Revolution.Social

What happens when the person who once architected one of social media’s biggest platforms decides it needs to be entirely re-thought? From day one Blaine Cook helped build Twitter creating the @ mention, OAuth, and numerous technologies that still quietly power the internet. Disillusioned by what social media has become, he stepped back to rethink it entirely. In this episode, he chats with Rabble...

From sitting next to Bezos to fighting from outside The Washington Post, Karen Attiah refuses to give up. Karen Attiah went from a grad student cheering on the Arab Spring to The Washington Post’s Global Opinions editor who hired Jamal Khashoggi. When she was fired over benign comments about Charlie Kirk she took to the internet and continued to use her knowledge of technology to speak truth to po...

What happens when you take Larry King’s studio, a crack production team, improv comedy, internet chaos, and the earliest generation of Vine creators? You got Behind The Vine . Eric Artell, the former host of Behind the Vine, joins Rabble for a deep dive into the golden age of Vine, the birth of creator culture, and the internet before every platform became an engagement machine. From interviewing...

He hit a million followers on Vine before “creator” was even a job title. Now Reggie Couz (an OG Viner) sits down with Rabble to answer the question that haunts every creator: Wwhat happens when the platform you built your career on decides it doesn’t need you anymore? From mustaches and wigs in his mom’s New Jersey house to Vine Meetups in LA, Reggie traces how he became an internet star and why...

Are we regulating the wrong tech problems? Many opponents of Big Tech cheered recent lawsuits that found Meta and YouTube liable for violating consumer protection laws and designing their products to addict kids and teens. But in the battle over user safety, is free expression going to end up as a casualty? In this episode of Revolution. Social, Rabble (Twitter’s first employee) sits down with two...

Is 2026 the new 2016? Back then, we didn't know that Facebook could win or lose elections, and become weaponized, that Gamergate-style harassment would take over politics, or that we were about to lose the creative, absurd, and sometimes brilliant short-form video platform Vine. Here's the good news: We're going to try to recapture the magic of Vine. Rabble’s new app, Divine, is available now at D...

When the internet is full of distortions, fake news, and AI-generated slop, how can facts and journalism rise to the top? Former BBC and Vice journalist Sophia Smith Galer has one possible way to beat the misinformation and exploitation. Her app Sophiana writes "algorithm-ready" video scripts for journalists and experts, to cut through the noise and help them go viral. In this episode of Revolutio...

From scams and spam to platforms we don’t control, many of the systems shaping our online lives feel increasingly broken. In this episode of Revolution. Social, Rabble (Twitter’s first employee) sits down with Molly White, software engineer, Wikipedia editor, and creator of “Web3 is Going Just Great”, to unpack what’s actually gone wrong, and whether it can be fixed. Molly has spent years document...

In an era of hypergrowth and enshittification, can venture capitalists win by investing with conscience? Today on Revolution. Social, Rabble talks to Union Square Ventures co-founder Brad Burnham and ex/ante founder Zoe Weinberg about digital agency, human rights, and tech that makes the world more inclusive and democratic.  "One of the broader objectives of ex/ante is to think about how do you mo...

The biggest social media platforms in the world have alienated their users and trapped them inside algorithms that only serve corporate interests. But there is good reason to have hope for the future of decentralized social apps, made for and by their communities. In this live interview recorded at SXSW 2026 in Austin, Texas, Rabble speaks with Rudy Fraser, the creator of Blacksky Algorithms, and...

Jim Louderback is a media pioneer: a journalist and columnist who went on to become the CEO of the internet-based television network Revision3, and later of the global events business, VidCon. Today, as the editor of the popular Inside the Creator Economy newsletter, he is thinking a lot about how creators can respond to AI. "What are the things that they can uniquely do that AI can't?" he asks. "...

Ben Werdmuller is the Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica and a seasoned technologist who has spent his career building platforms that prioritize social impact and integrity. In 2004, he co-founded the open-source social networking software Elgg, which for more than 20 years has served as an alternative to Facebook for governments, schools, and political movements around the world. "They a...

