Plexus has always had a single aim: broad participation.
But no interface we made in the past year could achieve it.
A single text box with a submit button will always confine people to polished, Tweetish bytes. And most people’s thoughts look nothing like Tweets. The things that are on most of our minds—the problems, relationships, and ideas we’re wrestling with—are messy and unresolved. They wouldn’t be on our minds otherwise.
That most people’s thinking can’t fit in a single text box should be obvious. But often, for social software makers, it isn’t. Only after our latest social network beta started to catch did we realize it wouldn’t enable broad participation. It simply didn’t have room for the intricate and messy worlds in each of us.
And so we asked: What would a home for that deeper stuff be?
We didn’t know. We thought collective thinking would require sci-fi brain-computer interfaces and therefore questionable moral maneuvers. But one weekend in May, after sitting with this question, meditating on broad participation, and experimenting manically, we found a simpler path.
Walk is a simple system for collective thinking. It resembles a word-processor, but helps you bring in other people’s thought-streams to forward your own.
Seeing people think together has felt like magic. In a world of growing loneliness and unbridled AI—it has also given us hope.
Much more to come. In pursuit of messy thinking,
Davey & Micah