The attention economy had a payment layer we pretended wasn't there.
We built Pleaz because the thing we are satirizing is not a joke. It is a description.
For fifteen years, the internet trained people to perform their lives in public, measure each performance in likes and shares and saves, and eventually monetize the performance through one of a dozen platforms that all pretend to be about something else. Patreon pretends to be about creativity. GoFundMe pretends to be about emergencies. Substack pretends to be about journalism. Venmo pretends to be about paying your friends back for dinner. Instagram pretends to be about photos.
All of them are about the same thing. People ask strangers for money in exchange for continued attention to their lives.
We do not think this is bad. We think it is honest. We think the dishonesty is in how we have refused to name it.
Somewhere along the way, the line between asking for help and performing for payment dissolved. The mother paying for her child's medical bills and the influencer raising funds for a month-long retreat use the same platforms, the same emotional language, the same photo grids, the same calls to action. The platforms do not distinguish between them. The algorithms do not. The audiences, increasingly, do not either.
We are not saying these are the same thing. They are not. We are saying that the infrastructure has treated them as the same thing for years, and nobody has wanted to point at that.
Pleaz points at it.
We are not a solution. We did not build Pleaz to fix anything. The attention economy does not need fixing. It needs acknowledging.
We are not a criticism. Everyone who has ever posted a birthday fundraiser, tipped a stream, or sent a Venmo request for dinner they hosted is already a user. We did not invent this behavior. We gave it a home.
We are not a prank. A prank ends. Pleaz is operational.
We believe that naming something changes it. Not always for the better. But naming it at least makes it visible, and visibility is the precondition for any conscious relationship with a thing.
We believe people should ask. We believe people should give. We do not believe either side should pretend to be doing something other than what they are doing.
We believe the interface matters. Every platform that hosts asking has an interface, and the interface shapes what kind of asking happens. Platforms that reward emotional intensity produce emotionally intense asks. Platforms that reward vulnerability produce vulnerability. Platforms that reward sincerity produce sincerity. We are trying to build a platform that rewards honesty about what is happening. We do not know yet if this is possible. We are going to find out.
We believe there is a real person with a real need somewhere in every feed. We believe most of us scrolled past them today. We are not sure what Pleaz can do about that. We are not sure anyone can. But we would rather be on a platform that does not pretend the problem does not exist.
Nothing we announce in advance. Pleaz is built incrementally, in public, without a roadmap. We will release what we build when it is built. We will not pretend to have plans we do not have.
If you are reading this, you are earlier than most of the people who will eventually be here. That is the only advantage we can offer.