A New Space for a New Generation
It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.
What a time to be alive!
Unfortunately, it doesn’t always feel that way. In many ways, the current generation is wealthier, smarter and safer than any other in history. Gen-Z has access to more information and better tools to share it than ever before. But it’s also more depressed, anxious and bored than any preceding generation.
Social media, in its current state, has a lot to answer for. Current research suggests that it exacerbates loneliness.
“It is a little ironic that reducing your use of social media actually makes you feel less lonely.”
— Psychologist Melissa G. Hunt, University of Pennsylvania.
At Airtime, we’ve spent the last year reflecting and building; looking around us, listening to users and thought-leaders. It’s been an enlightening journey that has solidified our resolve to be a positive force in these societal shifts.
‘Social media’ needs to be better. We believe this starts by starting over.
Over the last year, we’ve begun to evolve our product for a better, more authentic approach to human connection. A world in need of intimate spaces for us to be with our friends; as our real, unedited selves.
Today, Airtime is a platform for real friends — people who know and trust each other, to hang out together in real time. Here, friends gather to talk, share interests, and consume digital content together.
We built Airtime to be the opposite of a lonely, hyper-competitive social experience.
A Live Space
Asynchronous social experiences on social media feeds can cause loneliness through the illusion of connection.
Existing literature points to the pressure of social comparison that happens on social media. Indeed, this is what we found in our own user research. When you look at other people’s lives through the clickbait peephole of your social feed, it’s easy to conclude that everyone else’s life is cooler or better than yours. In reality, this works both ways. As we’re busy curating our digital selves, chasing likes and reactions, we disconnect with who we are when we are real and unedited.
The US Loneliness Index shows that nearly 70% of Gen Z feels as though no one really knows them well. It seems the more friends you have, the lonelier it gets.
In contrast, Airtime aims to be the space where you stay truly connected with the people in your life by being present — not via a curated feed on which rank is determined by a click-optimizing algorithm. Every user entering a Room is nudged to Go Live on camera, and others in the room are nudged to join them.
The subtle notions of “presence” and “being together” are the core of our app. We want the ‘now’ over the asynchronous. That’s why on Airtime the chat is intentionally secondary to the core experience of being together, Live.
A Safe Space
Over the last two years, we’ve seen privacy, safety, and trust emerge as some of the most important issues for teens and tweens.
A majority of teens have experienced some form of cyberbullying online.
Privacy and safety of our users is key to Airtime’s mission. These are things we optimize through features as simple and crucial as default settings.
For instance, we only support two default Room modes, both of which are only visible to the user’s friends, not strangers.
While a user may create a public Room, that option is intentionally de-prioritized so users won’t accidentally broadcast themselves to strangers.
Through this choice and others like it, we’ve chosen to prioritize our users’ safety and privacy over `virality`. In doing so we hope to make Airtime the safest space to be together with the ones they love.
A Connected Space
If consuming content alone from an algorithmically controlled `social` feed induces loneliness and anxiety, does that mean all content consumption is bad? No.
We believe it’s not the consumption or content but rather the context that is key.
One of Airtime’s core use-cases is the ability to experience media together.
Things like watching or listening to videos, TV, movies, songs, photos, and videos — alongside the people you care about and who care about the same content as you.
Experiencing together, for the lack of a better term, is the next wave of genuine `Social` Media.
In many ways, this bridges the gap between real life and the mobile phone that is at the heart of Gen Z’s loneliness issue.
If people generally go out to movies or watch TV with friends and family — why should they watch shows alone on Netflix?
A Fun Space
Expression assets augment the emotional reactions of users and are part of most modern social apps.
From Likes on Facebook, stickers on Instagram or GIFs on … just about everywhere; a lot of work has been done on expression assets in the messaging space. In contrast, expressions in the synchronous video space are ripe for innovation.
We spend a lot of time and energy envisioning how these moments of delight, euphoria, rage and even apathy would manifest in the live-social space. As an example, one of Airtime’s most popular reactions is the Sound Reaction.
Want to add suspense to an announcement you’re about to make — there’s a drumroll sound for that. If you want to lighten up a tense moment, there’s a handy fart sound for that too; which is, of course, our most used reaction!
The good news!
Our initial efforts are being validated. Our, primarily teen, audience has reacted very positively to these changes. Since launching our latest version in January, we’ve seen our already high engagement jump 60%.
And we’re just getting started! We now have more users doing more together than ever before. More laughs, more goofiness, more real connections and friendships across the world. There’s a lot more to be done and many changes yet to be made to make Airtime the world’s first live social platform, the way we’ve envisioned it to be.
Our journey has just begun and we look forward to hearing from you. Better yet, if you would like to join our stellar team, and be a part of this journey, we’re hiring!
Sanidhya Khilnani is the Head of Product at Airtime in Palo Alto. Gui Seiz is the Head of Design at Airtime (also in Palo Alto) :)
Want to work with them? Well, Airtime is hiring!
Have ideas to contribute or want to learn more? Reach us at support@airtime.com
