If there is one certainty of social media in 2025, it’s this: Rage clicks rule. Hyperbole, hate, brash deception—it’s all par for the course—and often rewarded with virality.
But Sez Us, an app just launched by veteran Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, believes it’s possible to change that by punishing users who shitpost for the sake of provocation.
The timing may be just right. America is entering an age of oligarchy with a rising wave of right-wing extremism taking hold of global politics. Platforms like Truth Social and X now operate as effective propaganda machines, recasting culture-war issues over immigration, DEI, and trans rights as boogeymen in President Trump’s new vision of America, which is really just a very old version of America. As the next era of social media comes into view, emerging platforms also have an opportunity to rise to the moment. Can Sez Us, which is positioning itself as the antithesis to X, facilitate a better way forward?
“If you bring back responsibility, ownership, and reputation, then suddenly all the incentives that we have in the real world are back,” says Yevgeny Simkin, Sez Us’ cofounder and chief product officer.
Even as online discourse has devolved into rabid spectacle, platforms like Bluesky have shown there is an appetite for a more civil kind of conversation. Rather than boosting any post that’s getting rage clicks, Sez Us uses what its creators call a “reputation engine,” a feature that allows you to rate another user’s posts on the platform across five key areas: approval, influence, insightfulness, relevance, and politeness.
On the app, ratings determine a user’s reputation score and overall visibility. The higher the score, the more reach you have in the community. Users can also control who replies to them based on a person’s score, with low-scoring users penalized by having less influence. All posts are visible but you can block users from replying, for example, if they don’t have high-approval ratings. Ultimately, ratings are designed to deprioritize engagement based around viral moments.
“It’s not about the moderators coming in and saying ‘you’re bad,’” Simkin says. “It’s about the community saying ‘we don’t like what you’re saying.’ Then I know that I have to temper how I say things. I have to be more polite. I have to be less bombastic.”
In the race to perfect social media, there has never been a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to moderation—for those who still bother with it. Scale can make this task even more difficult as a platform’s user base grows. For Simkin and his team, the idea was to build a platform that would “bring to the fore all the ways in which social media should be running rather than the way it has been,” he says. “The camel’s back was broken by the straw of Elon [Musk] buying Twitter,” and suddenly a whole new world seemed possible.
The fracturing of Twitter, since rebranded as X, kicked off an arms race among techies who had all sorts of ideas about the next phase of social media, and how to define it. It was during this period, in 2022, that the concept for Sez Us was born, grounded in the lofty goal of bringing back civil discourse.
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