Haven Social
So I found this youtube video where two VTubers, VildrArt and Inkiio, do a livestream interview with a man named William Lavelle, an American Midwest citizen with a engineering degree who is the founder of a new social platform in the works called “Haven Social.” You might have seen me reblog this before, but if you haven’t or if you’re interested, lemme share all I can.
Please note that this is a trimmed down version of the original which is just over 2 1/2 hours long. If you want to hear the full version where you hear parts of questions or even full questions that were cut for time, please go watch the full interview found here
Though, If you’d rather read it here instead of watching the video. I can easily transcribe a summary each question for you to have an easier flow to your reading pleasure. All of it will be found under the cut so that I don’t hog people’s timelines.
I hope you consider looking into this new platform that is in development and that you at the very least share it with your friends who have been looking for a place to seek refuge from all this AI slop. And if you don’t want to read the interview below, I’ll link the Kickstarter up here.
Social media that prevents AI from stealing your art, your biometrics, and your privacy.
What is Haven Social?
Anti-AI
Consumer Friendly
Protection from:
Facial Recognition Surveillance (think Clearview.ai and tracking your face all across the internet all cause a camera caught you walking on the sidewalk)
AI training platforms and programs
AI scrappers via AI poison
Algospeak (The reason this went from a school project to now needing funding to scale up what is now a developing social platform)
How is Haven different from other Social Platforms?
Protection from facial recognition mass surveillance
Protection from AI art scrappers
Protection from other platforms from forcing AI content down your throat
Fully transparent with how the algorithm works and not try to sneakily change it in the background
William Lavelle then makes an analogy where all current platforms are like washing machines where they use/require an app or connect to the internet, and so much attention is given to such features that the older washing machine models are better by comparison. Haven is one of those older washing machine models.
Then he says that every social platform today is run by a billionaire oligarch with ties to the current administration, which leads algorithms to shift in favor of their worldviews such as suppressing and pushing certain news articles and propaganda to align the masses to similar worldviews.
What will Haven look like, and how will it function?
A look and feel akin to Instagram or TikTok, favoring TikTok. He comments on how Instagram has a confusing layout.
Can Haven protect art/posts from AI?
Using the graphics cards of Will’s development team, you can poison your content automatically for free once posted to the site so that the users themselves don’t have to worry about their own as they use tools like Nighshade to do it themselves. This lays the groundwork for mass-proliferation of poisoned artwork, letting people not only defend from AI but attack as well via AI model’s fixed amount of poisoned data causing critical harm to an AI’s quality, as few as 250 compared to billions upon billions of tokens, no less.
How does Haven’s Anti-Surveillance work?
Basically, by using apps like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc., you are surveilled less due to Haven not having such features, themselves while also having ways to mess up facial recognition features like Clearview.ai.
How is AI detected or prevented by Haven?
They can detect AI by checking Syth ID. For ones that don’t have a Synth ID, Will claims that his team will try, but they can’t do much with detectors being a bit iffy which is why the money he raises from the kickstarter will go to funding better research for AI detectors.
Not only that, but they will be crafting a manual detection system where it incentivises users to report on AI slop and allows his team to pay creators unlike any other current platform.
How this works is that, once you scroll past a post, the system will give you a survey to ask staff like, “Was the post you viewed made by AI?” “Does this post break our site rules?” “Did this post have mature content but wasn’t marked as such?” With the survey complete, the user is rewarded with say a quarter or dime in which they don’t keep but can donate to any creative they find on the platform.
In terms of AI prevention, the main reason people post AI content is to gather a following to be monetized. To prevent this, William’s team has a person to manually review a channel for monetization with AI being a core reason to be denied.
Will Haven have any Core Values that which cannot be changed?
An example was given with Bluesky being vague on their NSFW content rules as they sneakily change them behind the scenes.
William does not have them written down at the moment, but his ideas are that
They want to allow as much as possible that isn’t hatful or illegal to own.
They don’t allow Gen AI whatsoever
William goes over the reasoning of the Bluesky example being caused by venture capitalist (VC) money, making them beholden to such people who only care about money. He will combat this by being self-sufficient via advertising (more on that later so don’t get angy) so that Haven’s core values can remain rigid and not be forced to change them via shareholders.
Will Scrapping be prevented on Haven?
