Where they come from.
When you get them.
And how you explore them. 

Bad news: recommendations are broken.

Even worse news: they’re broken by design (and/or have been deprioritized into obsolescence).

That’s because every major social app we use is designed to keep you 100% ON IT and ONLY on it. These are apps conceived and designed and optimized (and re-optimized) to be complete tractor beams for your eyes, sucks of your time, and never ending “feeds” on which to scroll thousands and thousands of thumb miles. 

By the way, what we mean by recommendations is content that is typically non-social, and potentially longer-format – songs, articles, books, shows, movies, podcasts, recipes, etc.

For social platforms, this kind of content often necessitates users leaving, and well buddy, that goes against everything these apps stand for. They don’t make any money this way, their metrics dip, and who knows how long it will be until you “come back.” There’s just no incentive for say, Instagram to send you off of Instagram to somewhere like Spotify when they could just keep you warm, cozy, and scrolling. Linking out is truly their lowest priority.  

Beyond that, there’s the noise. Social media platforms reward the megaphone. They reward the firehose. They’re built for the content creator. The more content created the better. The faster this content is created the better better.

And what happens is that the product we’re left with gets flooded with strangers. It becomes barely recognizable as “ours.” It’s why we’ve seen a recent push toward ‘bringing back the old Instagram’ or returning feeds to chronological order. People want to see their friends, unnnnnfortunately, their friends have been algorithmically removed because their content wasn’t tractor-beamy enough. Sorry bout that. Nowadays, many of your most interesting friends are full-on lurkers. 

But where does that leave recommendations? 

The reality is that we don’t have a great way of getting recommendations from friends outside our innermost circles. 

Facebook is dead. Instagram is tryhard TikTok. TikTok is an attention monster that will eventually consume us all but is designed to keep us on-platform. Twitter is bite-sized and fleeting. Group chats are great, but they’re small, move super fast, and are archived poorly. Reddit is great if you spend time customizing it, but the content is (likely) not from your real friends. And RSS feeds were great (and are making a sneaky comeback), but again they ignore the ‘your friends’ part of the equation.

So we’re trying something new. 

finds is built solely with your friends’ recommendations in mind. Unconcerned with status updates, selfies, stories, and even likes. We call it slowcial media (half-jokingly). The (totally revolutionary) idea that you don't need to be – nor should you be – consuming this stuff 24/7.

Instead, when you find something you love, you send it along, and others get to enjoy it when and how they want. No time-sensitive or disappearing posts, just weekly drops of content for you and your friends to peruse however you like, and archived for whenever you want. 

So in essence, finds is pretty simple:

1. We’ll text you once a week, asking you to send us a link to your favorite thing or things from that week – songs, albums, podcasts, videos, shows, movies, articles, books, recipes, whatever. 

2. Then just in time for the weekend, we’ll send you a drop full of all your friends’ favorite things for you to enjoy at your leisure. And the content doesn’t go anywhere. It’s yours. Capturing more and more bits of interesting from those you’re most interested in. 

3. And that’s it. Lather, rinse, repeat. Bon appetit.

But hey, you’re early. This is just the Alpha. 

And it only gets better from here (with your help). This stage will be lower fidelity than future drops, and it’s all about research into things like communication styles and cadence, drop timings and appearance, and more. So if you’ve taken the time to read this, we can confidently say that we’d love your feedback as we keep pushing this thing.

Thanks for being here at the start of this journey. We’re excited for all the recos that come next. 

Thanks, 
The finds team