I’ve always thought of social media as a crowded room.
Some people walk in and can talk to a total stranger within seconds, easily, as if it costs them nothing. The rest of us stand somewhere near the wall, wanting to say something, and mostly never do.
I don’t think that’s a small group of unlucky people. I think it might be almost everyone.
The wall has a name, and a number
In 2006, usability researcher Jakob Nielsen put a number on something he’d been observing for years in online communities: in most of them, roughly 90% of people only watch, 9% occasionally chime in, and about 1% produce nearly everything you actually see.
It’s been re-measured on forums, wikis, comment sections, and social platforms ever since, and the shape barely changes. A small number of people talk. Almost everyone else stands near the wall.
Social platforms didn’t create that wall. Crowded rooms have always worked this way, offline too. But social platforms made the room much bigger, then quietly decided that the loudest 1% should be the ones everyone sees.
A sleepless night, this summer
I’d wondered, for a long time, how the other 90% might ever get to say something online without first having to become the kind of person who can walk into a room and grab a stranger’s attention.
It felt like a real problem with no obvious shape to a solution.
Then, one sleepless night this summer, I think I finally saw it.
The problem was never the wanting to talk. It was the room.
Every platform I could think of asks you to speak into a crowd, hoping someone in it happens to notice you. What if nobody had to do that? What if there was no crowd to begin with, just one person waiting on the other end?
No crowd to walk into
That’s the entire idea behind One Reader.
You don’t post into a feed hoping to be seen. You don’t need the specific, slightly unfair talent of catching a stranger’s eye across a noisy room.
You write one letter. It goes to exactly one reader.
Nobody else is there watching, competing for the same sliver of attention, or being better at this than you happen to be.
I don’t think this fixes the internet. I think it might just quietly open a side door for the 90% who were always standing there, wanting to say something, never quite finding the moment.