Why atttend?

A few people have asked me recently why I’m building Atttend.

“Why another social platform?”

“Are you trying to compete with Twitter?”

“Why did you move from events to this?”

“And why did you initially say it was for product thinkers, but now it seems like it’s for everyone?”

So I think I should probably explain what I’m actually trying to build.

Atttend has changed quite a bit, but the thing I’ve been trying to solve hasn’t changed as much as it looks.

I’m interested in what happens when people actually think together.

Not just posting something and watching people like it.

Not just putting something in a group chat where the conversation eventually disappears.

Not just writing a finished essay after you’ve already figured everything out.

I wanted somewhere you could put down a thought while it was still a thought.

That’s basically what Atttend is now.

You come in, write a Thought, and people can Agree, Disagree or Extend it.

And I mean actually do those things.

If you agree, explain why.

If you disagree, explain what you think is wrong.

If you extend it, take the idea somewhere else.

So a Thought can start with one person and then turn into a whole chain of thinking.

Someone might make a Thought about AGI.

Someone else disagrees with one part of it.

Another person extends that disagreement from an AI safety perspective.

Someone from neuroscience comes in and takes that somewhere completely different.

Another person agrees with that extension but challenges one of its assumptions.

Now you have this huge tree of thinking around one original idea.

That is the part of Atttend that I’m actually interested in.

And this is also why we built Clusters.

Because I don’t think every Thought needs to be thrown into one giant feed.

You might want to think about AI.

Or AI safety.

Or AGI specifically.

Or something incredibly niche that only a particular group of people understands properly.

So you can create or join a Cluster around that topic.

The Thoughts you make inside that Cluster stay there.

You can see the Cluster on someone’s profile, but the actual thinking stays inside the room.

So now you can have a space where people aren’t just randomly talking about a subject.

They’re actually building on each other’s Thoughts.

And then there’s Tinker.

This is probably one of the parts I’m most excited about.

Because once a Thought has been around for long enough, it can become enormous.

Imagine a Thought with 200 disagreements, 300 agreements and hundreds of extensions.

And then those extensions have their own agreements, disagreements and extensions.

At some point, the thing becomes a massive tree.

You shouldn’t have to read every single branch just to understand what happened.

So we’re building Tinker into every Thought.

When you click Tinker, it reads the Thought and the entire chain around it.

The agreements.

The disagreements.

The extensions.

And instead of giving you a little summary, it produces a Paper that explains what is actually happening in that chain.

Where the original idea came from.

What people agreed with.

Where people disagreed.

How the thinking developed.

Where the different branches went.

And where the conversation currently stands.

And importantly, it cites the actual Thoughts and responses it is talking about.

So if Tinker says someone challenged an argument, you can click straight into that disagreement and continue thinking from there.

The Paper isn’t personalised.

Everyone looking at that Thought gets the same Paper.

Then you can talk to Tinker yourself if you want to understand something differently.

“Explain this part.”

“Why did they disagree here?”

“Explain this without the technical language.”

That is where the AI actually becomes useful to me.

It isn’t replacing the thinking.

It’s helping you navigate the thinking that humans have already done.

And then there’s Briefs.

This is the part of Atttend that is actually going to become the business.

An organisation can come to Atttend with a problem and create a Brief around it.

They can bring together people from completely different fields to work on it.

Maybe they need an AI researcher, a neuroscientist, an engineer, a product designer and someone from another field who sees the problem completely differently.

They all think about the same problem.

They create Thoughts.

They disagree.

They agree.

They extend each other’s ideas.

And eventually you have this entire body of reasoning around the problem.

Then Tinker can turn that into a Paper that explains what the group actually figured out.

So that’s really where Atttend is going.

And I think that’s also why calling it a “social media platform” doesn’t really describe what I’m trying to do.

I’m not trying to build another Twitter.

I’m not trying to get everyone to spend six hours a day scrolling.

And I’m not building specifically for product people anymore because I realised the thing I’m interested in isn’t product thinking.

It’s thinking itself.

The subject can be AI.

Medicine.

Philosophy.

Engineering.

Religion.

Design.

Science.

Whatever.

If there’s something you want to think about deeply with other people, that’s what Atttend is for.

So yeah, the product has changed a lot since the first version.

But I don’t really see it as abandoning one idea for another anymore.

We’re getting closer to the thing I was actually trying to build.