VOTE on TAO Social's logo directions!

Newsletter #008
Contents:

• Logo Vote

• Is this “anti-oligarch?”

• How is the team getting paid?

• Partnerships

Hey lovely people,

I’m on the road, running on gas station coffee and the wild hope that this platform might just change the social media game. We’ve got 50+ logo directions to vote on.

Thank you everyone who submitted! Your heart is all over this, and we see it in every line, shape, and idea. This energy is what’s bringing the platform to life.

A quick note before you dive in: these are directional, meaning they’re not final. Think of them as napkin sketches. i.e., The raw first drafts we’ll eventually hit with the ol’ pretty stick. The goal right now is to get a feel for what the collective is gravitating toward before we invest serious time polishing any one direction.

In the poll, you’ll see two sections:

1. Logo Directions. Early sketches and visual ideas

2. Conceptual Directions. Ideas that don’t have full visuals yet, but carry a strong concept or design direction

Even if a logo isn’t fully fleshed out yet, if the concept speaks to you, vote for it! This round is about identifying the strongest seeds…what has potential to grow into something great.

A few things to keep in mind when voting:

• Simplicity is key. A logo should be instantly recognizable, even when it’s scaled down to app icon size.

• Avoid visual clutter. Busy designs don’t translate well at small scale or in digital spaces.

u/core-0 shared some good advice in the Reddit in his post “Why an acronym logo is a bad idea.”

That’s not to say we can’t vote for logos that don’t have an icon yet. We can always add or derive one based on the style of the acronym. The goal is to identify the directions that resonate most with the community.

From there, we’ll take the top candidates and either:

• Have our internal design team refine and polish them, or

• Collaborate directly with the original creator if they’re a professional designer and waht to bring the concept across the finish line

So vote with your heart, your eyes, and maybe a little intuition. 🧠❤️🔮

The “Anti-Oligarch” Social Media Platform?

Some people have wanted to brand TAO and/or myself socialist. Personally, I’m not anti-capitalist or against profit, but there’s a time and a place.

Social media is not that place.

Because social media takes the most fundamental aspect of what it means to be human (that we are a social species), amplifies it infinitely, and crystallizes that power at our fingertips.

There shouldn’t be a pricetag on that. Because social media is a technological manifestation of what we are: Together As One.

And that’s why social media should be treated as a digital commons. Something that belongs to the people it was built to serve.

So when we say “anti-oligarch,” we’re not saying “eat the rich” (because let’s be honest, we’d take a donation from Mark Cuban faster than you can say Shark Tank). Plenty of wealthy people see what’s broken and want to help fix it.

What we’re saying is that this isn’t about making the founders rich.

Let’s put it this way.

Imagine a battlefield. The titans of tech tower above us, each inside their own custom mech suit.

• Bezos rolls up in an Amazon-branded juggernaut, powered by Prime subscriptions and warehouse despair.

• Zuck hovers in on a sleek Meta exosuit, eyes glowing with that unmistakable lizard stare, piloting an inflammatory algorithm designed to make your aunt and your high school gym teacher argue about 5G and freedom.

• Musk streaks across the sky in a Tesla rocket-mech hybrid, firing off cryptic tweets mid-flight.

Each of them armored up, piloting machines built from surveillance, ad revenue, and the extraction of our attention.

And then there’s TAO.

No single pilot. No one person behind the controls. Just a massive, cobbled-together suit powered by the collective. An open-source, people-powered mech. A patchwork of late nights, volunteer code, and way too much cold brew.

When we say anti-oligarch, this is what we mean.
We’re not against wealth. We’re not here to demonize success.

We’re here to build something different. A mech suit for the people.
A platform designed to protect our collective power, not siphon it.

And if someone wants to turn that into an AI-generated video…
Let’s just say I’d watch the hell out of that.
Actually, we’d probably use it as our commercial and trailer. Any volunteers? 🙋

@humanexperienced

Replying to @bluesdave11 Love this question. I’m going to keep answering this until everyone and their mother understand how radically dif... See more

So…if no one’s getting rich, how is our team incentivized?

When our financial steward stepped away to take care of personal life stuff, it fell to me to figure out how we’re going to compensate the team. The result is a unique model of deferred compensation.

Here’s the deal: In a normal startup, early team members usually get equity, which means they own a slice of the company. If the company gets acquired or goes public, that slice can be worth a lot (or, you know…nothing. Startups are chaos).

But TAO is doing things differently.

We’re abolishing equity because we believe social media should be owned by its users. Not a tiny group of founders and VCs. That means we had to invent a new way to make sure the people who made this platform possible aren’t left out in the cold if it takes off.

Enter: deferred compensation.

Think of it as a time-based thank-you plan for the folks who stayed up late after their kids went to bed, carved out weekends to write code, designed beautiful things on a tight turnaround, or just gave a damn when no one else did.

Because let me tell you, Adam (technical lead) and I have brought in 30+ volunteer developers. A grand total of five of them stuck, with three of them touching code.

This isn’t easy, and the people who have hung in here with us are doing it for all the best reasons.

Here’s how the deferred comp model works (at a high level):

• It's based on time volunteered.

• It only unlocks if we hit a safe level of profitability, so we’re not jeopardizing the platform’s future or burning through resources too early.

• We’re building it to be fair, ethical, and transparent.

More details coming soon. We’ll be sharing the full plan publicly once I finish working through some of the legal bits with our lawyer and have it fully socialized with the team.

But know this: if you’ve shown up for TAO, we see you. And if this thing flies, you deserve to rise with it.

Because platforms should honor the people who built them.

@humanexperienced

Replying to @Glyphus86 let’s talk about incentives for the TAO Social team

People, partnerships, and the beginnings of an epic community

We’re in talks with another player in the space about joining forces.

We’ve chatted with Mayhem Marketplace, who you may know from TikTok. They released their MVP today so you can download it and check it out.

We’re talking to Farm Fresh 24/7, who’s developed an application to connect folks with hyperlocal food communities and promote alternative, community-centric systems.

I’m actually really excited to be recording and sharing some conversations with brilliant thinkers and doers in the coming weeks who are on a mission to create systemic change in our world. I’m excited to bring attention to their ideas, as well as the possibility that TAO is the place where this comes to life.

We’re actively networking and seeking the right partnerships.

Because pulling this off is going to take more than an MVP and some funding.

We’re going to need numbers.
We’re going to need community.
We’re going to need each other.

In Service,
Chiara