Matthew Mandel

Synchronous digital experiences feel underrated. As life continues to move increasingly online, they’re our best path to sustained opportunities for collective effervescence.

The baseline argument for their power is the appeal of watching sports. I’m not a big sports fan, and even I feel the magic of watching the Super Bowl. There’s just something so exciting about participating in an event knowing that everyone else I know is doing the same thing at the same time too.

I thought HQ Trivia was a fantastic instantiation of this idea outside of sports. Their live game shows created some genuinely electric moments for me and my friends in college. It was really crazy to think all of our buddies – and hundreds of thousands of others – were competing against and in front of each other at that moment.

Async platforms sometimes create moments like this too. Following stories like the OpenAI board drama on twitter was something I experienced synchronously with friends IRL and online.

As engaging as these experiences can be, they can make for bad businesses. Filtering users by availability at a given time inherently limits your reach. As amazing as HQ Trivia was, its peak audience was just a couple million people.

Twitch has found more success. As a platform, it has lots of creators streaming throughout the day, which makes it easier for viewers to find streams to watch at times that work for them. This approach has helped Twitch grow to hundreds of millions of users.

AI could supercharge the Twitch model. Instead of collecting a high enough density of human streamers to always have some streams for users to participate in, new platforms might use AI to create always-on interactive experiences. Jars AI‘s formulaic TV shows run 24/7, which means there’s always content for an interested consumer to find. But because the content of the shows is determined by the audience’s prompts, there is a distinct experience shared by those on the stream at a given time. AI creates the possibility of endless content streams that audiences can check into when they want and then experience live with others.

If AI helps drive synchronicity, does it weirdly become a facilitator of human community and shared experience?