New social network focuses on your voice, because typing stuff turns you into an asshole

Photo credit: Farrel Nobel / Unsplash.

Here comes a brand-new social network, but there’s a sense of déjà vu. “Tings was created to see what can happen with communication when it is stripped of identity,” says co-founder Fang Ning. That sounds a lot like Whisper, Secret, or Yik Yak, but Tings instead focuses on your voice.

Fang tells Tech in Asia that he liked the idea of doing an anonymous networking app, but felt that it needed to center on the human voice in order to be more meaningful. It soon became clear that the focus of apps like Yik Yak “was only gossip and secrets,” he says, but he wanted more than that. “With Tings, we challenge that being anonymous is more than talking behind people’s backs; we believe being anonymous is about freedom and equality.”

He goes on: “In relationships with people, I seek out who someone is at their core – not what their job title is or who their friends are – but their innermost self. I have found that the way to get through the superficial identity to one’s inner self is through listening to their opinion of different things.”

What Fang, who’s the startup’s CEO, seems to be saying is that to truly listen to someone you don’t know, you’ve got to hear the cadence of their voice to get a sense of whether they’re being serious, satirical, or silly. That’s why some have said that Twitter really needs a “sarcasm font”.

“Without an ‘identity’, emotion becomes the key to give life to your content. Voice is more straight-forward and carries more weight of your words with regard to emotion and personal character,” he stresses.

Word of mouth

Tings, which has an app for iOS and Android, allows users to record their voice for up to 11 seconds and then add tags to make it discoverable. There’s no text-based status update. That’s deliberate. Fang explains:

We did a test with about 25 of our friends. We asked them to read out some nasty/negative sentences. Most of them could not complete the reading or [he/she] was not willing to read it. We did this to prove our thought that, psychologically, people tend to be more careful of what they speak than what they write or think. Take swearing, for example. There could be some nasty words that you would have thought in your mind or written somewhere or to someone, but [would] have never spoken it out from you mouth.

To put it less politely (because, hey, this is written down), we’re very easily inclined to being dicks when we write stuff on the web or in a letter.

China challenge