The Tylt — Be Heard.
We are proud to release the first version of The Tylt. It’s a space where your opinion literally counts and you have the opportunity to write yourself into the trending stories of the day.
The Tylt (pronounced “Tilt”) finds its inspiration from common problems and a twist.
The Problems
The feedback loop between publishers and their readers is broken. Every day people share unique, compelling opinions about the stories that they’re interested in but those opinions simply disappear into the white noise of social platforms. This point has been made so many times, it’s hardly worth expanding on what’s already been said.
Lots of people want to have their opinions heard on both sides of every issue, but they remain silent. Online debates suck up too much emotional energy and the end result is rarely worth it. When all is said and done nobody knows how to quantify opinions or showcase the individuals that have the most influence on the conversation.
A Way Forward
What we’ve launched is an ‘MVP’. There is room to grow, but we are confident these problems aren’t going away and we think our open approach will bring clarity to what is otherwise a hall of fun house mirrors.
The Tylt will break down trending stories and identify the two largest angles people might take. We will wade right into the deep parts of the conversation and give people a choice. Your vote and commentary will be counted and put into a real time data visualization that will unfold over time and tell the story of how people feel and who are the most influential people on either side of an issue.
The Twist
You can vote directly on the site, or share the corresponding hashtags in social space.
You can participate with The Tylt in a meaningful way by doing exactly what you already do in social spaces. We have soft launched just on Twitter (more platforms to come), which means RTing, Liking, responding to or creating a new Tweet with the hashtag you support is a way of voting. You don’t have to change anything that you do on social networks you already engage with.
This is our social approach. We aren’t trying to create new behaviors or networks. We want to better measure the actions you already take to express yourself and create a sense of purpose behind them.
As John Herman notes in The Awl, Twitter is a kind of “public comment section for the web.” As the web becomes increasingly splintered into major platforms that don’t play with each other, creating a new closed presence would only add to the cacophony of noise. Our long term goal is to set up the conditions so that these debates don’t have to happen in silos, but can live across any social space. Each platform is unique and people engage in different ways, we will watch it all, keep these differences in mind but bring them all back to a central place to find out how people across the entire internet felt about an issue.
TL;DR
The Tylt is a new site interested in how online debates happen and how information spreads. We want to quantify the right signals, identify influential contributors and display this information in the right way to tell a compelling story that includes the voices of our community.
