Welcome

Building a social media platform seems like a odd choice for someone who spent almost all of his career working in public health but that was the entry point. I started thinking seriously about this platform during the COVID pandemic. What I watched happen wasn't simply misinformation spreading — it was coordinated, amplified, and in many cases deliberately seeded by paid actors and automated accounts designed to exploit the way social platforms work. People died because of it. Not as a metaphor. Actually died. That wasn't new to me. I'd watched the same dynamics corrode public health messaging around vaccination for years before COVID made it impossible to ignore. But the pandemic made the scale and the consequences undeniable. The deeper problem isn't any single piece of false information. It's that the platforms most people use to understand the world are optimised to make you angry, not informed. Outrage travels faster than correction. Conflict drives engagement. The algorithm doesn't care whether what you're reading is true — it cares whether you'll keep scrolling. That system has been weaponised. By political actors. By commercial interests. By people who have concluded, correctly, that a confused and angry public is easier to manipulate than an informed one. And it has been made worse by media owners — social and traditional — who have their own agendas to push. I'm not naive enough to think a small platform fixes any of this. But I do think the design of the space matters. Rules matter. What gets amplified matters. Who is accountable matters. Koan is an attempt to build something with different rules. No algorithmic polarisation. No anonymous bad-faith actors. No engagement optimisation at the cost of truth. Real moderation with real consequences. If that sounds like your kind of place, introduce yourself. Tell us who you are and what brought you here. You don't have to share more than you're comfortable with — but the more honest you are, the better this works. That's the deal. A note on the name: a kōan is a question posed in Zen practice that resists reflexive answers. You have to stop, think, and engage honestly. The character 公 — which you can see in our icon — means "public" or "shared." Honest conversation is a public good. That felt like the right name for what we are trying to build. — Steve, founder