If 2020 was a tough year for your brand, ask yourself: did I survive a customer boycott? Did a documentary make a compelling case that I’m destroying society? Did I get hauled before US Congress? Did I get sued by the Federal Trade Commission? Did my employees walkout over my actions?

Yep, it was a tough time for social media’s “big fish”, and it’s why we’re paying close attention to a crop of new challengers now, in case one of them makes fertile soil from the shit show. 

So how might one successfully eat the big fish in social media?

Twelv bills itself as “social without the pressure”. It’s a “likes-free” environment, removing the popularity contest of follower count, with a subscription-based model, so they don’t have to sell your data to make money. Interesting, but there’s no buzz around it yet.

Flipping the media format might be another way to go. Tik-Tok exploded when its 15-second video format made Twitter and Facebook’s text + photos format seem dull to a generation raised on smartphone video and celebrity culture. 

Which makes Clubhouse’s audio-only format interesting in a culture obsessed by podcasts. Its virtual rooms of large, multi-person, audio-only conversations have become the hot ticket here in Silicon Valley, partly because of the novelty of the format along with the bigwigs it has attracted. 

However, the downfall of Clubhouse might be the same toxicity that’s plagued the big platforms. It’s already flared up just months from its launch. Without any serious moderation tools and protocols baked into the model from the get-go, is it just a matter of time before the platform is swamped by trolls and becomes yet another place where women and minorities need to be wary?

It’s this issue that has us giving a shout-out to Telepath, which has taken a strong point of view from the outset about how to tackle what has made Facebook an untenable proposition for many. 

Telepath’s challenger-ness is not in the user interface or format. It has a scrolling feed that looks a bit like Twitter with the groups structure of Reddit. But you have to use your real name, and your account is associated with an actual phone number, which should keep out at least some of the bots. Whilst that might be an issue for political activists, it might be the difference-maker for the rest of us. If publicly owning your point of view helps tone things down IRL, then it might help clean up a social platform, too. 

Moderation will be critical, and Telepath is building software and in-house teams to bake this in from the get-go. Having absolute clarity in the founding rules will set expectations for users and clear boundaries for the mods. The first rule, for instance, is Be Kind, and it’s a point of view:

More obvious ones are No Porn, No Fake News and quite nuanced ones like Don’t Circle the Drain. Take a look and consider if this isn’t the kind of world we’d all benefit from spending more time in.

Before you dismiss this as some kind of “Mr Rogers does Twitter” deal, consider that one can still have channels that are strongly anti. The anti-Trump group is called #DumbHitler, for example. And there’s #NewYorkTimesSucks and #CNNSucks, among others. There’s also a group that discusses #QAnon without promoting its views on the platform, which would be Fake News, of course. And there’s the Topic and Tone rule:

You can’t experience Telepath for yourself at the moment, as it remains in private beta. But I’ve been lurking for nearly a year now, and so far, it’s a delightful alternative to all the places I’m trying hard to stay off.

As is often the case with start-ups on this list, it’s too early to say whether this will work. It is unclear what Telepath’s business model is—subscription, perhaps. And whether it can rapidly build a user base when it deems itself ready. But, arguably, one of the things that has led to the situation we’re in with Facebook is the lack of competition, which could drive innovation and a little more introspection in a company that can simply buy any emerging competitor.

We’re rooting for Telepath and you should too.

Mark Barden is West Coast partner at eatbigfish. He is the co-author of A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages and Why It's Everyone's Business.