The Most Important Statistic In Your Life Is...
How many quality relationships do you have in your life? That statistic is your best predictor of long-term happiness and lifespan. Whatever is on your Apple Watch is hardly an afterthought. The word quality is important here. After a certain point, quantity of total relationships inversely correlates with your long-term wellbeing. That's to say - if you're lonely, it gets worse because you'll die sooner, too.
The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. It's an intuitive framework to live by. But then I look around at how humans act and behave - I'm increasingly disappointed.
Define A Friend
Dunbar's number suggests people can maintain up to 150 meaningful relationships. Facebook's brilliance is it framed "acquaintances" as "friends." The median number of friends on Facebook is 329, more than 2x our 150 ceiling. Its "friendships" also demonstrate long-tail distribution - more than 1/2 of its users have 500+ friends.
Then Twitter came along and redlined friends to followers. Do you know Elon Musk? Doesn't matter -
you can follow and chirp at him just the same. The average Twitter user has 707 followers.
See the trend? Social networks broaden your definition of "friendship" and reallocate your time spend. TikTok is boundless - it blew up the friends and followers paradigm and instead force feeds you the hardest hitting content from the web. Do TikTok users seem schizophrenic? Are their attention spans uncomfortably haphazard?
My goal isn't to point fingers. Twitter users are nearly as absent-minded. Our social trends feel like a fever dream - can we lucid dream an escape?
Passing The Baton
Systems seek homeostasis. Pendulums swing in two directions, money markets are cyclical, and social networks are no different.
People are aware of their burnt out psychologies but lack alternatives. That's why "mental health Monday" is gaining momentum in elementary schools and why BeReal surged last fall. The latter identified a public want and leveraged A-rate viral app mechanics. BeReal faces difficult churn today due to low content quality and a lack of engaging features.
But give BeReal props. Like the first sub-4 minute mile, once you see something is possible, competitors more easily level up. BeReal proved that you can build a large-scale social network from small friend groups.
The next great social network will carry forward BeReal's baton. It will deepen relationships between intimate circles of friends and have ~50 friends/user.
Dunbar has done extensive research in the evolutionary psychology of social networks. One of my favorite takeaways was that social layers are stepwise - they expand and contract at ~3x connections per layer.
We've experienced Facebook at 500, Twitter at 1,500, and TikTok go zero gravity; social networks are good at maximizing quantity of relationships... which created a gaping need for quality.
wyd
Griffin and I launch wyd (v2) this April. We're focused on the more intimate side of the spectrum - a network built on close relationships.
OpenMat (our December 2022 v1) was anchored to preconceptions, lacked product sense, and communicated poorly. We knew the problem we were after, but couldn't express it through a mobile app. It was a valuable failure - we had to challenge our own biases and learn.
Three principles guided our v2 decision making:
1. Build for specificity - you must know why you open the app each time.
2. Be intrinsically useful - a single friend group (2-3 people) must enjoy wyd even if nobody else is on the platform.
3. Talk concisely and precisely - a rando on the street must "get it" immediately.
wyd is where you share what you're doing with who matters. It's that simple - you have 1 status (it can be anything) and you update it for your friends and family. Swipe left for 1:1 chat, swipe right for a public facing channel. You can merge (think: retweet) your friend's status to share the public channel. Statuses are ephemeral and last 24-hours.
Head over to our website and sign up on our waitlist. Our phones aren't disappearing anytime soon - so wyd leverages viral app mechanics to deepen your relationships with who you actually care about.
Then for your own sake, sit down and scroll through your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok friend lists. Compare your number of quality vs. total relationships. Ask yourself:
1. Who do I allocate my time towards?
2. Does my time spend make sense?