General

1. What is UpTrust?

UpTrust is a trust-based social media platform that's meant for having deep and nuanced conversations about any topic, but especially difficult topics. Instead of optimizing for engagement and showing you things that will keep you on the site, we use your intentional judgment of other people's content to show you content you trust, and content that might bridge the divide between you and those who hold positions opposite of yours.

The result is that most people leave with a sense of time well-spent, instead of guilt for doomscrolling and fear and anger about the state of the world. Check it out for yourself by creating an account.

2. How does UpTrust work?

Like many social media sites, you can create posts or comment on existing ones to get conversations going. Voting on any content indicates your trust for that user in a given domain. We then use that information to show you more content that you trust and things that can be potentially profound (a concept we call "bridges").

All of this is based on each individual user’s voting, so the site doesn’t have an opinion on what’s trustworthy, what the sides are, and what bridges them. It’s all based on your conscious choices, instead of where your eyes happen to linger or what pisses you off. It's always changing as you and your trust network weighs in on content on the site. Finally, people lose trust when down-trusted, adding accountability missing in many current sites.

This is built to mirror how trust works with your in person networks: you might have fun with your climbing buddies but you don't go to them for financial advice, and your CPA isn't setting your kid's broken bone. And if you say something that turns out not to be true, or recommend a product or band that sucks, you lose some credibility for that kind of thing.

3. How do I create an account?

You create an account on our signup page. We used to have a waitlist, but now we're letting everyone on to the site.

If you were on the waitlist previously, you should already have an account creation email. But if you can't find it, or didn't get it, you can also use the sign up page.

Use your account to have fun, learn something, or find meaning. And don't forget to be excellent to each other!

4. Is there a mobile app?

No, we don't have an app in the app store. (Anything on an app store is not us.)

You get almost the same effect by adding a shortcut from your home screen:

Android:
1. Open uptrusting.com in Chrome
2. Tap ⋮
3. Tap "Add to home screen"
4. Tap Install (or Add, depending on what Chrome shows)

iPhone/iPad:
1. Open uptrusting.com in Safari
2. Tap the Share button (square with an upward arrow)
3. Tap "Add to Home Screen”
4. Tap Add

You can then enable push notifications in your settings from the app that appears.

5. Is it free?

Yes. Free to join, no dues, no catches.

6. Can I invite friends?

Yes! Anyone can join, and we'd love it if you shared it with anyone you think will love it. The more people like that here, the more valuable it is to everyone.

7. I can't log in.

Hmmm, let’s sort that out. Most common causes:

Your account hasn't been created yet If you signed up for the waitlist early on, your account may not exist yet. Check for an account creation email; if you don't have one, please sign up again.
Password issue Passwords are easy to forget and copy-paste often messes it up. If you already tried typing it manually or use a password manager*, use "Forgot password?" link on the login page.

If neither of these work, don't hesitate to reach out to support@uptrusting.com.

(Bitwarden and 1Password are both UpTrust DevOps Josh approved)

8. I never received a password reset or account creation email.

Usually this is because you used some sneaky alternate email and then forgot, so you’re checking the wrong inbox. If that might be true for you, try checking one of your other inboxes. Otherwise, email support@uptrusting.com from the email you plan on using.

9. What should I do if something isn't working?

Find a way to love yourself, and come to peace with the world while working to make it a better place.

Oh! You meant on UpTrust? Leave us feedback by clicking on the “feedback” link in the bottom left corner, next to a chat icon, or email support@uptrusting.com.

10. Is this a scam?

Sadly, this question indicates the state of affairs we want to change. But if it were a scam, would this FAQ admit it?

Check it out for yourself. The platform is live with cool conversations happening right now. A thread on Race and IQ produced 32 substantive comments without degenerating into a screaming match. Monogamy vs. polyamory drew 47 comments engaging the actual argument.

How It's Different

11. Why does standard social media feel so bad?

The standard business model sells your attention to advertisers, and the quickest way to get people’s attention is to make them angry, scared, or inadequate. Algorithms have been tweaked over the past twenty years to maximize getting your attention at the lowest cost, and that just happens to be content that makes you feel terrible. People who want money or influence learned to outrage, polarize, and cancel each other because that's how you win under those rules.

UpTrust runs on different rules, and is supported by a different business model: we believe that there are plenty of advertisers who really want the right customers buying their products. Advertisers that are not interested in pulling off more and more hijinks to compete for our already oversaturated attention. On UpTrust, what "wins" attention is what each individual has determined is credible and nuanced, so it has a radically more positive feel, even when people are disagreeing.

12. How is this different from Reddit, Quora, or a popularity vote?

Reddit and most voting systems are majoritarian: the reactions of the crowd decide what's visible. That structurally suppresses minority viewpoints and anything that doesn't please the largest group. It makes it easy for bots to game. To make matters worse, these systems are made to be as frictionless as possible, so this privileges majorities of unreflective, unconscious reactivity.

UpTrust is perspectival: the trust network you curate through up- and down-trusting decides what you see. Two people reading the same thread see different rankings based on their own trust choices. A Nobel laureate and a viral hot-take account could carry equal weight on a topic. It all depends on the feedback you give through your votes. And our voting mechanism is designed to have just enough friction to ask for intentionality.

