Scroll social media for long enough and things can start to blur into the same polished loop – carefully-edited lifestyles, recycled memes, AI-generated filler and content that sometimes feels designed less for people than for the algorithm itself. Sometimes the internet feels less like a place where things are actually happening and more like a machine that manufactures attention.

Inside SEED CLUB, one of the most commented-on threads (160 posts and counting) since the community began is simply titled: “What next for social media?” For a lot of people, it’s not just about tweaking social media – it’s about starting over. 

One answer currently bubbling up is Collective Memory, a new live-posting platform that tries to pull the internet back into the real world. The rules are deliberately simple: you can’t upload from your camera roll, you can’t use filters and you can only post what you’re seeing right now. Picking up where BeReal dropped off, every piece of content – or “Memory” – is captured live and pinned to a specific place and time, turning the feed into a stream of moments happening across the world in real time.

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The Collective Memory feed

The twist is that attention on the platform has actual value. Instead of likes, users stake a native token called ATTN on posts they think deserve attention – meaning the people who capture the moments everyone cares about can actually make money from them.

Below, we speak to Eitan Matteo Caggia, one of the app’s co-founders, about why social media feels increasingly disconnected from reality, how limitations can change the way we document our lives and why anchoring content to time and place might be the internet’s next big reset.

What made now the right moment to build Collective Memory?

Social platforms, as they exist now, go against our most basic instincts. We’ve lost the ability to tell what’s real. Everything is engineered for constant dopamine hits, and the result is sugar fatigue: too much, too empty, too constant. On top of that, AI slop makes you question your perception of reality. Platforms accelerate this feeling because they optimise for their own profit. 

How does visual culture work on Collective Memory? How’s it different from the usual social feed, and where do you see it going?