I think we need to build a quieter internet. It's so loud these days, and so much fake shit everywhere, and everything follows and tracks you.
Dont get me wrong, I love the internet. I've built companies on it, learned from it, and watched it make incredible things possible. But today's internet is just more and more and more shitty, and nothing really goes away.
Every year, we accumulate more accounts, subscriptions, emails, notifications, passwords, permissions, data, and companies asking to be in our lives and never leave, and it's exhausting. Almost every incentive points in the same direction: more engagement, more content, more data, more reasons to come back.
We've become incredibly good at starting digital relationships with platforms and surprisingly bad at ending them. Signing up takes seconds. Leaving can mean finding a hidden setting, remembering a password, sitting through a retention flow, contacting support, or simply giving up. And they all want it this way for fake traction stats and bloated valuations.
The burden compounds on the individual. One company has your email. Another has an old account. Another charges you every month. Another sends endless emails from 15 different bificated email lists; you would have to be extremely lucky, whack-a-mole style, to kill them all. Another holds personal data you gave them years ago, and it's not even worth trying to end the account. Each company squeezes every last drop out of a single small interaction and acts like you are married for life. You experience the accumulated weight of all of them all of the time. There is so much AI and automation on B2B platforms, but none on B2C, so I have been hacking away at that side, trying to make sense of the noise water hose that constantly weighs me down online.
The amount of content, personalization, outreach, and automation that can be pointed at one person is becoming effectively infinite. It's hilarious to watch the terms keep changing while I feel like a hostage in something from, like, two lifetimes ago, so they can train on my past self.
Anyways, we need more technology working on the other side of the equation. Technology that helps unsubscribe, cancel, delete, forget, reduce, and quietly handle the things that no longer deserve our time.
That's what I've been trying to build with Yorba and get off the ground to make some real change against the grain, a consumer-side layer to reduce everything the internet accumulates around you and fight fire with fire, automation vs automation. It would be more fair at least, and for sure more fun.
I think we're still at the beginning of the idea, and where we want to go around the identity layer and context will be fun if we can get there. But I thought I would come here with fellow builders cause our platform is strong, metrics are good, but the top of funnel is hard to break through cause see above the noise that surrounds us all is immense.
I increasingly believe there should be an entire class of technology built around less. It's gonna be needed and already is, but it doesn't fit the narrative of today's more, more, more, more internet.
I am tired of the overoptimized, constantly automated, increasingly fake internet and just want a simpler, quieter one.
I think we need to build a quieter internet. It's so loud these days, and so much fake shit everywhere, and everything follows and tracks you.
Dont get me wrong, I love the internet. I've built companies on it, learned from it, and watched it make incredible things possible. But today's internet is just more and more and more shitty, and nothing really goes away.
Every year, we accumulate more accounts, subscriptions, emails, notifications, passwords, permissions, data, and companies asking to be in our lives and never leave, and it's exhausting. Almost every incentive points in the same direction: more engagement, more content, more data, more reasons to come back.
We've become incredibly good at starting digital relationships with platforms and surprisingly bad at ending them. Signing up takes seconds. Leaving can mean finding a hidden setting, remembering a password, sitting through a retention flow, contacting support, or simply giving up. And they all want it this way for fake traction stats and bloated valuations.
The burden compounds on the individual. One company has your email. Another has an old account. Another charges you every month. Another sends endless emails from 15 different bificated email lists; you would have to be extremely lucky, whack-a-mole style, to kill them all. Another holds personal data you gave them years ago, and it's not even worth trying to end the account. Each company squeezes every last drop out of a single small interaction and acts like you are married for life. You experience the accumulated weight of all of them all of the time. There is so much AI and automation on B2B platforms, but none on B2C, so I have been hacking away at that side, trying to make sense of the noise water hose that constantly weighs me down online.
The amount of content, personalization, outreach, and automation that can be pointed at one person is becoming effectively infinite. It's hilarious to watch the terms keep changing while I feel like a hostage in something from, like, two lifetimes ago, so they can train on my past self.
Anyways, we need more technology working on the other side of the equation. Technology that helps unsubscribe, cancel, delete, forget, reduce, and quietly handle the things that no longer deserve our time.
That's what I've been trying to build with Yorba and get off the ground to make some real change against the grain, a consumer-side layer to reduce everything the internet accumulates around you and fight fire with fire, automation vs automation. It would be more fair at least, and for sure more fun.
I think we're still at the beginning of the idea, and where we want to go around the identity layer and context will be fun if we can get there. But I thought I would come here with fellow builders cause our platform is strong, metrics are good, but the top of funnel is hard to break through cause see above the noise that surrounds us all is immense.
I increasingly believe there should be an entire class of technology built around less. It's gonna be needed and already is, but it doesn't fit the narrative of today's more, more, more, more internet.
I am tired of the overoptimized, constantly automated, increasingly fake internet and just want a simpler, quieter one.
Would love any and all feedback on our project.
Chris Zeunstrom