There will be such as Cloudfare’s AI Labyrinth feature which is Will’s favorite where the AI is diverted to an infinite looping room of webpages that that have no value.
How do we know that Haven isn’t gathering pure datasets?
William says that gaining people’s trust on the internet is difficult, but he gives it a shot by starting off with him not being from Silicone Valley where startups happen often to try and make people’s lives worse. No, he’s from the Midwest. “Cornfields represent,” he says. Second, he brings up current social media owners have gone to places like Harvard (Zuck) or NYU (Dorsey). Not William, he went to Iowa State University, calling himself an engineer and not a techbro.
William then states that those two things may not be enough to gain people’s trust, so he opens an invitation to talk to him about it.
The VTuber comments on the fact that we still use platforms that we know aren’t trustworthy and that he’s willing to gamble on the potential of a new platform that has features he’s excited for.
How will Haven appeal to non-creatives?
William says that they will appeal to general people and not just creatives unlike Cara who only seems to appeal to artists. They way they would do so is that it'll work just like Instagram or TikTok, sharing photos of you and the boys and/or girls on a night out, photos of your vacation, or funny memes.
How will Haven overcome the Network Effect?
William claims the core way to reduce the network effect is all about the friction of switching platforms, posting all of your current content onto the new platform and advertising the new platform to your audience.
The way Will's team will deal with this is that they will do all the hard work for you. If you make an account on Haven and you prove that you own the accounts you say you own, they will go out to that account and gather up all of your content, stuff like timestamps included, and post them to your account for you.
To tackle the a user's audience, the platform will ask for your platform on other sites when you sign up for Haven. Once you fill that out, (from what I understand) you will have to do something similar on the other end. After that, you will automatically follow all the people from your...say... Instagram's follow and following lists, now on Haven. You won't need to go looking for who you follow and follow them, yourself, and your audience won't have to find you. All that is required outside of that is to accept "opting in" to this feature.
Can you monetize your content on Haven?
Monetization will work the exact same as Youtube. When you react a certain milestone on your account, you can apply for monetization. The reason they even have this is because they run advertizements on Haven, comparing to Cara, Art Station, and Bluesky who don't have monetization.
The VTuber co-host then makes a comment about how people don't have problems with ads but more so when ads are too invasive, bringing up the rise of ads on Pinterest as an example
You will be able to opt out of being advertized to by paying a subscription which that will be used instead to pay for a creator's monetization.
How will Music affect monetization on Haven?
the Vtuber host introduces this question via animation memes that earn basically no money at all due to copyright holders taking up to 100% of monetization revenue.
William then says that then will bend the knee and do the same only as a last resort. But it won't be 100% of the revenue. (just a guess on my part) There will likely be a hard limit a copyright holder can take.
How is Haven's algorithm different compared to other platforms?
William talks about how engagement bait and rage bait has been growing over the years and how current social platforms only monetize engagement in general, not accounting for hate speech. To fix this, he has two simple solutions
Comments don't count as engagement
Clicking/tapping a "dislike" button refunds all the engagement you gave the content, even your view, to counteract rage bait and engage bait.
Is Haven going to have an app?
Yes, it will be an app as well as a website
Anti-Censorship vs "Freespeech" vs Hatespeech
Haven is Anti-Censorship and ti about Free Speech, but he doesn't use the latter in his marketing due to the implication of "absolute free speech" which includes hate speech.
What he really means by anti-censorship and free speech is that he wants people to be free from using algo-speak and be protected from corporations and governments who wish to promote and supress certain topics. A good example is not agreeing with Musk getting you shadowbanned while having to call protests "music festivals"
Is gore and gore art allowed?
William says here are content warnings, spoiler tags, and blurred images unless you wish to see it. With the gore, it all depends on the nature of said gore. Say you're a vetranerian who wants to talk about how to fix a wound and thjey have such wound all up and close to use as an example. That is allowed. animating a fight where blood is spilled or drawing a piece of body horror is also alloowed. But, they're not gonna allow such things as, and I quote from William, "Top 10 Cartel Executions Compilation." Basically, if it's something you'd post on Live Leak, it's not allowed on Haven.
Is Haven planning on working with other Anti-AI platforms such as Unvale or VGen?
William and his team are not currently planning on it, but he says he wouldn't be opposed to it. he even talks to the chat saying "if you work for one of them, hit me up." lol
How will Haven be financed?
They have the current platform as a small prototype and will use a Kickstarter to scale the project to support hundreds of thousands of active users.
Haven will also run advertisements to upkeep the cost for running the app, pay for its staff and pay for poisoning people's content for free. William claims that these ads will be more ethical and better than any other social platform by NOT SELLING THE ADVERTISEMENT DATA AT ALL. They keep it private, internal for their use only. He also says that they're not evil with how they target their ads and then takes a long time to talk about how evil targeted ads are that was sadly cut for time in the edited version of the interview. Next he talks about how he uses advert money to fund the development of AI poisoning tools as it stays up to date with anti-poisoning tools. He even says that it gives them an R&D budget to develop protections against AI attacks that don't have the tools to handle them yet. Lastly, he says that if you subscribe to HAven, they will get rid of any advert data they have of you there and then and blacklist you from their statistics and analytics.
How are you better than other anti-AI socials?
William answers that where other platforms are against AI, Haven is both against and protects against AI.
Next he goes on some conspiracy speculation about how DiVine and their devs "And Other Stuff" has this AI building and training tool named "Shakespeare." Meaning, this company is promoting both Pro-AI and Anti-AI topics. Likely to claim that DeVine will be used to help Shakespeare train AIs. Jack Dorsey, the head behind "And Other Stuff," also owns a AI training company called "Goose AI." He finalizes this saying that he's not too worried about DeVine as he thinks it'll implode within a few months, maybe even a couple years.
Is NSFW/18+ content allowed?
Yes, yes it is. Haven is for art, and nudity is a part of art. William brings up the Cysteine chapel and ancient Greek statues as examples. He then goes over the worries of how advertising will work with NSFW content being present. Here's the interesting part. They do mess around with that. They're a lot more flexible than one may think. He takes Game of Thrones as an example where advertisers were all up in that shit. GoT had tones of nudity, violence, gore, death, and vulgar language, and they were still fine with it. Another example they give is Twitter with how a scandal happens there basically monthly such as Grok praising Hitler and then Musk saying "hey advertisers, fuck you, you should pull your ads from Twitter." Even with all that, riskadverse brands still buy Twitter ads. He then says that "Yes, we have porn. Every site has porn, and you're fine with putting up ads on those other sites. You'll be fine."
Are there any age requirements and verification?
William says there is, but showing government ID is something he says that goes WAY too far. How he does it is the same as how bars and nightclubs do it. They. Do. Not. Let. Them. In. They are not the parents of any kids who are on the internet. How they go about not letting minors in is basically using every possible trick in the book, including Newgrounds's method of proving you're 18+. Only adults have credit cards. If you want Haven Premium to have no ads, it'll first be sold as a single cent. This will be used to prove that the user is an adult and not a minor. He doesn't want to use that method though.
Will there be a subscription system for creatives akin to Patreon (for N/SFW)?
William doesn't have this planned to add, but he finds it cool and will keep it in mind
Is "Dead Dove" content allowed?
To define "Dead Dove" content rq, it's a story contains dark, explicit, or morally reprehensible content that is exactly as advertised in the tags
This was a viewer-submitted question where they added the following note:
"Platforms have a bad habit of getting big because of NSFW artists and artists drawing "dead dove-"
"Those artists migrated there only to kick them out once the platform has enough other people to slowly adjusting which NSFW content is allowed and which isn't."
"Bluesky slowly tightening the noose to disallow fictional non-con and monster depictions where rules before were so vague that is was assumed it was allowed."
William answers this by saying that Bluesky did this due to being funded by cosmetics and Venture Capitalist (VC) funding and having to adhere to VC demands due to those people only caring about money and making more of it. He then says that due to be self-sufficient, Haven won't be adherent to the demands of shareholders.
He then says that, with full transparency, that he will have to use the funding to do some funding rounds, but with that, he says that unlike Bluesky and Patreon, they will do it as absolutely minimum as possible. With them buying back the stock from those funding rounds, they will be free to adhere to what they believe in.
How can you support Haven Social?
He runs a kickstarter. I'll link it here so that you all can go donate like I did with their highest pledge at $90 with adding $210 more to make a total pledge of $300
Social media that prevents AI from stealing your art, your biometrics, and your privacy.
