Social

Twitter is a mess, so former employees are creating Spill as an alternative

Comment

illustration for Spill social media app; one person talking, one listening
Image Credits: Spill

Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell and DeVaris Brown met during orientation on their first day working at Twitter. They didn’t know that just a few years later they’d be building a social media platform of their own.

“We were the only two Black guys in there, and we were like, ‘Hey, we’ll be friends!’” said Terrell, who served as the platform’s global head of Social & Editorial until last month, when he was one of thousands of employees laid off upon Elon Musk’s takeover. Brown was a product manager lead at Twitter working on machine learning, but left Twitter in 2020 to found Meroxa, a Series A startup that makes it easier for companies to build their data pipelines.

Today, Terrell and Brown are announcing waitlist signups for Spill, which they describe as “a real-time conversational platform that puts culture first.” They expect that the platform will launch in about six to eight weeks.

As Black creatives and technologists working in social media, Terrell and Brown have watched as Black women, queer people and other diverse communities have powered new trends on platforms like Twitter and TikTok, only to be overlooked. In the same way that Black founders are unfairly dismissed in venture capital, Black content creators have had their work stolen and earn fewer brand deals than white creators, studies have shown.

“I think this is really a platform issue,” Terrell told TechCrunch.”Even before I left Twitter, over the last several months, I was just talking to Black female creators, talking to Black queer creators and I’m like, ‘How do you make your money? Is any platform supporting you? Does the idea of Spill interest you?’”

So, it was important to the founders that Spill builds in creator monetization features from the get-go. Spill will use blockchain technology to chart how posts go viral and compensate the creators behind them, but Terrell deliberately refuses to call Spill a web3 company.

“It’s not a web3 thing,” Terrell told TechCrunch. “But the use of blockchain is for both crediting creators and setting up a model for us to compensate them automatically. If they have a spill that goes viral and we monetize it, it’s really effective.” Spill hasn’t decided yet what the revenue share will look like, or what method will be used to track how posts drive ad revenue, but Terrell says that creators will “absolutely get real cash” in U.S. dollars, not cryptocurrency. The blockchain technology is something that lives under the hood in the tech stack, not something that users will be bombarded with.

Like Twitter, Spill will have a live news feed where users can post “spills” (a step up from Mastodon‘s “toots“). They’re called “spill” after the phrase “spill the tea,” and Terrell said that they’re leaning into the teacup motif. Even their website sports a Kermit sipping tea meme (which, by the way, was popularized on Black Twitter). Spill is also building a feature called “tea parties,” where users can host both online and IRL events, then get in-app bonuses to apply to things like boosting their posts. Users can still buy boosted posts, but Terrell says that, “if you’ve been creating and crushing it on Spill, we’re going to give you these things.”

Brown, who is serving as Spill’s CTO, is extending the company’s commitment to honoring cultural production into the very fabric of the platform.

“This will probably be the first, from the ground up, large language content moderation model using AI that’s actually built by people from the culture,” Brown told TechCrunch.

There is an established history of racial biases within the hate speech detection algorithms that most social platforms use — one study showed that tweets written by African Americans were 1.5 times more likely to be flagged as offensive or hateful, while tweets written with AAVE (African American vernacular English) were 2.2 times as likely. AI can’t understand the cultural context in which certain speech is being used, especially if the developers behind the AI are people who don’t understand — and have made no attempt to understand — the linguistic nuances of cultures beyond their own. But if anyone can change that, maybe it’s Brown.

“We’re going to be more intentional and be more accurate around things that will be deemed offensive, because, again, this is our lived experience or learned experience,” he said. “It’ll be much more accurate to catch those kinds of things that will detract from the platform that would not lend to creating a safe space for our users and our creators.”

Spill is building with a small team — less than 10 people, plus three advisors, including Dantley Davis, Twitter’s former design chief. Other buzzy Twitter competitors like Hive have run into security issues when building these kinds of products without a robust team. But Spill’s founders are confident that they won’t fall into the same trap.

“You’ve got John McClane and MacGyver here!” said Brown. “Phonz, on the content and social side, has run some of the largest and most successful campaigns in the world.” At Twitter, Terrell’s team won a Webby Award for Best Overall Social Presence, and before that, he led social media marketing at HBO. “And then you have me, who literally has run some of the largest web scale services, probably since the advent and popularization of cloud computing. This isn’t our first rodeo.”

Spill’s waitlist is live now, where users can reserve their handle and receive updates before the platform’s launch.

Read more on TechCrunch:

More TechCrunch

Tags

Expedia says Rathi Murthy and Sreenivas Rachamadugu, respectively its CTO and senior vice president of core services product & engineering, are no longer employed at the travel booking company. In…

Expedia says two execs dismissed after ‘violation of company policy’

When Jeffrey Wang posted to X asking if anyone wanted to go in on an order of fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral.

With AI startups booming, nap pods and Silicon Valley hustle culture are back

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to…

VCs and the military are fueling self-driving startups that don’t need roads

When the founders of Sagetap, Sahil Khanna and Kevin Hughes, started working at early-stage enterprise software startups, they were surprised to find that the companies they worked at were trying…

Deal Dive: Sagetap looks to bring enterprise software sales into the 21st century

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI moves away from safety

After Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to permit game emulators, the retro game emulator Delta — an app 10 years in the making — hit the top of the…

Adobe comes after indie game emulator Delta for copying its logo

Meta is once again taking on its competitors by developing a feature that borrows concepts from others — in this case, BeReal and Snapchat. The company is developing a feature…

Meta’s latest experiment borrows from BeReal’s and Snapchat’s core ideas

Welcome to Startups Weekly! We’ve been drowning in AI news this week, with Google’s I/O setting the pace. And Elon Musk rages against the machine.

Startups Weekly: It’s the dawning of the age of AI — plus,  Musk is raging against the machine

IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims…

IndieBio’s SF incubator lineup is making some wild biotech promises

YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube…

YouTube TV’s ‘multiview’ feature is now available on Android phones and tablets

Featured Article

Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

CSC ServiceWorks provides laundry machines to thousands of residential homes and universities, but the company ignored requests to fix a security bug.

1 day ago
Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and the buzz is palpable. But what if we told you there’s a chance for you to not just attend, but also…

Harness the TechCrunch Effect: Host a Side Event at Disrupt 2024

Decks are all about telling a compelling story and Goodcarbon does a good job on that front. But there’s important information missing too.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Goodcarbon’s $5.5M seed deck

Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.

Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy

A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said…

Healthcare company WebTPA discloses breach affecting 2.5 million people

Featured Article

Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Microsoft won’t be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.

1 day ago
Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Ember has partnered with HSBC in the U.K. so that the bank’s business customers can access Ember’s services from their online accounts.

Embedded finance is still trendy as accounting automation startup Ember partners with HSBC UK

Kudos uses AI to figure out consumer spending habits so it can then provide more personalized financial advice, like maximizing rewards and utilizing credit effectively.

Kudos lands $10M for an AI smart wallet that picks the best credit card for purchases

The EU’s warning comes after Microsoft failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools.

EU warns Microsoft it could be fined billions over missing GenAI risk info

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…

Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI