These days, people are reliant on social networking sites for knowing what’s happening around the world. However, they are also plagued by invasive ads and fake news. That is why Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has launched WT:Social, an ad-free social networking site dedicated to sharing quality news article.
WT:Social stands for Wikitribune Social. It is founded by Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, who has expressed dismay over the current issues surrounding most social networks today. The motive behind the new social network is to eliminate fake news which have proliferated over the years on other sites such as Facebook. Also, WT:tribune promises to never sell data for ads and rogue, personalized algorithms.
Users will have access to a central news feed that is aggregated from the different “SubWikis” the users are subscribed to. They can post articles too which would appear on these “SubWikis”. To control the stem of fake news, WT:Social is giving users with tools to report fake news and misleading headlines. In the future, an upvote feature will be added to highlight quality news content shared on the site.
Instead of relying on ads to generate money, it will rely on users’ donations. Donations are Wikipedia’s primary way of making money, so it’s not surprising that its co-founder adopts the same appraoch to WT:Social. “Instead of optimizing our algorithm to addict you and keep you clicking, we will only make money if you voluntarily choose to support us—which means that our goal is not clicks but actually being meaningful to your life,” Jimmy Wales said in an interview with Financial Times. Without ads, WT:Social promises that it will never collect personal data for any financial means.
The WT:Social can be accessed via https://www.wt.social. Users can now sign up on the site. As a matter of fact, Jimmy Wales recently tweeted that the site has just passed 80,000 new members, which is impressive for its kind.
Now, https://t.co/aHzu6tpX5O has just passed 80,000 members. We’re about to send out a big email to everyone on the mailing list talking about a big push – I want to double that number by the end of the year. And I think we can double it faster than that. Will you help?
— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) November 15, 2019
(Source: PCMAG / Twitter – @jimmy_wales)
