When I started building Anertia, I had a clear product brief: a platform for authentic self-expression. A place where people could share what they actually think, without the performance anxiety that comes with public social media.
Simple enough. Except that "authentic self-expression" is one of those phrases that sounds specific and means almost nothing. Every social platform claims to enable authentic self-expression. Twitter claimed it. Instagram claimed it. Substack claims it. What makes any of them different?
The answer, I came to believe, is not the feature set. It is the incentive structure.
The Performance Trap
Most social platforms are built on an engagement model. More engagement means more data, more ad revenue, more growth. And engagement is driven by content that provokes strong reactions: outrage, admiration, envy, inspiration.
The problem is that the content that drives the most engagement is rarely the content that represents what people actually think. It is the content that has been optimized for reaction. The hot take. The perfectly curated photo. The humble brag dressed up as vulnerability.
People know this. They feel the gap between what they post and what they actually think. And over time, that gap creates a kind of cognitive dissonance: a sense that the version of themselves they present online is a performance, not a person.
Anertia was designed to close that gap. Not by removing the audience: people want to be heard: but by changing what the audience rewards.
The Design Hypothesis
The core hypothesis behind Anertia was this: if you change what gets amplified, you change what people say.
On most platforms, what gets amplified is what gets engagement: likes, shares, comments. That creates an incentive to produce content that is optimized for reaction, not for truth.
What if you amplified resonance instead? Not "this made me react" but "this made me feel understood." Not "I agree" but "I have felt this too."
That is a different signal. And it produces different content. When people know they will be rewarded for saying something true rather than something provocative, they say different things.
What We Built
The Anertia platform was built around a few core design decisions that flowed from this hypothesis.
First, we removed the public like count. Not the like itself: people still want to know their content resonated: but the public display of it. When you cannot see how many likes a post has, you cannot optimize for likes. You write for the reader, not for the number.
Second, we added a "resonance" response: a way to say "I have felt this too" that was distinct from a like or a comment. This gave people a way to signal authentic connection without the pressure of a public comment.
Third, we built a prompt system that asked questions designed to surface genuine reflection rather than performance. Not "what are you grateful for today?" but "what is something you believed last year that you no longer believe?" Not "share a win" but "share something you got wrong."
These seem like small design decisions. But they add up to a fundamentally different incentive structure: one that rewards honesty over performance.
What I Learned
Building Anertia taught me something about product design that I have carried into every project since: the incentive structure is the product. Features matter. UX matters. But the rules of the game: what gets rewarded, what gets amplified, what gets seen: determine what people actually do.
If you want people to behave differently, you do not tell them to. You change what the system rewards. That is true for social platforms. It is true for enterprise software. It is true for any product where human behavior is the variable you are trying to influence.
Anertia was an experiment in incentive design as much as it was a social platform. And the lesson it taught me: that the gap between what people say and what they mean is almost always a product problem, not a people problem: is one I keep coming back to.
