Likes. Retweets. Upvotes. Plus ones.
Every social network seems to have a way of quantifying how well the posts you share perform among other users, but one new site is doing away with all that in the hopes of eliminating performance anxiety online.
Potluck, which launched to the public Tuesday, is a pared down social network that simply asks users to share links -- no witty comments, no back-and-forth banter, just links. Once the link is shared, it appears in a notifications dashboard on the left side of the page, but unlike traditional news feeds, Potluck won't show the name of original sharer. Instead, it only displays the name of the link and the number of friends who have left comments on that link.
Potluck was developed by Branch, the New York startup behind the social discussion platform of the same name, which came out of The Obvious Corp -- an incubator launched by Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone.
"We’ve always wanted to design a system that enticed every user to engage," Josh Miller, co-founder of Branch, wrote in a post introducing Potluck. He described the new product as being a good fit for "lurkers," meaning people who usually "sit back" and look at what others share rather than share posts themselves (perhaps out of fear of judgment). "It’s incredible that these same users make up the 86% of the internet who have never published a blog post or tweet."
The hope, according to Miller, is that Potluck can convince this normally hesitant group of users to start sharing by making "'publishing' as simple as copy-and-paste."
Potluck is currently only available on the web, but Miller says it will launch on iOS soon.