Building for Boundaries

Basile Morin, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Over the next weeks and months, we’ll be pushing features and technical updates that bring Germ out of beta, empowering you to use Germ in more contexts for more kinds of conversations. Before we get into the technical details, it’s worth taking a moment to refocus on our values and goals.

At Germ we are designing for safety, wellbeing, and user agency with every decision. As CEO, I recently authored a piece for Tech Policy Press on the ways that ad-supported social media is incentivized to addict and overexpose. A business’s life force is its revenue model - what does it sell, to whom, and how? For platforms whose revenue comes from ads, their life drive is to serve more relevant ads to more people. Fundamentally, this business model architects the raft of harms we see in the news, and feel in our products, every day. Platforms are constantly looking for ways to increase users’ screentime and serve them ever more relevant ads. That leads to symptoms like addictive product design, the promotion of agitating and polarizing content that spikes users’ cortisol levels, the overexposure of users to one another so that they form more connections and stay put longer, and of course, the total availability of users’ information and behaviors to the platform itself and whatever parties they choose to share it with. For me personally, understanding this fundamental drive was foundational to my understanding that to solve these harms, a new platform from a new company was needed.

At Germ, our goal is to build not just technologies but a technology company whose internal incentives power products that make our users happier and healthier, leading to to successful business outcomes for us. Trust and safety then becomes an entire way of being—what is more important than trust? and safety??—rather than a siloed set of tools tasked with fighting the core incentives of the product.

In cultural studies there is a concept called the “dual nature of culture”: reality is reflected in culture, but culture also produces reality. At Germ we’re conscious that the culture we build as a company will emerge in our products, even as we have designed products to respond to the ways that people already organically connect, in an attempt to make that easier, smoother, and more secure. Here are the cultural values we keep front of mind at Germ, starting with our mission. This blog post is an opportunity to extend on the brief copy that is always present in our User Guide.

Healthy Communication

We build tools you can trust, so you can form relationships built on trust.

Germ’s mission, enshrined in our charter as a benefit corporation, is to promote healthy communication. Psychology tells us that healthy communication is consensual, boundaried, respectful, and accountable. Healthy communication happens between empowered individuals who are in control of their choices, their availability, and their identification, and that’s what Germ facilitates. Our goal is to build you software that helps you form and dissolve connections the way you want to, that respects your privacy and your decisions and that you can trust to act on your behalf, not ours. Within our software and our wider speech, we strive to practice healthy communication with you, our community members, with transparency about who we are, what we’re building, and why we operate how we do.

Accessibility

Germ is for everyone. We continually work to make Germ more usable by more people.

Making products accessible is about more than making sure that people who use assistive technologies like screen readers can use Germ (although they can!) It’s even more than making sure that Germ is available for Android as soon as possible (though we’re working on it!)

Accessibility is about equity more broadly: making sure that we are reaching out to all sorts of communities, across a range of abilities, digital literacy levels, and demographic factors like race, class, and nationality, to understand what their communicative needs are so we can work our hardest to serve them with our products and community-building. We believe in principles of universal design that insist that when you design experiences with marginalized users in mind, you create better and unforeseen opportunities for everyone to participate and thrive.

Utility

Germ makes it easier to be social. Our tools make it fast, simple, and trustworthy to make friends, set boundaries, and stay in touch.

For a technology to be accessible, it has to work, it has to be useful, it has to be usable. Germ is not designed to be entertainment, although talking to friends, or watching others converse, can be entertaining. Rather, it is designed to do work in your life, and to make the work of maintaining and closing conversations and connections easier and more functional.

Alignment

Our business supports healthy community life by design. When our users are healthy, our company is healthy.

As a principle of mechanics, alignment describes the proper arrangement of parts such that a system works as it was intended. Alignment pours energy into intention. Misalignment creates injury, disrepair, and unintended consequences.

The advertising model is a fundamental misalignment in a social media service whose job is to promote a thriving public sphere. This misalignment is so severe that critics are right to ask whether dominant platforms are actually architected toward social health. As technologist Anil Dash has written, “the purpose of a system is what it does.” As the artist formerly known as Kanye West once said, “the system’s working perfectly, that’s why.”

As a next-generation social platform, our highest design calling at Germ is to design a new system that actually, not theoretically, aligns business—the work of producing revenue that supports our operations—with our desired outputs—technology that supports healthy global communication.

Our commitment to alignment means that Germ’s business and technology is designed as a single system that promotes healthy communication. While we may participate in corporate philanthropy in the future, our pursuit of healthy communication will not come from a company side quest. It is core to our mission, to our technology, and to the business models we explore.

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As we roll out new technologies and features in the coming months and years, we’ll be listening to our community of users to iterate for healthy growth. Please know that you can always find a listening ear at Germ — we’re building Germ for your real life, so let us know how we can help.