New Social App Aims to Fix Social Media's Harms

2 days ago7 min read

In a move that feels both nostalgic and desperately needed, two of social media’s founding architects are circling back to the drawing board. Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, and Evan Sharp, the co-founder of Pinterest, have just secured fresh funding for a new social app with a deceptively simple mission: to help users “plan with intention.” This isn’t just another platform vying for your endless scroll; it’s a deliberate pivot, a quiet admission from insiders that the digital town squares they helped build have become exhausting, divisive, and often downright harmful. The very premise feels like a course correction for an entire industry.Stone, after all, was there in the early, heady days of Twitter, a service conceived as a way to share status updates with friends that morphed into the global nerve center for news, activism, and cacophony. Sharp, from the visually serene world of Pinterest, built a empire on aspiration and collection, a digital mood board that, for all its calm, still operates on the attention economy’s fundamental fuel: the infinite feed.Their collaboration is fascinating because it bridges two distinct philosophies—Twitter’s real-time public conversation and Pinterest’s future-oriented personal curation—and suggests a synthesis aimed at reclaiming agency. The scant details available hint at an app focused on planning, which could mean anything from coordinating real-world events with friends to mapping out personal goals, a stark contrast to the reactive, now-now-now dopamine hits of legacy platforms.This push towards intentionality isn’t happening in a vacuum. We’re living through a palpable cultural fatigue.The mental health toll of social media is well-documented, from adolescent anxiety linked to Instagram to the corrosive effects of political misinformation on Facebook and Twitter (now X). Regulators in the European Union and the United States are circling with Digital Services Acts and antitrust lawsuits, while a growing “techlash” sentiment has users themselves seeking alternatives, from the niche appeal of Mastodon to the promise of decentralized protocols like Bluesky (which, ironically, also sprang from Twitter’s roots).Stone and Sharp aren’t naive; they understand the architecture of addiction because they helped design it. Their new venture reads as a conscious uncoupling from that model.But the challenges are monumental. Can an app built on planning compete with the neurological hijacking perfected by TikTok’s algorithm? Is “intention” a feature users will flock to, or a niche for the already digitally disciplined? The funding, while a vote of confidence from investors, is just the first step.

#social media

#app launch

#Biz Stone

#Evan Sharp

#funding

#planning

#featured