Will Potluck Be 'A House Party on the Internet' or Succumb to Social Network Oblivion?

There’s a new social network in town, which will surely elicit groans and eyerolls from fatigued netizens already struggling to juggle a half dozen online profiles and carefully curate their web identity.

And yet assuaging that stress is exactly what Potluck hopes to bank on. It's being billed as a link-sharing social platform where you're not judged by what you post, and can just sit back and be yourself. The "friends feed" highlights links that are shared by your friends (which Potluck pulls in straight from Facebook, Twitter and Google), and friends of friends, but doesn't show who originally shared a link. No names, no avatars—unless you bother to click through to find out. So, no sweat if you get zero comments or upvotes on that weird article you shared.

In other words, Potluck users are encouraged to enjoy content for content's sake, not because of who shared it. It takes some of the ego and elitism out of social networking. But will that be a big enough breath of fresh air to justify adding another platform to an already bloated space?

Josh Miller is betting on it. Miller created Potluck and is also the founder of Branch, a product of Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone's incubator The Obvious Corp. In an introductory blog post on Medium Miller wrote, "We reduced this anxiety by taking the emphasis off of individual people and placing it on the common interests that bring them together." By taking the pressure off, it promises a non-intimidating, non-awkward, pressure-free way to make new connections online.

Yes, the ultimate goal, Miller freely admits, is to go beyond the nameless links and discover and converse with the person behind the content you both enjoy. It's an attempt to answer the million-dollar question of social networking: How do you connect with not only the people you already know, but the people you ought to know?

Mutual friends are a tried-and-true way of meeting new people. In Potluck's case—the startup's tagline: a house party on the internet—you’re just bringing GIFs and blog posts to the party instead of casseroles and red plastic cups of cheap beer. The bet is you're more likely to click with someone if you share a common friend, plus a love of cat videos.

Potluck also takes aim at the "86 percent of the Internet that has not written a tweet or a blog post before, and doesn’t really want to," Miller writes. He came to this revelation by talking to his teenage sister, i.e. a “normal" person—not the Redditors and Twitterati of the cyberworld. Here we also see the influence of Biz and Ev, because this ability to lurk without actively participating was the genius of Twitter when it first launched. You could be entertained and informed without even revealing who you were. In other words, a virtual fly on the wall.

The question is, how much of that 86 percent is going to bother requesting and accepting dozens more friend requests from the same online networks they already aren't too engaged in, or get psyched about content shared by people with no little in sharing content? Potluck, like any social network, needs to be used by enough people to make it valuable to anyone, and so far it's not user-friendly enough to inspire a rush of new members. At first glance, it's even confusing. What's the point?

But for those of us that want to join the party, Potluck takes on a million-dollar problem plaguing the social network space: a group conversation platform that's more intimate than the vast entirety of public internet, but less intimate than DMing a single person or emailing two or three targeted friends. Other startups are tackling this, but no one has cracked it yet. This alone will make Potluck worth watching.

Still, the new social network runs the risk—and it’s a big risk—of being just another chore to attend to while multitasking through our plugged-in hours. Say you see a link you like--do you put it on Tumblr? On Facebook? Or Google+? Do you email it to a select few of your friends? Why bother with yet one more place to copy/paste that URL? The Potluck bookmarklet will help a bit, but is it enough?

At first blush, the startup won’t stand out for being different. It’s yet another link-sharing platform that connects you with a friend's network online. But it may well cut above the noise by  taking a bit of what works well for all the networks that have come before it. There's the simplicity of Instagram, the cool-hunting appeal of Tumblr, the hyper-connectivity of Facebook, the hands-off option of Twitter, the (relative) comfortable anonymity of Snapchat, and the community fostering of Reddit.

If Potluck doesn’t manage to become the next big internet sensation, it’ll be cast away to the forgotten island of social networks. But I wouldn’t write it off yet.