Once upon a time, social media was… well, social. Nowadays, it’s all about serving ads and impressions to people you’ve never met. A new app out of the UK, Swizil, hopes that enough users are annoyed by the current state of affairs and just want to go back to sharing with their immediate social circle.
The whole point of the app is heading back to private sharing, apparently with a focus on “a better way to stay connected, one that reflects how we actually live and share, not how platforms expect us to perform.” That’s marketing speak, of course, but a sharing app without algorithms sounds… nice.
Will Swizil stick?
It could also be entirely replaced with a particularly lively WhatsApp group, but the app’s interface could be the saviour here. Both Android and iOS versions of Swizil are already available, and they mimic modern social media fairly well. Download stats suggest that it’s very early days yet for the app. Any contenders in the space generally have to crowbar users away from their favourite doom-scroll providers. But you should be able to convince a few folks to jump ship to look at what the friends and family are posting.
What Swizl isn’t terribly up-front about, at least in the media release, are the subscriptions. The platform eschews ads and claims to be focused on privacy, but it’s also planning to make a bit of cash. New users get a month’s access free, after which they’ve got to choose between a Plus (R80/m) or Pro (R250/m) plan.
Those plans get users access to the platform, sharing access to the bigger socials (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and TikTok), and “AI-powered caption generation”, with additional AI features also likely. Users can also top up AI Tokens, grabbing 100 of the buggers for a R120 payment.
Swizil obviously reckons it has something decent here, given that it’s a new launch and already asking for cash. Maybe it’ll work for the company. Maybe Meta and friends have pissed off enough people. But breaking the internet overlords’ stranglehold probably isn’t as easy as promising that nobody will advertise to you, ever.
