New friend request

Happy Fourth of July to all of you celebrating! In today’s digest, I’m covering a new social media app that wants to bring the fun back to social media with some retro vibes. But first…

The headlines: 

🧵 A year after launching, Threads has hit 175 million users. 

🤖 Amazon is discontinuing Astro, its WALL-E-esque robot business.

💬 WhatsApp is building its own AI avatar generator.

Social media is a hard nut to crack as a founder. To go up against titans like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat and carve out a piece of the pie is no easy feat. How many new social apps have we seen wind down just as fast as they pop up? 

That’s why a new social app built by Gen-Z whisperer, investor, and former Product Hunt employee Tiffany Zhong is raising eyebrows. Noplace is an app backed by Alexis Ohanian that aims to bring back the more whimsical days of social media and friend-finding. It opened to the masses this week and immediately shot to the top of the app store charts, clinching the number one spot. 

It’s like old-school MySpace, where users can create colorful and customizable profiles to share anything from mundane status updates to what they’re listening to and their relationship status. It’s designed to appeal to a younger generation and create more community amongst young people. 

It doesn’t have more features than traditional social media—it has fewer, and that’s where I see the appeal. It’s entirely text-based, so there are no photos, videos, or files. It also has no vanity metrics such as likes or reposts. All you have is a number that shows how many responses a post gets. 

Noplace also ditches the algorithms other social apps use to keep us hooked on the endless flow of content. Instead, it uses AI to moderate and curate content between two feeds: one made up of your friend's posts and the other, which is kind of like a global messaging board where you see original posts and ones in response to them. 

Profiles follow the same theme of simplicity. You get a profile picture, a bio section, an add friend button, and your wall — the home for everything you post.

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