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Most social platforms measure success in one way: time on site.
Not time well spent. Not connections made, relationships deepened, or people genuinely helped. Just time. More minutes on the platform means more ad impressions, more data points, more revenue. The metric is simple. The optimization is relentless.
To maximize time on site, platforms have discovered that certain kinds of content are more effective than others. Outrage performs better than warmth. Novelty performs better than depth. Parasocial admiration — watching a stranger's highlight reel from a comfortable distance — performs better than actual reciprocal connection. And so the feed is optimized, iteratively and at scale, to show you more of whatever kept you watching last time.[1]
This is not a conspiracy. It is the predictable output of a system optimizing for the wrong objective function. The platforms are not trying to make your social life worse. They are just not trying to make it better, and they have enormous amounts of data and engineering capacity pointed at the thing they are trying to do.
The result is a specific kind of social experience: you spend more time than intended, you feel vaguely worse afterward, and the people you feel most connected to on the platform are often strangers you have never met and never will.
Researchers Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the term parasocial interaction in 1956 to describe the one-sided sense of connection audiences develop with media figures — a relationship where one party knows a great deal about the other, and the other knows nothing at all.[2]
For most of the twentieth century, parasocial relationships were a fringe concern, limited to the subset of people who sent fan mail or felt genuinely bereft when a soap opera character was written off. Today, they are a mainstream form of social life. The median social media user follows dozens of accounts they will never interact with in any meaningful way. They feel familiar with people they have never met. They mourn the departure of creators who have no idea they exist.
None of this is pathological. The human social system was not built for the scale at which modern media operates, and it is reasonable that it produces these responses. But it is worth naming what it is: simulated connection. It has some of the psychological textures of real connection — recognition, familiarity, warmth — without the reciprocity, accountability, or actual relational investment that makes connection meaningful.
The problem is not that parasocial relationships exist. The problem is that they crowd out the conditions for real ones. Time, attention, and the sense of social satiation that comes from passive consumption are all finite. When the feed provides enough of a simulation, the friction of pursuing actual relationships can feel less worthwhile.[3]
There is a distinction worth drawing clearly.
A feed is content delivered to you. You did not choose it specifically. You did not ask for it. It was selected for you by an algorithm whose interests are not the same as yours. Your role is passive — you scroll, you react, you consume.
Discovery is something different. It is intentional: you are looking for something or someone specific, or you are exploring within a defined parameter space that reflects what you actually care about. The matching logic is transparent. You are the agent, not the audience.
Vibe Garden is a discovery surface, not a feed. When you open it, you see a curated set of profiles and plans — people who appear likely to align with your values, based on their own published values and connection goals. The ranking is based on alignment, not on who has the largest following or who posted most recently or whose content triggered the most engagement.
Two models of social
Optimized for time-on-site. Strangers you will never actually meet.
My morning routine that changed everything 🔥 #motivation
🚨 Limited time offer — don't miss out!
POV: you've been doing this wrong your entire life
Here's the framework I used to 10x my productivity (thread 🧵)
Day 47 of posting every single day no matter what
Scroll for more · Engagement optimized
Switch to Vibe Garden to see what values-based discovery looks like
The difference above is not just aesthetic. It reflects a fundamentally different theory of what social software should do. The algorithm shows you what it predicts will keep you there. Vibe Garden shows you who it thinks might actually be worth meeting.
Usernames seem like a small thing. They are not.
A unique handle — @yourname — does something specific: it makes you findable by people who already know they are looking for you. Someone who heard your name at an event, read something you wrote, or was referred by a mutual contact can search for you directly. You do not need to send a follow request to a mutual connection. You do not need to find the right platform. You just need to be searchable.
This is how intentional social contact works. Not the ambient, algorithmic kind — the deliberate, directed kind. The kind where someone thought of you specifically and came looking.
The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar's influential research on social group sizes suggests that humans can maintain meaningful relationships with roughly 150 people across their social network, with much tighter concentric circles of closer connection (5, 15, 50).[4] Most social platforms are optimized for the outer edges of that network — acquaintances, strangers, audiences. The inner circles are served poorly, and intentional new connections that could move into those inner circles are nearly impossible to initiate.
Username handles, combined with values-based search, make the directed initiation possible. You can search for people by name or @handle. You can see their published profile — their values, their goals, what they are looking for in connections — before deciding whether to reach out. The connection starts with intention on both sides.
Most discovery on social platforms is one-directional: you follow someone, they do not follow back. You consume their content, they have no idea you exist. This asymmetry is fine for entertainment consumption and perfectly reasonable for following public figures. It is a poor model for finding people to actually spend time with.
The concept of mutual fit is different. Both parties have published what they are looking for. Both can see the alignment. The starting position of any potential connection is not fan and creator — it is two people who have expressed compatible interests and can see that compatibility before the first message.
This is not a guarantee of connection. People are complex, and values alignment does not automatically translate into relational chemistry. But it changes the starting conditions significantly. Research on relationship initiation consistently shows that perceived similarity is one of the strongest predictors of initial attraction — not physical appearance, not status, but the sense that someone else shares your values, worldview, or goals.[5]
Vibe Garden surfaces that perceived similarity upfront. The match score next to a profile is not a compatibility guarantee — it is a shortcut to the question "do we have common ground?" — which is the question you would ask anyway, just more slowly, in conversation.
Beyond shared values, Nalya now builds something even deeper: your Vibe. Values tell you what someone cares about. Your Vibe — combining your Inner Compass (how you make sense of reality) and Seeker Type (what drives you forward) — reveals how they interpret the world and what pulls them toward connection. Research by Maya Rossignac-Milon shows that interpretive convergence — how similarly two people construct meaning from the same ambiguous scenario — predicts romantic attraction more reliably than any personality questionnaire. It's the difference between two people who share the same values on paper, and two people who actually see the world the same way.
Three things, in order of impact:
First: Take the Values Assessment if you haven't yet. Your profile on Vibe Garden is only as rich as the values data behind it. The assessment takes about 15 minutes and is the foundation everything else builds on.
Also: Discover your Vibe through the scenario engine. Fifteen Quick Read scenarios (each takes ~15 seconds) reveal your Inner Compass — the lens through which you interpret the world — a compatibility signal that goes deeper than any quiz. See all types →
Second: Claim your @username in user settings. It takes 30 seconds. It makes you searchable by name — for people who already know they're looking for you, and for the ones who are looking for someone like you.
Third: Publish your profile to Vibe Garden. Your profile is private by default. Publishing is what makes you visible in the discovery feed and in search results. You control what appears, and you can un-publish anytime.
Free · ~2 minutes · No follower count
Claim your @username, publish your values profile, and start appearing in searches and the discovery feed. You control what's visible — and you can un-publish anytime.
Requires a free account. Publishing your profile is optional — you can explore Vibe Garden without being visible in it.