Relevant: Curated by Communities, Not Clicks
Announcing our upcoming beta launch on March 5th, pre-seed investors, and team.
Relevant is an app for curating information based on quality, not clicks. Relevant uses a reputation system and economic incentives to encourage users to rank and organize content within topic-based communities. It’s based on the principle of inclusive hierarchy — anyone can participate but not everyone’s vote holds the same weight.
In the fall of 2018 we raised a pre-seed round from Coinbase Ventures, Coinfund and a group of angel investors. We’ve been busy building a talented team of developers and designers and we’re thrilled to announce the upcoming launch of our beta app on March 5th.
You can Sign up now to be first in line to get an invite once we launch.
Why We’re Building Relevant
There are times when a one-person-one-vote democracy is an appropriate way to make decisions and there are times when it is not. Sometimes you need an expert you can trust to make a difficult choice or execute a task. For example, you probably wouldn’t want to rely on legal advice offered in a Twitter poll. You would ask a qualified lawyer.
Yet we increasingly turn to the populist dynamics of social media to help us understand how the world works. The internet enabled us to question traditional establishments of authority, but has yet to produce reliable ways to identify trustworthy sources. We have learned to distrust TV pundits, paid experts and other authority figures (often rightly so), yet lack effective tools to identify who we should trust. Useful information is drowned out by popularity metrics such as likes and follow counts. These metrics lack any kind of specific context and are easy to game. Web 2.0 social platforms recommend Trump, Kanye, and Kim as our thought leaders on everything from mental health to politics and economics. We can do better than that.
At Relevant, we’re building a new kind of network based on trust. Within each Relevant community, the most important content is not what has been clicked the most but what the community trusts the most. This enables the identification and utilization of trust networks within specific domains. Like universities and trade schools, these networks offer hierarchical structures that will help us navigate, organize, and compartmentalize digitized reality. Unlike rigid traditional institutions, these networks are diverse, inclusive, and adaptable.
How it Works
Each Relevant community is similar to a subreddit wherein users can upvote, downvote, and discuss links. Only instead of using the number of upvotes to rank posts, we look at who upvoted the posts to determine their value. This is why on Relevant, one upvote from a trusted user is worth a lot more than a million votes from bot accounts.
Reputation
Relevant communities safeguard and codify trust via a sybil-resistant reputation system. Communities are maintained by elected admins with verified identities who are responsible for upholding the community’s values. However, any user can have the same amount of influence as an admin. Ordinary members can earn trust through participation and can take on more administrative tasks and play an active role in cultivating the community.
Economic Incentives
Administering a community is a lot of work. Even though we are able to crowdsource administrative tasks, a truly sustainable community should have the ability to pay its maintainers. Underpinning the Relevant Protocol is a crypto-economic mechanism built on the Ethereum blockchain that rewards community members for their digital labor and creates incentives for 3rd parties to build tools and services useful to communities.
The First Communities
On March 5th, we will be launching a beta app with a few pilot communities. One of them will be dedicated to the crypto industry and we will be reaching out to crypto thought leaders with invitations to join the community as administrators in the coming weeks. Get in touch if you would like to be involved or if there is a specific community that you would like to see on Relevant.
Relevant Backers and Team
In the Fall of 2018, we raised a modest pre-seed round from Coinbase Ventures, Coinfund and a group of true angels, Matt, Grant, James and Roberto. Thank you all for your support, expertise and belief in our vision.
Big thanks to our advisors Matt Liston, Trent McConaghy and Joshua Kleckner as well as early contributors and team members Phillip Nessen, Jay Goss, Babak Radboy, Taylore Scarabelli, Billy Rennekamp, Jules LaPlace, Michael Castelle and our COO Analisa Teachworth.
We’re also extremely excited to welcome our newest team members: Achill Rudolph, Allan Yu and Santiago Angel.
