“Let me tell you about the time I inadvertently joined a cult…”
In a voice vulnerable and sincere, a person identified only as @SeekingPlumb describes her journey from growing up hyper-religious to making her way into a strange, illusive community in Los Angeles, how she met her first and forbidden love, and how she learned who she really was, despite the “weird culty stuff.”
“Hey, I’m also really fascinated by this. It could be a memoir or a movie…” @garyplaysbone replies in a smooth, curious tone, sparking a lively and intimate conversation.
This conversation is among thousands happening right now on Swell, a new-ish social media app designed specifically for people who want to share personal stories, and for those who want to listen.
Designed as a voice-to-voice platform — no dancing videos, no viral memes — Swell is set up for people to find niche communities via short audio recordings, none longer than five minutes. When you sign up for the free app, you’re given what they call a “Swellcast” to begin recording and discussing whatever you want.
“Swell is designed to give space and time to regular people to have their voices heard,” explains co-founder Arish Ali. “There are no memes to forward, no ad-driven algorithms running wild, no beauty filters to apply. You simply use your voice to tell a story, voice an opinion, or ask a question, and let the world hear it and respond. It is uncomplicated. It is unpretentious. It is the un-social media platform.”
Swell works like your smartphone’s voice notes on steroids — storytelling condensed into bite-size bits. Unlike a podcast, users don’t need microphones or a hosting site to be heard by others, it is just your voice talking into your phone.
“We know that podcasting has erupted because people feel intimate when someone’s in their ear,” says Deborah Pardes, Swell’s vice president. “What podcasting lacks is the two-way conversation, and also as podcasters you have to invest a lot of time and money upfront and then hope that people will tune in.”
Another voice-driven social media platform that launched in 2020, Clubhouse, has already peaked and crashed. Its chatrooms became a cacophony of arguments and self-promotion. Swell aspires to be something else, leaning into the natural human curiosity of being drawn to confessions. Lurking around people’s conversations at a coffee shop, overhearing a conversation coming from the next aisle at the store, or hearing a glimpse of something authentically personal are thrills we can’t help but seek.
Given that there are more than a few bad actors in the social media landscape, the app does moderate for abusive and threatening content “ranging from post deletion to user suspension, in line with our Terms of Service,” according to a statement from the company. “We empower Swellcasters with moderation tools, enabling them to control interactions on their posts. They can turn off replies, delete responses, block users, and report offensive content.”
Ali and Sudha KV began the company in 2019 initially to create a repository for health stories.
“Google searches for stomach aches rarely yield anecdotes about more traditional approaches that Grandma used to take. Pharma has the biggest megaphone for that,” Pardes says. “We started to imagine a community telling stories about health.”
But with all the social and cultural changes in 2020, Swell widened its lens and pointed it toward conversations on topics beyond health.
“The focus shifted because we saw that people needed to talk about a lot of things; there was a crossover between health and wellness and politics and life,” Pardes says. “We looked at the podcast world as a one-way communication platform that had no flow back from the listeners. Swell is designed to nurture listening and talking; storytelling at its best — where the start of an idea told through a great story may spark other stories and ideas and connections.”
Pardes highlights the platform’s easy user interface and intimate, person-to-person feel. The app offers users daily prompts to encourage conversation. There are “Swellcasts” centered around topics — books, politics, sports, meditation, cooking and more.
“The currency on Swell is different from other platforms, meaning that when you’re on TikTok, or Instagram or Facebook, you tend to be obsessed with numbers. ‘I want hundreds of likes and thousands of followers.’ It’s very different on Swell because when one voice responds to you, that’s like a complete atomic network,” says Pardes.
For those who do want to use this app as part of a social media strategy, users can share links to their content and cross-promote themselves on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and TikTok.
In this age of the professional social media influencer, how to monetize content is the question. Pardes says that although the app is free to use, content creators can “upgrade” to a “Premium Swellcast,” which charges subscribers if they want to listen to your content for 99 cents, $1.99 or $4.99 a month.
Pardes says Swell makes money through revenue-sharing of subscription fees. She declined to disclose the number of users on the platform, saying only that they have “several thousand active daily users.”
Users, called “Swellcasters,” can have all their recordings public or can have private conversations. Some content can be free and other content can be subscription-based. A Swellcaster can conduct interviews or have one-on-one discussions with guests through the platform, invite others to a conversation, or create group Swells.
The lack of filters, reels, video and any long-form content could be a bonus to those looking for simple content creation online. But the lack of these features may keep away a more advanced content creator (and their following) who may find the five-minute recording max limiting to their creativity, or not what their existing audience is accustomed to.
The reality is, for Swell to become a real player in the social media space, it will need to attract some big names (celebrities, influencers, authors), invest in collaborations and sign up a lot more users.
Current published estimates put Facebook at 3.05 billion monthly users, 2.4 billion on Instagram, 1.4 billion on TikTok and 933 million on YouTube. To be a serious alternative to these wildly popular platforms, Swell needs to find its people, one conversation at a time.
