It’s a newcomer in the very changing landscape of social networks: it’s called Fizz, and even if for the moment, you have to be a student and in the United States to use it, in certain campuses only, it starts to cause a sensation. Fizz is an application in the style of Reddit: you can post written messages, photos but also surveys on the life of your campus, as well as exchange private messages. All this anonymously.
Nothing revolutionary therefore in the landscape of social networks, apart from two particularities. First, you have to be a student to register, that means having an email address with .edu, instead of .com. So if you are excluded from the platform, you cannot come back because you will not have another address.
The other specificity is moderation. It is operated in part by an artificial intelligence but, above all, by about fifteen students from each university, paid for this work. They know the content of the discussions better than ordinary moderators. To avoid, for example, that the message “John Smith must be destroyed” be taken as a threat when maybe at this university John Smith is the name of an old building, not a person.
Two ex-students from Stanford University in California, Teddy Solomon and Ashton Cofer are behind the project. The two comrades did not complete their four-year course. “Dropouts”, as they are called at Stanford, who joined the university at the start of the 2020 school year, in the midst of Covid-19. Student life was nothing like what they dreamed of since classes weren’t held on campus. Hence the idea of a platform to exchange between students despite everything.
Fizz launched in the summer of 2021. 95% of Stanford students would be enrolled today. Other universities like Dartmouth, one of the famous Ivy League schools on the East Coast of the United States, have gotten into it. Fizz representatives distribute free donuts on campuses in exchange for registration. The platform hopes to have a thousand campuses in its network by next year. She currently employs 22 full-time people at a house in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley.
Students who stop their studies in an elite university to launch a social network on university campuses: the story resonates with that of Facebook, created by Mark Zuckerberg from the Harvard campus in 2004. And the anecdote revealed by the Techcrunch site is precisely that the daughter of one of the investors, a student at Stanford, came home very excited from an evening telling her father that she had met “the new Mark Zuckerberg”. Conquered, the man in question, Rakesh Mathur, who participated in the creation of a dozen start-ups, invested 750,000 dollars in the project to become the boss and he has just raised 4.5 million dollars. .
For now, the application, which presents itself as more authentic than Instagram or Snapchat, does not generate revenue. One way to change this is to make it an online market, where students can easily sell their bikes or books, for example.