Crazy Wisdom
Episode #571: The Like Button Killed Connection: Rethinking Social Networks from First Principles
- Consciousness & Philosophy
- Psychedelics & Inner Frontiers
- social networks
- entertainment networks
- Bien
- biometrics
- privacy
- Meta
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Timestamps
- 00:00Daniel introduces Bien as a real social network, contrasting entertainment networks disguised as social platforms
- 05:00Building with AI tools allowed bootstrapping the app before hiring a five-person team for professional development
- 10:00Social networks evolved into entertainment networks optimized for engagement and advertising rather than genuine connection
- 15:00The advertising model incentivizes dopamine delivery and algorithmic content over posts from actual friends
- 20:00Removing the like button and public comments forces deeper interaction through private voice notes instead
- 25:00Social graphs become stale over time because unfriending feels awkward, so people curate for weakest relationships
- 30:00Matrix and Nostr protocols enable interoperable messaging, suggesting a Cambrian explosion of new social apps
- 35:00Depth matters more than metrics—success means users actually feel closer to their inner circle
- 40:00Voice notes combined with photo sharing mimics natural storytelling behavior when friends gather in person
- 45:00Meditation in Ramana Maharshi's caves in India inspired reflections on silence, self-inquiry, and building products mindfully
Key Insights
- Daniel Segundo was inspired to create Bien after recognizing that existing social networks excel at breadth but fail at depth of connections. While meditating in caves in South India, he went through his phone contacts and realized only about 5 percent of his 1,700 contacts were people he actually wanted to stay close to, with the remaining 95 percent being noise. He saw that tools like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have solved the problem of maintaining surface-level relationships across broad networks of people, but there was no good tool for maintaining deep connections with your inner circle beyond basic messaging apps like iMessage or WhatsApp, which still suffer from having too many contacts with access.
- The fundamental problem with current social networks is that they have become entertainment networks rather than true social networks, driven by the advertising business model. Instagram only shows content from your actual friends about 7 percent of the time, with the rest being algorithmically suggested content designed to maximize engagement and ad revenue. The like button, while useful for maintaining broad social graphs and understanding your status in larger groups, reduces complex human relationships to superficial interactions. This creates what Segundo calls a circus-like experience where you are constantly bombarded with entertaining content rather than meaningful updates from people you care about, and the advertising model incentivizes this transformation because the product is ultimately about delivering dopamine to keep people scrolling.
- Bien removes traditional social media features like public likes and comments, replacing them with private voice note responses capped at 60 seconds. The theory is that hearing three voice notes from close friends provides more genuine connection than receiving 300 likes on a post. This design choice stems from recognizing that while the like button serves a useful function for breadth-first social networks where people want quick validation from large peer groups, it is completely inadequate for depth-first relationships. By forcing more intimate and effortful interaction through voice, Bien attempts to upgrade the quality of connection rather than the quantity, building off existing habits like sending voice notes to close friends rather than trying to create entirely new behaviors.
- The traditional follower-following model creates stale social graphs because people are uncomfortable unfriending or unfollowing others as relationships naturally evolve over time. Instead of this model, Bien uses a system where each user maintains a private list of people they want to stay close to, and if two people have each other on their lists, they see each other's content. This eliminates the social awkwardness of unfriending someone while allowing social graphs to naturally evolve. The current model forces people to curate their sharing based on the weakest relationship in their network because they do not want to offend distant connections or go through the work of managing close friends lists, which results in less authentic sharing overall.
- Segundo is building Bien on a paid subscription model rather than an advertising model to align incentives directly with users. He believes no one can build a compelling social network on the advertising model anymore because it creates conflicting incentives where the company must serve both advertisers and users, ultimately degrading the product into what he calls slop. The straightforward deal with customers is that if the product cannot provide value equivalent to the price of a cup of coffee per month through premium features, then there is no justification for the business to exist. This allows Bien to focus solely on whether users feel closer to their inner circle after using the product rather than optimizing for maximum scrolling time.
- Segundo bootstrapped the initial development of Bien using AI coding tools like Replit before hiring a team of five people to develop it professionally. He notes that with current AI tooling, if you can think clearly and understand the problems you are trying to solve, you can build solutions much more cheaply than even five or ten years ago. He eventually hired a designer and iOS and web developers to do things properly with a do it right or do not do it at all mindset. The app is currently iOS-only, built in Swift for a premium experience, with plans to potentially build a React Native version for Android if there are stronger signs of product market fit.
- Segundo's background in trading commodities and futures, along with his deep interest in Eastern philosophy and self-inquiry practices, significantly influences his approach to building Bien. He spent time studying Ramana Maharshi and practicing meditation in caves at Tiruvannamalai in South India, which he says has a profound impact not just on spiritual practice but on thinking about product development and participating in markets. His experience with a major trading drawdown in 2025 after running up a small account 25 times led him to this period of reflection that ultimately resulted in the conception of Bien, demonstrating how his various interests in trading, philosophy, and technology intersect in his approach to building a depth-first social network.
Episode transcript
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Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. I've got Daniel Segundo here, and he thinks that social networks are actually entertainment networks in disguise. and he is building a real social network called Bien. welcome to the show.
Yeah. so I recently I got kicked off of Facebook and Instagram. they tried to do KYC and I, and they gave me an ultimatum that I needed to get. Give them my biometrics, in order to remain on the site, which I said no to, just because Facebook has such a lousy history of, privacy and protection. And they've been caught before using biometrics in ways that they were, saying. Saying that they weren't. So I've gone into a very like, interesting, you know, it all happened randomly. First three months ago, Facebook gave me the ultimatum, and then a month later, Instagram, gave it to me. And so I am just like, it was really interesting realizing how much of a dependency I had on someone else and how easily they could change. It turns out a lot of people are in my situation and it's just sort of random algorithmic type of stuff. maybe some more nefarious things as well. Because Meta is definitely a company that is not very, well, as I think they have like $1.2 trillion in fines at the moment, from various governments, including New Mexico government. So super interesting place we're in. Regarding social networks, what inspired you to start this? Where, how did it, how did it come about?
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