This is Crowdsourcing Mornings! This post takes place every weekday morning and highlights one crowdsourcing project I liked from Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or other crowdsourcing websites.
Please read our crowdsourcing guidelines at:
https://geekalabama.com/media-kit-pr/geek-alabama-crowdsourcing-guidelines
Have you ever opened a separate window or better yet, created a new account to check out an Instagram photo because you didn’t want it to affect your recommendations? Or withheld a ‘like’ on a video you actually enjoyed because you didn’t want Youtube’s algorithm to make you a de facto subscriber to that video’s channel?
These small preferential actions help to personalize your feeds at the cost of closing you off to new things you might actually like. They also make you an unwitting contributor to the social and political polarization happening around the world right now.
I wanted a better, more inclusive social media experience, so I started building Adduna. It’s a platform that throws open the doors of cultural exploration by balancing people’s need for community with our innate sense of curiosity.
Two things make Adduna different: its focus on culture and identity and the freedom it gives you to explore.
On the cultural front, we know that social media often reproduces the inequalities found in the real world. It’s true that everyone now gets to publish their thoughts, but the voices that get promoted tend to fit a specific mold:
“Non-risky influencers — who are hired more frequently, and paid more — tend to be white, beautiful, heterosexual with long-term boyfriends… Generically, ‘risk’ also means content that falls outside historically stable and recognizable verticals like makeup, fashion, travel, and cooking. Success in each of these genres is also contingent on whiteness.
Adduna resists this trend by actively promoting content from a wider variety of sources so more perspectives and topics can receive the attention they deserve.
The other key factor addresses social networks’ reliance on algorithms that do the behind-the-scenes work of making recommendations. That can make things convenient, but sometimes you want to dig deeper on a specific topic without having a computer decide for you.
Adduna makes that possible by putting more filters in the user’s hands. For instance, what if you wanted to find science fiction books by French-speaking authors from Africa? Or albums made by indigenous musicians in South America? At the moment, there’s no platform that lets you explore the internet in that way. Adduna’s goal is to fill that niche.
As of May 4th, this project has raised $1,000 of their $25,000 goal. This project has 29 days left to raise the $25,000 or it will not be funded. For a pledge of $10, you will get app early access. For a pledge of $50, you will get three years of access. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/493768243/adduna-content-collection-for-the-culturally-curious?
Categories: Crowdsourcing Mornings Stuff
