Eric Yang is a social-media 🏷️#founder who left Vanderbilt University to build 📝Junto, a nonprofit social network "founded in the spirit of authenticity." Junto was structured as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit — deliberately refusing investors so no third party could alter its direction — and rejected the standard engagement machinery: no like counts, no follower counts, with users curating their own feeds rather than being fed by an algorithm.
Yang's diagnosis of mainstream social media is what he calls the extractive paradigm: attention-driven targeted advertising funding public corporations with fiduciary obligations to investors, which trickles down into deliberately addictive design patterns, personalization that builds echo chambers, superficial social currencies that make human expression competitive and artificial, and centralized technology holding all of it behind a corporate firewall of information. He lays this out on "📝Extraordinary Levels," the fourth episode of 📝Everything They Know.
Eric entered the library through his Everything They Know interview on my friend 📝Ari Andersen's podcast.