Scaling Intimacy

How to make large forums feel small…

Small group chats can be wonderful. Members share context, talk honestly, and feel a belonging that transcends their individual relationships.

Group chats with more than 10 people, on the other hand, get out of hand. The central feed gets overwhelming. Posting starts to feel wrong, like shouting through a megaphone. Most members disengage.

The chaos makes sense. Asking large groups of people to unite in the same online forum is hard. Everyone has a different reason for being present. Central feeds ignores idiosyncrasy—flattening both the content you see and the content you’re willing to share.

There are some band-aid solutions here. Discord resorts to servers, Reddit to subreddits, and Twitter to followers. Each of these strategies help, dividing big communities into smaller ones, but the divisions cause complexity. People struggle to find the right servers/subreddits/followees, or sign up for too many and end up getting spammed.

Mechanics of existing online forums make intimacy hard to find.

What would it take for large online forums to feel intimate?

First, community members would need a way to receive only the content they care about. And conversely, they’d also need a way to share content with only the individuals who care about it. A new level of precision in receiving and sharing content.

What would it look like?

It’d have to be a forum without a central feed. A place to express an unpolished idea or experience, route it to all and only your peers who would care about it, and find, immediately, the most relevant thoughts from the rest of your community.

If this portal were possible, there’d be a few wild implications.

1. Routine meaningful connection. This kind of content-routing would enable connections between people who’ve dealt with the same problems—not just rarely—but routinely.

2. Vulnerable discussion. Community members would be able to connect through thoughts that, previously, they would have wanted to share but not to broadcast.

3. Scalable Intimacy. Communities would become more, not less, intimate as they grew; the larger they got, the more relevant thoughts & peers there would be for every member to connect to. A million-person online community would feel as intimate as a small group chat.

Up until this decade, the requisite language-processing technology didn’t exist, nor did a well-resourced company with the ability to serve high-impact communities and earn their trust.

Plexus—a public benefit corporation equipped with state-of-art connection-making technology—is making it.

(Inverting the Internet, Step 1)