Alex Komoroske spent over a decade at Google overseeing key initiatives for ads, Chrome, and Maps, before running Corporate Strategy at Stripe. At heart, he's a champion for the open web. Today, as the CEO and co-founder of Common Tools, Alex says technologists must lean into ethics and away from short-term results. "We're in the late stage of this extractive kind of thing, where we're all just tr...

Anil Dash is a pioneering technologist, advocate for ethical tech, and former CEO of Glitch, who currently serves on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Looking back on his career, he says Silicon Valley has lost its moral compass because it no longer responds to shame. "You stopped being able to say, don't do this thing, it makes you look bad," Anil says. "Facebook never cared about...

Mike McCue has seen a lot of changes over the years to the open web. He was an executive at Netscape, which helped liberate the web from AOL's walled garden; he served on the board of Twitter but wasn’t able to prevent it from abandoning its open API ecosystem; and now, as the CEO of Flipboard, he's building towards a more open future. “I've never been more optimistic than I am now about how the i...

VidCon programming director Jacques Keyser says there’s a big shift happening in social media: Creators who once lived and died by the algorithm are increasingly looking for ways to “own” their audiences. “No one can take your podcast away, no one can take your newsletter away,” Keyser says. “Once you've built that audience, that is yours, you own that … if you are on YouTube, if you're on TikTok,...

Evan Greer is a director at Fight for the Future, the digital rights organization that helped organize the SOPA blackout and continues to fight for an internet where ordinary people have a voice. As a parent, a trans activist, and someone who's spent over a decade in the trenches of internet policy, she brings a unique perspective to the debate over how we protect kids online. “So many of these fo...

Rabble and Alice Chan, Revolution. Social's host and executive producer, share an update on diVine, the new social video app that's bringing back the spirit of Vine and real human creativity (no AI content allowed!). "We're not anti-AI," Alice says. "We just believe that there is great power in human creativity and that humans have kind of had that power taken away from them involuntarily."  Recor...

Camille François, assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, has spent her career at the frontlines of trust and safety, including as a principal researcher at Google and the Senior Director of Trust & Safety at Niantic; now the founding president of ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools), she's working to make the safety tools used by big tech co...

"My thesis is that humans invent things all the time, and for the first 30 years, we call them technology," says Ben “Neb” Cerveny, president of the Foundation for Public Code. "And then if they work, we call them infrastructure."  Ben was part of the original team that built one of the defining Web 2.0 platforms, Flickr, and he even gave Flickr its name. Currently, he is applying what he learned...

Bridget Todd is the host of the podcast There Are No Girls on the Internet, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, and a longtime commentator on how platforms shape culture. And she says the rise of AI-generated videos has turned her — an OG superfan of Vine — against short-form video altogether. "I can't trust that any of these are real cats doing cute things," Bridget says. "It's completely...

Happy new year to all! Today, we're re-airing the first episode of Revolution. Social, an interview with Jack Dorsey. We'll be back next week with a new interview about the future of social media. Twitter never should have been a traditional tech company, says Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. Instead, it should have been designed as a protocol — like email, or podcasting. “That was t...

When Bluesky hit its millionth user, it had fewer than 10 employees; today, it has more than 40 million users, but only 30 workers; that means that “everyone on the team wears a lot of hats,” says Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. It also makes it much harder to comply with regulations like the new wave of age verification laws, which have been designed for Meta-sized social media companies. “There's a whol...

Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist, author, and host of the Team Human podcast, who has been advocating for human-centered technology since the early '90s. He believes venture capital turned social media into a strip mall, but that its fundamental values can be reclaimed and re-invented. “It was a wonderful chaotic thing,” Douglas says about Twitter. “It was not a mean, treacherous, troll-baitin...

We need a more diverse approach to internet governance, says Jillian York, the director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). At the EFF, Jillian has studied the global impact of social media policies and advocated on behalf of global activists and others whose voices are often suppressed.  Today on Revolution. Social, she and Rabble talk about the cha...