love for sneakers; it’s about connecting over fundamental personality traits, worldviews, or ways of being. And you don’t even need to be able to articulate those yourself; the app draws that out of you through a series of personality tests, then matches you with people it deems you likely to have chemistry with.
These tests are similar to Myers-Briggs or Enneagram, but instead of letters or numbers, “Soulers” get roles like “Pragmatist,” “Artist,” or “Thinker.” These roles are visible on each Souler’s profile, and are also used to sort them into one of 30 “planets.” These quizzes help Soul algorithmically match users with content and even other users.
Soulers can continue to add to their profiles by taking additional Soul Quizzes as well as using “Gravity Tags,” which “attract” more suitable content and other Soulers. Based on each user’s traits and engagement, Soul generates a chemistry score for every other Souler they interact with, out of 100.
From there, Soulers can self-organize into group chats or “Virtual Parties,” Soul’s Clubhouse clone. Similar to Clubhouse, it’s a collection of audio-based chat rooms where participants are split into on- and off-stage. Unlike Clubhouse, most of the rooms are either for hangout or karaoke (the latter highlighting the app’s Chinese roots), and, of course, everyone is pseudonymous.
While pseudonymous platforms like Discord and Reddit empower users to connect over specific interests or hobbies, Soul is a place for kindred spirits.
Together, these platforms form digitally native social graphs based on what people choose to emphasize about themselves, rather than on legal identity or physical proximity. These social graphs are difficult to create on identity-based platforms, as well as in real life, and are the result of meaningful connections between people who otherwise would never have met.
2. Value-add monetization
Users on pseudonymous platforms give up some of the individuality they might otherwise be used to having. On the flip side, these users tend to be quite open and expressive.
On pseudonymous platforms, users are eager for self-expression, recognition, and clout—and will pay real money for it. As a result, these platforms can monetize in ways that add value to users (e.g., Reddit Gold, Discord Nitro, and Twitch donations), rather than relying solely on ads.
Since the early days of Reddit, for example, users have purchased Reddit Gold to reward posts they like. A good chunk of Reddit’s historical revenue has come from Reddit Gold, which has since expanded to a number of other post awards, including subreddit-specific.
Similarly, Discord makes most of its money from users looking for more ways to express themselves. More than half of Discord Nitro’s benefits have to do with expression, whether through custom emojis, special profile badges, or boosting your favorite server. Like Twitch, Discord allows longtime server supporters to further express themselves via titles and rewards—yet another example of pseudonymous users signaling, within context, identities of their choosing.
Soul, on the other hand, allows an even more direct form of self-expression via virtual avatars, which may or may not resemble Soulers’ real selves. Soulers are free to craft a persona to embody aspects of themselves they identify with or aspire to the most.
Soulers can visit the avatar store and browse apparel from a selection of free and premium items, ranging from shirts and facial hair to masks and horns. Avatars are direct representations of each Souler, so dressing it up is essential for self-expression and standing out.
Soulers can even pseudonymously video call each other as their avatars, rather than showing their real faces, similar to face filters.
Thanks to the prominence of avatars, much of Soul’s revenue is generated from Soulers purchasing Soul Coins to use in the avatar store, and from Soulers gifting each other items.
To further enhance the importance of avatars, Soul’s algorithm also de-prioritizes selfies and other personally identifying information on the global feed, funneling self-expression toward on-platform features.
Pseudonymity gives users a blank canvas of an identity to eagerly fill out. This way, instead of primarily monetizing through ads, platforms like Soul can provide value-add features for self-expression.
3. Lowered barriers to content creation
In addition to more genuine connections and self-expression, pseudonymous platforms also have the potential for much higher levels of participation and content creation.
The current, non-obvious example is actually TikTok.
Rather than just passively browsing, 55% of engaged TikTok users in a given month claimed to have uploaded a video. On a monthly basis, that means engaged users are nearly as likely to post a video as they are to follow or to comment. If this figure is anything close to the truth, it blows the 90/9/1 rule out of the water.
Besides offering better video editing tools, how did TikTok achieve this?
While TikTok isn’t pseudonymous per se, it features something that replicates the benefits of pseudonymity: a distribution algorithm that acts on your content, not your connections.
The most important consequence is that anybody can succeed on TikTok. People don’t need to be friends with you or already be following you. With the algorithm, people can engage directly with content they’re likely to enjoy, despite having no existing connection to creators. No need to find your audience—your audience finds you.
Furthermore, the fact that you don’t need to import your real life friends lowers psychological barriers to posting. You’re free to experiment with whatever you want, knowing it’s not very likely you’ll get recognized—or worse, judged or cancelled—unless you go truly viral. TikTok is not explicitly pseudonymous, but its algorithm accomplishes similar goals.
Soul, on the other hand, shows how a democratized content algorithm effectively complements pseudonymity by using it to drive nearly all interactions.
To start, the global feed visually resembles that of Facebook or Twitter, but it works more like TikTok’s. On Soul, everything—from text to audio snippets to polls—is globally shareable, not just with your followers, but with anyone.
As on TikTok, the result is that anyone can succeed on the strength of what they put out, rather than having to rely on endorsement by blue checkmarks or being famous off-platform. There’s still a “Following” tab, but Soul’s bread and butter, similar to TikTok’s, is an algorithm that is neither follow-dominated (Twitter) nor limited to specific groups/servers (Reddit/Discord).
Soul also uses an algorithm to drive user-to-user interactions by matching them in voice calls or group chats. As previously mentioned, every other Souler you encounter has an associated score indicating how likely you are to get along. As a result, their recommendation engine not only lowers the barrier to posting globally, but also drives engagement for more direct connections.
The future vision of Soul is what they call an AI-powered “virtual playground,” where curation and discovery, regardless of form, is handled by an algorithm. This way, Soulers can find compelling content, meet kindred spirits, and go viral, all without Soul needing to know anything about who they are in person.
According to Soul’s F-1, an impressive 35% of monthly Soulers post content, and Soulers average 62 daily 1-on-1 messages. On Soul, putting yourself out there has never been easier or felt safer.
Putting it all together
Let’s recap.
Identity-based social networks have a ton of users, but are limited by real-world relationships and social dynamics. They’re crutches that merely imitate “being there.”
Pseudonymous platforms like Discord and Soul support communities and self-expression not found elsewhere. These facilitate connections otherwise not possible, and thus go “beyond being there.”
By capitalizing on what’s missing, pseudonymous platforms present the following opportunities:
Interest- and personality-based connections
Value-add monetization
Lowered barriers to content creation
In a nutshell, pseudonymous platforms are all about encouraging users to include information about themselves that they choose to or even aspire to identify with, while allowing them to exclude sensitive or irrelevant information. This enables entirely new ways of forging genuine connections and expressing yourself online.
Democratized, pseudonymous platforms like Soul have the potential to upend social media as we know it. They create social graphs that reflect our inner selves, rather than ones based on physical identity and all the baggage that comes with it. Their continued success shows that to bring the world closer together, platforms don’t need all your personally identifying data. They just need to connect you with those who resonate with the deepest aspects of yourself, which you proudly choose to identify with.
This is the ambitious vision of Soul—a “digital playground” defying not only physical distance, but all the arbitrary circumstances that have, until now, kept kindred souls from ever crossing paths.
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to chat, I can be reached at @qualiaspace and kylecqian@gmail.com.
Huge thanks to my amazing friends for reading drafts.