21/6/2024

The last good vibes social media platform

I have a theory that every social media platform is destined to descend into chaos. It shouldn’t come as a surprise when we gather millions of people in one place and encourage them to share their opinions on everything.

Posts.cv is the exception that proves the rule. Unpretentious, with a focus on design, digital art, and career development, and featuring human curation, the most controversial posts I’ve seen in months are from people frustrated with companies ghosting them after job interviews. Even those are rare and have a mild tone.

At first glance, Posts.cv looks like a clone of the late Twitter, right down to the button placement in the UI. Features like mentions, likes, and DMs, which are expected in these environments, are all there. Let’s face it, it’s hard to escape the infinite scrolling, even if, due to the low number of users, getting to the end of the feed isn’t a difficult task – unless you get lost admiring others’ work and photos.

And that’s where Posts.cv differs: the content and the people. The Highlights tab, which showcases the best of the network, features digital UIs, personal projects, artistic experiments, discussions about Figma and other graphic tools, and – of course – pictures of food and beautiful places.

Posts.cv is a spin-off of Read.cv, “a dead simple way to create a digital resume” launched in 2020, according to Andy Chung, one of its three founders, in an email conversation.

Andy, who lives in Berkeley, California, has a background in design but has since split his time between product, engineering, and design.

The inevitable comparison with LinkedIn goes beyond the idea of a “digital curriculum” – although I like to think of Read.cv as a saner version of LinkedIn.

One of the company’s revenue streams is job classifieds, which companies pay to advertise open positions on an online board and in the weekly newsletter.

Read.cv also generates revenue from paid subscriptions (pay-what-you-want starting from USD 6/month) and newsletter sponsorships.

The “holding” has become, in Andy’s words, “a full blown design community where you might go to find design inspiration, job opportunities, hire new collaborators, or share and gather feedback on work in progress”.

Curious about the motivation behind creating a social media platform at this point, I asked if Posts.cv had anything to do with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter at the end of 2022. Unsurprisingly, according to Andy, it did:

We actually wanted to avoid becoming a social platform for a long time, mostly because we felt that this need was already being served by Twitter. When Elon took over we did feel like there was an opportunity to win over some of the design and technology crowd since we were already a professional identity provider.

Posts.cv’s look and feel, a digital commodity, pleases Andy: “The microblogging primitive has always felt analogous to the workplace in the sense that the conversation can naturally gravitate between industry stuff and regular banter. It helps you get to know people in both a professional and personal capacity, and that really aligns with our mission.”

You don’t have to pay to enjoy the platform. There are some advantages linked to the subscription, but the experience – both on Read.cv and Posts.cv – is very pleasant anyway.

In fact, you don’t even need to register an account to appreciate what Posts.cv users exhibit. I spent a long time visiting the Highlights tab logged out before mustering the courage to create an account and share my own content.

I asked Andy what the secret is to maintaining the friendly atmosphere of the platform.

“We’ve been fortunate that our product has resonated with such a positive and talented community”, he answered. “I believe a part of this is that we’ve relied heavily on curation for setting the tone of the platform, both on Read.cv and on Posts. It has allowed us to celebrate the best content on the platform in a way that feels more authentic than more algorithmic approaches.”

The curation of the Highlights and the Explore page of Read.cv is done manually by the three founders — Andy, Mehdi Mulani, based in Los Angeles, and Shen, from Vancouver, Canada. These days, Shen does most of this work, I was told by Andy.

Andy does not reveal any numbers, but he says that he and his partners want to grow — “it’s vital to the health of our business.” He believes it’s possible to grow while cultivating the positive atmosphere present today, as long as “people’s motivations for being there remain genuine and non-transactional”.