13. Who decides what's trustworthy?

You do. No editorial board, no moderation committee, no AI deciding for you. Your trust network is built from your own choices, who you up- and down-trust. Like normal life, it's granular: you trust / distrust people on specific topics, based on individual posts. Credentials, life experience, and domain judgment can all factor in or not, depending on if that matters to you, and the people you trust. The platform doesn't define expertise from the top down (though we define and protect this decentralized process).

14. What's the difference between a “like” and an “up-trust?”

Nobody uses the like button the same way on any platform, and we don't expect people to use the up- and down-trust buttons identically either. The word "trust" does important psychological and cultural priming, then the incentive landscape does the rest of the work.

Your emoji reactions on the platform don't affect the algorithm at all. We think of them like facial expressions in an in-person conversation: they give you information, but not about whether someone is trustworthy.

Bridges

15. What are bridges?

Bridges are connections between two opposing points of view, according to you. The platform identifies where trust graphs diverge and prioritizes content that both groups up-trust. This means you see the most reasonable takes from people who see the world differently, according to the people you trust. Disagreement becomes more interesting and more creative.

Also, instead of "retweeting," which is a way of amplifying often the most polarized views, you can pre-reward bridging by betting your trust on bridges you believe others can make. All of this counteracts echo chambers, while still allowing for people to have radically different points of view.

16. What happens when two groups don't just disagree on values but disagree on what's real?

That's where we shine. With bridge detection, we do something no other platform even attempts. We surface the person who understands both groups' epistemic frameworks well enough to be trusted by both. Not a cat meme to diffuse tension, not a centrist splitting the difference, not an AI LLM-speaking to a fake balance; someone who earned credibility with both sides through what they’ve said. That person is almost always invisible on engagement-optimized platforms, because nuance doesn't provoke reactions and replies through outrage. But on UpTrust, they get boosted.

You can’t quite see it happen because it’s perspectival, but there are a couple bridges for a more than a few people on this thread about Brian Thompson's assassination.

17. Won't this just create echo chambers?

Thanks to bridges, your feed includes perspectives where someone earned credibility across people you trust and people you don’t trust. This means you get to see the most accessible differing opinion on any given topic, according to you.

We like to think that strong subcultures can be like healthy cell walls; they have distinction and boundaries, but they’re in communication with other subcultures so they don’t become isolated, starving or festering. Bridge detection does this.

In action: here’s a post about gender categories, where people with fundamentally different worldviews both found the same contributor worth hearing.

Trust and Safety

18. Is this a social credit score like Black Mirror or China's system?
Heck no, it’s closer to the opposite. China's social credit system assigns a universal score: one number, state-controlled, centralized consequences. UpTrust has no universal score. No authority assigns one. Your trust network is yours alone, based on who you find credible, invisible to any central power. Someone else's network looks completely different. There's no single number following you around; there are a ton of numbers. You can see who’s the most trusted in a particular group or topic, based on the people in that group or topic. This is always relative to a particular collective, like being “the fastest runner in Texas” or “The most trusted in Occlumency at Hogwarts.”

19. Does brutal honesty or contrarian thinking get suppressed?

It totally depends on each individual person’s trust network, but in general, if credible people vouch for contrarian thinking, it rises. What gets suppressed is provocation that isn't credible to anyone in your trust network. Here’s an example of a charitable, intellectually serious take on why someone might vote for Trump written for a progressively oriented person.

20. What stops bots or coordinated groups from gaming the trust rankings?

Trust is perspectival, not universal. Other people’s votes only affect your feed when they come from people you've chosen to trust. Coordinated groups can only shape the feeds of people who already trust them. Faking genuine trust at scale across independent users, each making their own choices, is genuinely hard — and basically impossible to maintain, because then you'd actually be trustworthy.

Also, what’s stopping bots gaming the engagement metrics on your current favorite platform (if it’s not UpTrust?)

21. What about AI? How are you going to stop it?

We're not. Stopping AI from participating in online discourse is getting harder to the point of impossibility. Instead we designed UpTrust to make AI beneficial to individuals, the platform, and civilization. If slot-machine engagement is your metric, AI slop is the default outcome. With trust and nuance as your metrics, better collective sense-making is the outcome.

22. What stops a mob or cancel campaign from destroying someone's reputation?

No platform eliminates mobs completely. What UpTrust's architecture does is limit the impact instead of pouring fuel on the fire.

On engagement-ranked platforms, pile-ons get amplified because outrage generates reactions, reactions generate visibility, and visibility generates ad revenue. The mob is the product.

On UpTrust, coordinated attacks are much harder to scale. There's no universal score to flood. Even a skilled, coordinated attack only affects someone's standing in the trust networks of the people who coordinated it — and those people already distrust the target, so nothing has changed for them. Someone outside that group won't see the frenzy promoted to their feed just because it's generating heat. The incentive to manufacture mob energy doesn't exist here.

23. Is there content moderation?

Yes — for legal requirements and safety basics (threats, illegal content, spam). But moderation isn't the primary mechanism for information quality. Up- and down- trusting decentralize moderation: new quality content gets promoted by trustworthy people; untrustworthy content simply doesn’t rise up to visibility on more than a few people’s feeds.

