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Virts (Social Media for Collectives)'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #5 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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What I love: "We are enabling communities to be a productive force, instead of endless discourse".
The goal if successful would turn the mode of social media from consumption to action, from an energy sink to a source of positive change. I think you've thought a lot about this and it shows from your screenshot of the site to the whole philosophy... but here comes the constructive criticism:
It reads like the setup to a pitch more than a pitch in many ways. You write "Virts = group identity + social feed + coordination" as the synopsis, and then explain a lot of the philosophy of what Virts should be... but I don't think you explain the key aspects that would sell the pitch to investors, but also importantly to USERS. which is: what is the mechanism for coordination? for it being more than endless discourse and productive? These questions remain unanswered but I'd think they are the core of what makes Virt an important and interesting project. Otherwise it comes off as another experimental UI social media that's a mix of obsidian graph and and a social media feed and a forum, which maybe that's it, but for some reason this seems like it wouldn't be a 10-100x improvement on Reddit / Stack exchange forums or discord servers where a lot of this functionality is available and it's already being used for.
I guess showing the differentiation between these more concretely would make the pitch 10x stronger.
Also out of curiosity I'd like to know which groups you think would be ready to plug in!
I think that the goal of the project is epic and I'd love to see it materialize, but I want your iron to sharpen on the iron of my asking for clearer mechanism, systems, etc. To be fair to you, you do say that you're in the research phase, so maybe if you haven't arrived at that stage you could explain some research questions and lines and pitch that as the intermediary step also?
I also think that for the funding it would be useful to understand the time frame , ie is 10k enough for 1-3 months? maybe give a scope? bc if it's longer I think you're underselling your needs and I think the mission would deserve more funding.
Hey! Really cool pitch — I see a lot of overlap with what I'm building with OneMind (GitHub).
OneMind is a consensus-building platform where groups propose ideas, rate them on a 0-100 grid, and iterate through rounds until the best idea wins repeatedly — that's "convergence." No moderator decides, no voting majority rules — direction just emerges from the collective.
I think we're attacking the same problem from different angles. You're building the social layer for collectives to exist and coordinate. I'm building the decision-making mechanism — how a collective actually arrives at a shared answer without anyone being in charge.
Your governance section mentions democratic approaches and customizable alternatives — OneMind's iterative propose→rate→converge loop could plug right into that as one of those governance options. Imagine a Virt that uses OneMind's consensus engine to make its collective decisions.
Would love to connect and exchange feedback. @DefenderOfBasic pointed me here since I missed the submission deadline.
Here's a 2-min demo if you're curious:
I think the high level idea is cool but this sentence jumps out at me: "Today, most people turn to Fox News, CNN, X, Reddit, or Discord to get your information about the world. Isolated feeds, algorithm delivered, extremely biased, and not very information dense." - one of these things is not like the others? A discord server is a self-organising ingroup community, exactly the kind of atomic unit that seems to be at the bottom of our hierarchy. It's not like an algorithmic feed. And people evidently like this and it's a popular form of organisation, and there is a fledgling network of inter-server connections that begin to maybe be the thing that Virts is trying to achieve. I think a key angle of the pitch could be, "how is Virts different to a Discord server/community slack/group chat? what would make an ingroup that currently uses one of these switch over to Virts?" - spelling out this difference explicitly would help paint a more vivid picture of the vision.
very helpful, thanks!
Cool pitch! Definitely some overlap with GMS. We should connect to discuss how we might work together or help each other. I wonder if your funding ask is a bit conservative, though. I also know of some online communities that may be interested in testing or implementing Virts. Would you say the ideal community to use this platform would be one that is very dynamic and hard to define, but wants to define the scope of interests they spend the most time on?
I think all of life, collectives included, are very fluid. sometimes a collective is organized AROUND an idea (“a book club for charlottes web”, “more passive”) and sometimes a collective organizes THE IDEA (a political party or some other ‘producer’ of material (including intellectual material) (“more active”)
I envision this platform allowing both of these types of groups to exist and commingle.
One example that I think of is like you and your group of friends from an irl situation. There’s not really anything *in particular* you may want to chat about, but the “idea” that is being produced by this collective is the friendship itself (maybe they’ll name themselves a silly name as a type in the platform)
I imagine a lot of uses will be this type of thing (especially related to content creators or other “more social” realms) which encompasses a ton of types of people, from research to activists to game clans to creator plurs and more.
I agree with the ask being kind of conservative. Originally the numbers were a lot higher but some said it came off as intimidating, so I “changed the scope” to just get the initial MVP. Another funding round will likely be needed as we are moving from MVP to scaling users
Super interesting pitch! I like it a lot, and I see some overlap with the GMS pitch, except instead of representing a single company, you're proposing a platform where communities can gather, and collectively negotiate with other communities, and organize within themselves. This concept actually seems incredibly promising to me, and I'd be happy to contribute to making it real. Reach out if you need more help building it!
thank you!