Tedium - Social Network Drift 🧺

Today in Tedium: One thing I’ve noticed with the recent social media diasporas that have emerged in the wake of Twitter’s decline is that the people who make up those diasporas don’t really seem to be pulling in new groups of people so much as giving the types of people that are already addicted to Twitter a new place to go. We are not bringing in new members of the club, for the most part—we are instead doing the social media equivalent of a ’90s revival night at the local hipster dance club. New generations are likely hanging out in other communities, or at least trying to carve out a corner of the internet that hasn’t been taken over by lame people. In a world where social networks abound, what leads people to try to find new places to hide out, instead of sticking with the current one? In today’s Tedium, I talk to the founders of Picnic, an emerging social network, about budding communities and the need for generational “white space.” — Ernie @ Tedium

The desktop interface of Picnic, an emerging social network.

One of the fastest-growing new social networks found its momentum from teen girls

The social network Picnic, which is akin to a TikTok-meets-Reddit vibe, sports numerous circles dedicated to topics like memes, music, school, and anime. (The anime communities, with hundreds of thousands of members each, are particularly popular.)

Videos dominate the network, though there are some image and text posts. And while the web version of Picnic gives off vibes very similar to Google+ or Tumblr, of all things, the phone version definitely carries itself with a style closer to TikTok or Snapchat—with swipe-heavy engagement dynamics and even some light game elements.

The thing that stands out about it at this point, honestly, is the audience. The app has more than 3 million downloads and more than 100,000 new posts each week, and the most popular communities at this juncture are based around Gacha, Roblox, and anime. The audience is reportedly 90 percent Gen Z, which means that I feel my elder millennial status more acutely when using this service.

This is a network where teenagers, particularly teenage girls, hang out. They are talking about life, school, memes, and the things that interest them. There is a “news” circle, but not much chatter about the debt ceiling battle happening there—rather, it’s news about their lives and their experiences. Maybe at some point, this network will have more of a focus on the drama of the news cycle that’s usually found on other social networks, but today is not that day.

The real focus here is community, and the way that new friendships often build from shared interests. Nico Laqua, the CEO of the network who attended Columbia University on a STEM scholarship, says that he found solace in communities like this as a kid himself, when he found an early interest in programming.

“With Picnic, the motivation is that online communities are something that are very near and dear to my heart,” he said in an interview. “I spent my whole childhood on internet forums of various groups, mostly programming and stuff like that. But I think it’s the most beautiful expression on the internet to be able to discuss like shared topics with people that you might not know in real life.”

The 23-year-old Laqua and his business partner, 21-year-old COO Emily Yuan, built the network as something of a proof of concept, only to find that it grew faster than they were expecting, and they had to immediately scale the infrastructure.

“We were expecting a couple hundred, maybe a thousand people to test it out and people loved it,” Yuan, who left Stanford to help launch Picnic, says. “People, especially young people, really wanted a space online to hang out.”

An early factor that shaped the network was Yuan sharing the app with her younger sister, whose interest in the platform helped it spread like wildfire—and, ultimately, shaped its current audience base.

“She’s in middle school, and she and her friends all made communities, and those communities actually ended up being the biggest ones on the platform today,” Yuan says.

This decision to focus on a younger demographic has likely given the network a level of stickiness with its audience that other new social networks may find harder to match.

Other social networks do things similar to Picnic—from the Discord-style focus on communities to the looping videos of its mobile apps—but in many ways, the power of the network is in its ability to bring new groups of people together in a bottom-up fashion. Gradually, the communities that seem to show the most staying power are the ones developed by community members themselves, such as Gacha, an anime-style visual avatar format that has proven a popular way for Picnic members to express themselves.

“We see a lot of really interesting communities surrounding a lot of different topics,” Yuan says. “And each of these communities, they have their own personality.”

While the duo has funding, they are still doing things in a barebones format—Laqua speaks of splitting 12-hour sleeping shifts with Yuan to keep the network online and track any issues with the service, including content moderation, which is especially a concern given the current target audience. They are well in the midst of startup life—but their joint project has a lot of potential.

Everyone gets a piece of this watermelon. (Tanalee Youngblood/Unsplash)

Picnic hopes to seed its community through revenue sharing—and build self-governing communities in the process

Beyond an open and transparent approach, one way that Picnic hopes to differentiate itself and emphasize its positive intentions is by focusing on an approach that most community-driven networks of its nature have failed to offer: Revenue sharing.

The one social network that has largely maintained a consistent presence in users’ lives since the beginning is YouTube, in large part because it generates a consistent revenue stream.

“What YouTube has shown is that you give the people that are providing the value, any social platform, an economic incentive to, to produce long term value, they’ll do so,” Laqua says.

Community-style platforms have largely not benefited from this kind of approach, except indirectly—say, by offering a Patreon where one of the benefits is access to a Discord server. Over time, this has led to awkward situations—most notably when the creator of the popular Reddit forum WallStreetBets was removed as a moderator because he had attempted to trademark and monetize the community he built.

Despite users ultimately creating much of the value on many platforms, they are often cut out of the profits and growth they generate for these networks, which makes them more likely to depart for greener pastures. So by putting a degree of financial incentive in the hands of moderators by offering them fractional ownership of the community they built through a system of “seeds,” they ultimately are able to control their community’s destiny. If WallStreetBets launched on Picnic, it would have never run into the drama it faced on Reddit.

Laqua says that this borrows from some of the more decentralized thinking of the fediverse or Bluesky, while still making it accessible to a larger class of end users, who can do things like add AI-enabled apps, called pods, to their communities.

“We really want to support all sorts of functionalities, including selling stakes in circles and allowing people to really just run their communities however they want to in a kind of almost decentralized manner,” he says. “And I think that like that contrast as an approach with something like Bluesky, most of the attempts towards decentralization is more of a theoretical benefit than a practical one.”

Giving a degree of financial control to those that operate circles on Picnic could also take some of the moderation burden off the network itself, as the community would be incentivized to self-moderate the communities they’ve built, with distinct rules that allow for a curated experience, along the lines of what you might see in a Reddit community or Facebook group—except with the possibility of making money from it, if it’s operated effectively.

“We want to create a safe space for people to post; we don’t want any illegal content, we don’t want anything too terrible,” Yuan says. “But in the end, we want the communities to be able to determine what is okay.”