Verified Users Act Differently

One of the most interesting things that we've done with public, I think is by way of merging a brokerage where when you run a brokerage, you open a brokerage account, we actually need to verify your identity, right? That's like standard kyc, know your customer. And so by merging that with a social platform, we actually have arrived at what might now be the most verified social network in, in the history of social networks, in that every single member is actually verified. So in order to participate in the community, we need to have verified your identity. And that's been such an interesting social experiment in and of itself. Toby, because I think it's like historically the Internet has always been mostly centered around anonymity, right in the early days and now later with the crypto movement or whatnot. And we've sort of made a 180 on that and been like, well, we're going to operate a social network where nobody's anonymous. And so therefore there are no bots, there are no sort of like, you know, everyone is a real person. And that just means that the behavior on the app is incredibly, within the community is very, very different than what you sort of see from other social networks historically. And I've had, I've had the privilege to talk to some of the leaders of those kind of big social companies and I think they've been also pretty fascinated with it because it's something that they're not in a position to do, obviously. Right. Historically, it's only people with the blue check mark that has their identity be verified. And those tend to not really cause the issue when you're talking about content moderation on those platforms. And so just by having that mechanism in place, we've dramatically lifted the bar as far as the quality of the community, which has been also very important just because it's very like when you're having a community around finance and investing, it really is a quality over quantity game as far as the user generated content that exists on the app. And we always say that the community is really our way to educate people at scale because it's a community that educates itself. And so rather than us trying to run a publishing house and running an education company on top of that, we think it's much more powerful if you have a diverse community to also have diversity of thought within the things that you kind of like how people approach investing, et cetera. And so I think at the most foundational level that's been super fascinating to see because it just raises the baseline quality of the conversations and the stability in the community, it makes it much more humane. We even talked about the Gamestop incident. There was a lot of people coming in from a certain forum on Reddit where everybody actually are anonymous. But when those users kind of trickle into public, we've seen them very much conforming their behavior to the culture that already exists in the community. And I think that's a very kind of human thing. I know that Steve, the Red founder, talks about this as well, but like, you know, you will act differently at a dinner with your in laws than you do with sort of when you're hanging out with your friends, right? And I think the same is sort of true for communities. You sort of tend to pick up on the vibe in that community and then conform your behavior to that a little bit. And so when we see, especially in those days where a lot of Wall street best people came in on Reddit, they might have a cartoon for a profile picture, a username with a bunch of swear words in there on public, they have a real profile picture with their dog or their significant other, they have a real name and the bio might have some diamond and rocket emojis, but it's still presenting a much more human side of themselves, which again, just adds to the culture of the community and reinforces what it's really about. So in addition to that, we obviously have a bunch of tactical things. There's actually a lot of interesting things that you can do. There are many ways you can scale content moderation, especially when you're maybe sort of within the written format and you don't have that much live content happening. Live content is incredibly tough to scale content moderation for, but for a lot of the written stuff, you can sort of set up bots that crawl stuff. We have a lot of things that sort of run things through models in real time and alert our community members and things of that nature when there are things that they might want to kind of look into. And so long story short, there's actually a lot of ways that you can scale that mostly with code as well now, and not just with actually people, but obviously we also do have a community and a customer service team that is relatively, to our size, a relatively large group within the company.