Existing social platforms optimize for engagement. Engagement means time on site. Time on site means advertising revenue. The result is platforms that are very good at keeping people interacting and very bad at helping them connect — which is one reason why loneliness has gotten worse, not better, in the social media era. At the same time, online marketplaces have remained transactional: people buy and sell without any mechanism for the shared experience of an auction to become the basis of a relationship.
The proposal outlined here addresses both failures through two linked platforms designed to be built and operated together.
Platform One: ShareBid
ShareBid is an auction platform with a novel secondary market built into it.
A seller listing an item sets a desired price outside the standard auction that is conducted without reserve. On the basis of that desired price, shares in the expected sale proceeds are offered to share buyers. Share buyers are not bidding on the item — they are speculating on whether the final auction price will exceed the desired price. If it does, they profit proportionally to their shareholding. If it does not, they lose proportionally.
When the shares are fully sold, the seller has received the desired price and exits the financial picture. From that point, shareholders and auction bidders are the interested parties, with directly opposed interests: shareholders want the final price to be as high as possible, while bidders want to win the item for as little as possible. In effect, the seller has used the share market as a pre-sale insurance policy.
The effect is to create a prediction market wrapped around an auction. Knowledge, taste, and judgment are rewarded alongside successful investment. A participant with genuine expertise in vintage watches, rare books, or mid-century furniture can engage with modest sums and do well on the basis of that expertise. ShareBid is designed to be engaging and fun — a place to test evaluation skills and compete on knowledge rather than wealth alone.
On the question of regulatory classification: legal opinion consulted to date suggests that shares in the proceeds of a single auction sale, resolving within days or weeks of issuance, are unlikely to constitute securities under the Howey test, which requires investment in a common enterprise. This distinguishes ShareBid from existing art investment platforms such as Masterworks, which issue shares in long-term holding vehicles and operate under full SEC registration. The legal question warrants continued attention as the platform develops.
Platform Two: What Do You Want To Do?
What Do You Want To Do? is a social network built on a structural insight absent from existing platforms: that identity-based and interest-based matching produces filter bubbles and mirror relationships, whereas what creates genuine connection between people is shared activity.
The platform matches users not by who they are but by what they want to do — a project they want to build, a skill they want to develop, a thing they want to make happen, or simply someone to talk to. An AI layer handles introductions and light moderation, functioning as a skilled host would: placing compatible people in contact, prompting conversation when it stalls, redirecting when it turns unproductive. The relationship that develops is between the users. AI is kept to its role as tool.
The platform is funded by subscription rather than advertising. This is a structural rather than merely ethical choice. Advertising-funded platforms optimize for engagement — time on site — which places the platform's commercial interests in direct opposition to the user's interest in genuine connection. A subscription platform optimizes for the value that causes users to renew. In this case that value is real connection, which means the revenue model and the social mission are aligned.
The Connection Between the Two
The two platforms are designed to operate together, and the connection between them solves a problem that defeats most new social platforms: the cold start problem.
A social platform requires people to be present before other people have reason to arrive, and requires a natural opening for connection when they do. What Do You Want To Do? addresses this partly through declared intentions rather than passive browsing. ShareBid addresses it more directly: two people who have bid on the same object, or bought shares in the same auction, already have something concrete in common before any introduction is made. The shared experience of wanting the same thing — and the outcome of that contest — is an opening no algorithm needs to manufacture.
ShareBid participants who give permission are able to communicate with each other within the platform. From that communication they may, if they choose, enter the broader social network: discover shared intentions beyond the auction, find out whether there is something worth building or pursuing together. The auction functions as an introduction mechanism — a structured context in which strangers with demonstrated common interest encounter each other naturally.
The two platforms share a single underlying conviction: that the loneliness epidemic and the filter bubble problem are the same failure seen from different angles, and that both are products of platforms whose business models require them to keep people interacting rather than help them connect. The solution in both cases is the same — align the revenue model with genuine human value, use AI as infrastructure rather than perpetual motion machine, and create the conditions under which real relationships between particular people become possible.
Seeking Collaborators
Both platforms are at concept stage. A technically serious co-founder or development partner is sought for either or both. For those interested, the intellectual groundwork behind these ideas is documented at rextyranny.blogspot.com. Enquiries to rextyranny@gmail.com.
