A New Kind of Social App
By the end of 2025, two familiar tech industry names quietly went live with a social platform bearing a strange mission. Tangle app is a new social app created by Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, and Evan Sharp, co-founder of Pinterest. The app is built by their San Francisco-based startup West Co, which has raised about $29 million in seed funding led by Spark Capital. The founders describe their goal as addressing some of the deep emotional and psychological harm they believe mainstream social media wrought over the past 15 years.
This new social app is not designed to compete with massive platforms on engagement or growth. Instead, the Tangle app aims to encourage users to reflect on their intentions and build meaningful real-world habits. The version available now is invite-only, and the founders have made clear it could change substantially before a full public release.
How Tangle Works
Tangle has a very simple core functionality: “Every day it will ask you with one simple question, “What’s your intention for today?”” Instead of getting lost in endless feeds, the Tangle app prompts users to start their session by thinking about priorities.
The Tangle app warmly invites the users to express their intentions to a few selected friends who will then be in a position to give support or hold them accountable. This habit, when carried on for a longer timeframe, shapes the individual that thinks intentionally and behaves intentionally and thus the content consumer gets to be less and less passive.
This has not only the advantage of the app’s powerful algorithms that are usually aimed at keeping the users around as long as possible but also powerful content delivery.
Why This Matters
Though Stone and Sharp have already pointed out some of the negatives of mainstream social media networks, mentioning anxiety, comparison culture, and distraction as their main influences.
They think that the user-driven design of traditional social feeds has a psychological impact and that an intention-and-reflection-based design could be the way to new and different options. Their approach shows a shift in how people talk about social media wellbeing.
Users and regulators alike have expressed their dissatisfaction with the addictive design elements including but not limited to; infinite scrolling, engagement scores, and algorithmically recommending divisive or sensational content. Tangle’s design intentionally avoids such mechanisms and thus creates an experience that is user-centered but also subdued in terms of the level of engagement.
Founders’ Vision and Background
Tangle is a new social app created by Biz Stone and Evan Sharp. They helped shape two major social platforms and are now working to rethink how social technology interacts with wellbeing. Sharp, who leads West Co as CEO, has spoken about an eight-year effort to explore how social technology connects with the human mind and heart. Stone has openly criticised how some social platforms evolved away from original ideals and has supported values-driven alternatives in tech.
Their emphasis is not on creating viral content or amassing millions of users quickly. Instead, Tangle’s early version is experimental, tested with a small user community to refine features that genuinely impact users’ daily lives.
Challenges Ahead
Tangle’s cautious and deliberate method is put to a great test. Present-day platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X), and TikTok that have huge user bases and cultural appeal, any new social app must prove why it deserves space on a user’s phone. Tangle’s creators are well aware of this situation and thus have decided to approach it with an exploratory and flexible mindset rather than as a finished product.
Moreover, detractors question whether any application can veritably offset the evils inflicted by years of engagement-first design through a systemic approach. Presently, there is no definite way indicating Tangle’s growth or how its community will survive without the network effects that large platforms enjoy.
A Shift in Digital Values
What distinguishes Tangle is not merely a question but a doctrine: social technology should support humans in leading more meaningful lives. This application does not draw more attention or fight for clicks but rather it requests its users to begin with their own self. That transition might be slight, yet it embodies the deep-rooted transformation of thought about the way digital tools can and do impact mental wellbeing, either by supporting or undermining it.
Digital landscape is changing and Tangle is one of the few cases that will show us what we can expect from the digital world in terms of intentioned social interactions during the era of the nonstop and always-on connectivity. The Tangle app is not merely an app, it is an experiment in redefining the way we connect over the internet and the very quality of those connections we are after.
