Bond, a new social media platform, wants to use AI to help you change your doomscrolling habit

Popular social media sites are designed to keep our devices busy, endless eyes searching for retina-frying memes and dumb videos to create advertising platforms. However, in recent years, many companies have tried to take advantage of user fatigue, forcing users to engage in IRL activities, or offering non-disruptive features such as endless scrolls.

The bond, which was officially launched on Tuesday, is one of those sites. Dino Becirovic, founder and CEO of Bond, says his site offers an AI solution to America’s gaming problems.

The site works like this: Like a social network, users post what they’ve been up to recently. Bond allows users to edit their profile, sending what it calls “memories,” through a variety of media, including photos, videos, and audio files.

Unlike other sites, Bond is designed to act as a kind of idea generator for what the user should go and do in the real world.

The data stored inside Bond becomes the feed for its AI, which is trained on what kind of, action-based suggestions it can make for the user, Becirovic says.

For example, if you’ve been posting about how much you love Pho and haven’t had it in a while, Bond’s system can recommend nearby Vietnamese restaurants that are getting good reviews. Or, if you’re into heavy metal, Bond might say that Iron Maiden is coming to your city next week.

The more you write about your experiences, the more likely the system will give you better ideas, says Becirovic.

In other words, the system is designed to get you out of the program and back into the real world, where you can do more things, instead of just “rotting in bed” and “doomscrolling,” as the kids these days say.

The design looks a little like Instagram, although there is no real food. Instead, user profiles are provided in the form of group memberships. Clicking on a profile brings up the user’s latest news. These stories disappear from your profile after 24 hours, Becirovic said, but are stored in your private profile. Users can search their memory database whenever they want.

Bond’s team includes people who have previously developed major social media apps, including TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook, the company says. Becirovic previously worked at Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, where Bond’s founding researcher, Arthur Bražinskas, led the integration of user signals at Google Gemini.

What are the financing options for companies like this? Most social networks are just that major advertising vehicles -and that’s where they make the lion’s share of their money. The bond has no ads, so how will it change the money?

Interestingly, Becirovic sees how – eventually – users can license their data from the Bond database, and sell it to companies that want to use it to train AI. In this case, Bond would take a very small profit from the use of the license, thus generating continuous revenue and positioning itself as a provider of data to AI companies looking to change their models.

“The idea behind this license is that you can monetize your memories,” he said. “If we become this platform with the right motivation for billions of people to create their daily lives, naturally we will be a great place for people who want to teach seven-by-seven GPT, all other types that are coming in the future.”

In some cases, Bond will use the data it has collected to serve as a tool for creating products that link to e-commerce. “Users can choose to do this. If we can do this, we believe that we can take some benefit from sales and merchants by helping them to use it better, drive, and / or increase,” Becirovic told TechCrunch in an email.

Becirovic said that Bond will not sell user data for advertising purposes, and users can “delete any memories by deleting them from the Memory tab or using plain language on the Memory chat.” He added: “Users can also delete their profile if they are not making a profit from Bond. As the product grows, we will introduce more privacy features to users to manage their data.”

Becirovic said that Bond will improve its encryption over time, although he is not sure about the security of the platform: “E2EE encryption is very important for us soon after the launch.

For now, Becirovic seems to be focused on making Bond better. “Making money is not a short-term thing,” he said. “Our primary goal is to make users get the most out of their memories.”