Motivation of Atrable Project

Inspired by authentic vloggers on YouTube.

I love watching authentic vlogs from people like Casey Neistat and Pani Bottle (빠니보틀). One day, I realized that I felt more intimate with those vloggers than with some of my "friends"; I could know the vloggers' life stories by watching their vlogs, which helped me feel close to them. I wondered if there's a way to use vlog to get closer to my friends and form real friendships.

How do we make real friends?

We deepen our friendships when we spend time together and understand each other's lives.

I thought social networking platforms would help me do that by making it easier to share genuine stories together. Sadly (or luckily for me 🤓), there was no such platform, so I'm making one!

Audio & video instead of photos

I already know what my friends look like. I don't know their life stories though, and that's what I want to learn about while "connecting" with them.

With audio, you can't "see" anything; instead, you can only "listen" to what's going on. That makes it easier for us to focus on the story rather than appearances.

Still, audio-only contents are kinda boring, so you can turn on the camera and record a video on Atrable. The video is shown in a tiny window so that you'll focus more on the story itself rather than the tiny tiny visual details.

Aiming to fix all the issues of traditional social media platforms 😼

I don't know if that's physically possible, but I know that sharing honest stories and making real friends are the keys to solving most social media issues.

Example

• Hate would disappear when people get to understand each others' lives by listening to their diaries.
• Depression would be reduced when people get to talk with their friends about their experiences.
• Jealousy would be reduced when people genuinely share their experiences through audio/video diaries, instead of showing and bragging about those through photos.

I'm working 7 days a week to make Atrable be the place where you feel welcome and safe to share your personal stories with your friends. Atrable is still in development, but if you're interested, come try using it!

- Seihyun (Shawn) Lee, May 2023