Rob Maurer announces SHARELOFT, a new paid, conversation platform

Creator and host of the Tesla Daily podcast, Rob Maurer, took the opportunity during his 1,000th episode (congrats), to announce a new platform, SHARELOFT.

After struggling with the limitations of existing platforms like Twitter, Reddit and YouTube comments, to engage in deep, meaningful and rich conversations, Maurer is launching SHARELOFT to fix this.

While these other social platforms allow comment threads, they often lack the sophistication necessary to include rich media, or spawn sub-threads and perhaps most of all, reward and recognise those with the best ideas. I completely agree that we need to see better communication platforms online and I’m extremely keen to see what features (and UI) SHARELOFT offers to resolve these issues.

Initially, the platform is launching in private beta, available to those most loyal fans who have supported the channel on Patreon.

Also interesting is the business model for SHARELOFT. Maurer details that it won’t be run an ad revenue, instead will require payment to access. While a specific cost was not provided, he does mention it won’t be out of the reach of most at something like a dollar a day.

Paid platforms obviously do create a barrier to entry, but perhaps the negative behaviour we see on basically every free ad-supported platform would largely be eliminated by charging a notional fee. It’s an interesting approach and also one I’m sure many will watch closely to see if it is successful.

During the 1,000th episode of Tesla Daily, Maurer also talks about the challenges of chasing the YouTube algorithm, admitting that it’s far too tempting for creators to go after ad revenue. Avoiding ads in the new conversation platform, really does mean users will need to find great value in the content and community there to stick around.

With Tesla being such a diverse, multi-faceted company, there’s never a shortage of conversations to be had. Whether it be reflecting on past results, or thinking forward on the possibilities of future products, there is no doubt, this platform will need to support a lot of simultaneous conversations and somehow surface the best to you, without being in notification hell.

I’d also love to see a way where breaking news is better resolved. Often when news breaks in the community, there’s not an aggregated way to see all the coverage and different thoughts around the topic. I would love a dashboard or river of content from live streams, to TikToks, to blog posts and Tweets, with the capacity to customise, or better yet, have semantic analysis to filter between negative (often to exclude), neutral and positive.

While there was no mention of it today, I expect SHARELOFT will have a mobile app to enable contributions from anywhere in the world, along with a great website.

Personally, I think this sounds like a really exciting project and one I’d love to try out. I very much agree with Rob that the Tesla community is amazing, often very thoughtful, supportive, analytical, and optimistic, while maintaining a healthy dose of realism.

On a broader note, the technology and social media space are ready for disruption in this space. It’s been more than a decade since the rise of all the big names and thoughtful, detailed conversation often gives way to the negative, let’s change that.

If you’re interested in SHARELOFT, go register your email at https://www.shareloft.com/ and follow the Twitter account at https://twitter.com/shareloftupdate