So, use the down-vote! It’s scary, but we think it’s good for you, like setting good boundaries and holding yourself accountable. It helps us find bridges too.

24. Will my feed be full of religious or political content I don't want?

Your feed is shaped by your trust choices. If the people you trust aren't vouching for that content, it won't surface. 😇

For Creators and Advertisers

25. What about creators? Why would they use this?

Right now creators face an impossible choice: provoke or be irrelevant. Creators y’all know you’ve gotten good at clickbait headlines and provocative thumbnails. You *could* try to build an audience by being excellent, but you're competing with an algorithm that rewards kids committing felonies on camera with viral distribution, which then gets them venture capital contracts.

UpTrust changes what "winning" attention looks like. Trust scoring lets creators build audiences as recognized experts in specific domains rather than race-to-the-bottom entertainers competing for reactions. You don't need the biggest audience anymore. You just need to be trustworthy to the right audience.

26. How does UpTrust make money?

It doesn't yet. The planned model is a trust-based advertising marketplace. Instead of flooding 100,000 people with ads and hoping they eventually care, advertisers work through creators who have earned trust with specific audiences on specific topics. You only see ads vouched for by someone you trust, and they stand to lose reputation if you don't find the ad credible. Creators won't accept ads that would tank their trust, so advertisers have to make genuinely good ads for trustable products. When they do, they get a pre-sold audience with dramatically higher conversion. Shill something that sucks and the system punishes you — same way it works in real life, but with structural enforcement.

27. Do users get paid?

Not yet. As the trust-based ad marketplace develops, trusted voices will have influence and visibility with real economic value. If that's what you're looking for, you may want to check back later.

The Bigger Picture

28. Every system gets corrupted eventually, what's the safeguard here?

Two structural ones. First, the trust graph is distributed and user-controlled. There's no central authority that can be captured to shift what everyone sees. Second, UpTrust is a Public Benefit Corporation, legally required to balance profit with its mission. It cannot quietly pivot to engagement-maximization without violating its charter.

For more, check out this conversation between our advisor Eric Ries and UpTrust cofounder Pete Michaud about the legal structures that protect missions.

29. No but really, why won't this just turn into every other platform?

Every platform that tried to fix social media with better rules failed, because rules fight incentives and incentives are more powerful, especially at the scale of millions of people. UpTrust doesn't layer nicer rules on top of the same reward structure. Visibility is earned through trust, not engagement, for users, creators, and advertisers. Everyone benefits from playing long games and gets punished for betraying trust.

It’s surprising; thanks to UpTrust all of us have had little insights about unconscious ways we’ve been engaging the enragement system on other platforms. So there’s often a period of adjustment for new users, but on UpTrust genuinely contentious topics don't devolve, because there's no structural reward for making them devolve.

But I mean, don’t take our word for it, please decide for yourself. Here's a provocative thread on whether democracy is broken.

30. What happens when Facebook or X just copies this?

They can't without gutting their own business model. Engagement-based ranking is how they sell ads. Trust-based ranking would suppress the most reaction-generating content that currently drives their single bottom-line: increasing quarterly profit. Every major platform is locked into an optimization loop where changing direction would destroy them. Even a visionary founder who saw the long-term gains couldn't afford the short-term cost of the transition. UpTrust doesn't have that problem because it was built from scratch on a different reward structure, and we allow people to leverage trustworthiness rather than nervous system hijacking to get value (money, attention, status, etc).

And if they do, that's great! REALLY, that's its own kind of success for UpTrust's contribution to online discourse.

31. Do lurkers get value from it?

Yes. You don't have to post to benefit from a better-ranked information environment. Reading here is a different experience from reading anywhere else. If you never cast a single vote, the rewards make it so even people who just want to “win” attention have to produce more quality content.

32. What doesn't work well yet?

The network is still small. UpTrust's trust graph gets more powerful with more users making more trust judgments. If you're into obscure topics, your trust graph will be thin at first because fewer people are voting in those areas. It's early, but what's there works.

Also, if you see an app in the appstore it’s not us.

About

33. Who created UpTrust?

UpTrust is built and owned by the UpTrust team and a few angel investors. We are an independent organization with no affiliation to any major platform. It's structured as a Public Benefit Corporation, which means it's legally required to balance profit with its stated mission. Cofounders are Jordan Myska Allen, Pete Michaud, and Blake Borgeson. Full team and org info can be found on our corporate site.

34. Is UpTrust affiliated with the legal tech company called Uptrust, or PAC text surveys, or uptrust.co?

No. UpTrust uptrusting.com and uptrusthq.com is an independent social media platform with no connection to any of those. The legal tech company was acquired and no longer operates under that name.

35. Where can I learn more?

The best way to learn more is to spend some time having a conversation on UpTrusting.com.

To learn more about the team and mission, head to our org site at uptrusthq.com.

And for some longer arguments in conversation format, you might find these podcasts interesting: uptrusthq.com/podcasts.

community building and user engagement

UpTrust Frequently Asked Questions