Social Media That's Not A Boring Popularity Contest — Maven

Around about two weeks ago, while I was still in the hospital recovering, and while working on my first post, I opened up a new tab in Brave one afternoon and was greeted with this:

Most of the time I don't pay a lot of attention to these adverts, but in this case I was intrigued enough to click through. Social media detox? Righto. What's this about then...?

And so, the landing page:

I opted to try the web app hoping to find some information along the way: Follow interests, not influencers?

And we've finally arrived. This is Maven. Pretty barebones user interface. Bit of a navigation menu on the left, posts in the centre. I hadn't made an account by this stage as I wanted to learn more, so I clicked there on the left and was taken to the about page, which is interesting reading.

Maven is the product of a new start-up, and bills itself as a serendipity network. Partly to differentiate itself from other social media networks and partly as a description of using the site: posts are grouped and displayed according to interest tags and there's no likes or following of people. You like and follow tags that are generated from the text posts that users make instead. The serendipity part, I guess, is that you never know exactly what you'll find written under a particular interest tag.

So I made an account using email, which was straightforward, and then this is what I saw. Three other users and all the interest tags they follow, presumably. After a bit of clicking around, bit of exploring, bit of reading other people's posts I've built up a list of followed interest tags that looks like this:

• economics
• flow states
• philosophy
• consciousness studies
• quantum physics
• psychological trauma
• internet culture
• personal growth
• AI
• artificial intelligence
• machine learning
• coding
• programming
• image/audio/video creation
• nature

One topic I didn't see anywhere was 'music' so I decided to make a post asking for people to share a piece of music that has changed them.

Then, lo and behold, the music interest tag was applied to my post and from there I could click through and follow it.

I guess that's a good thing, though it wasn't explained in any way, which would have saved time, as in: The best way to access an interest tag that's not immediately visible is to make a post about it. Useful piece of information.

The site uses machine learning and AI to function: Images are generated such as the one to the right of my post. I would say that interest tags are generated this way as well, as there's no way I saw to add your own while writing a post.

I've had a browse through Maven three separate times as of writing this post, each for about an hour. There's not a huge amount of users, so the amount of content seems limited, though this will likely change as time goes on. The overall approach is interesting and I've seen and heard some good stuff by spending time on the site: Open-endedness as a goal in Artificial Intelligence research from the about page, a nice song with beautiful opening guitar by Glen Campbell (Gentle On My Mind), a paper on using AI to generate website front-ends, and a thinker's website with a bunch of questions worth pondering. Also I have now been introduced to wuxia, a genre of fiction where the central theme is Chinese martial artists and their adventures in Ancient China. Had no idea. Learning things.

So, most of the interesting things I've encountered on Maven are off-site, but the Internet is a big place...

There's some interesting discussion going on I'm sure. I'll check in there again. Maybe we can talk to some people about Hive and encourage new users to join us here? It's a given that the folks already using Maven are open to new approaches to social media. Can't hurt to try. However, Hive could be considered as a popularity contest type of site as well, just not in a Web 2.0 way. Though I doubt there's many hardcore users of Maven yet, of the true believer variety.

What's your thoughts? Will you be giving Maven a go?

-Sing