Group chats in Towns can be configured in such a way that only people who meet certain criteria – say, have a specific experience – are allowed to post messages while everyone else watches from the sidelines. In this scenario, Rubin hopes, large group conversations will no longer be polluted with ill-informed opinions and fraudulent posts. He believes that the ability for someone to prove they are a real person using blockchain-based credentials, meanwhile, could help minimize the ability for malicious actors to manipulate public discourse with bots.
The whole venture is a gamble that people will want their data – not just identifying information, but details about their activities, spending habits and so on. – engraved in the blockchain in the coming years. If they wished, Rubin theorized, this data could be used to group people based on shared experiences and attributes. Cities can have a group for people who attended Taylor Swift’s latest tour, or those with cybersecurity qualifications, or anyone who often eats out in New York.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Joel Khalili: Can you start by explaining how you came up with the idea for Towns?
Ben Rubin: I started my career as an architect. Having studied the architecture of real buildings, one of the things that is still a driving force in everything I do is how you bring people together in very unique ways. And today I see myself as an architect. It’s just that the environment I work in is digital.
So it’s not just about creating Houseparty follow-ups or dealing with Discord and WhatsApp.
As we become more connected, there is an opportunity to create spaces for people that actually influence how conversations happen, what intimacy looks like, and so on. There are some things you can’t do with bricks that you can do with the digital world and obviously vice versa.
of course
One of the interesting things about Houseparty is that it was a double opt-in graphic – like the Facebook graphic – where I ask you for a friend, then you have to accept it. I’m not just following you like Instagram. But the moment that happens, any time you’re in a conversation with your friends — just like at a house party where you might be talking to someone I don’t know — I can go and say, “Hi.”
