Two veteran tech-industry insiders today announced raftr, a social media platform that will allow people to talk about the world’s unfolding stories that most fascinate them. Founded by former Yahoo! President Sue Decker, and former Convera CTO, Claude Vogel, raftr’s mission is to create the same engaging conversation experiences that happen naturally at work around the watercooler or at home in our living rooms—but on a world stage, online.

“I love my social feeds, but they have become super noisy with articles by publishers looking for distribution, by friends of friends forwarding random things, or worst of all, by content that is not from trustworthy sources,” said Decker, raftr’s CEO and co-founder. “What people are craving is a safe place to engage in conversations about things they care about, with curated content intended to advance better conversations about the stories we all follow together, whether that’s the leader of the free world, a favorite TV show, or a football team’s path to the Super Bowl.”

Today’s social networks are optimized for fast and atomized content distribution, which means they are not oriented to create the best experiences for content consumption and conversation; they are architected around following “people” rather than “stories.” This leads to feeds that grow increasingly cluttered with topics of limited interest and stories of questionable provenance—or conversations that quickly become echo chambers dominated by celebrities.

Raftr, by contrast, is both curated and story-centric, so like-minded people can easily engage in discussions with others around news relevant to the ongoing stories they choose to follow. Raftr’s editorial team produces ongoing serials across news, TV shows and sports teams into easy-to-follow narrative “blogcasts” that are shared in weekly episodes. These blogcasts dive deeper into stories as they progress, offering links to the best articles of the week, exposing different perspectives, and posing key questions of intrigue to prompt engaging conversations.

“Raftr is addressing an important audience of people who have become fatigued by the overabundance of content from their networks,” said Jerry Yang, Founding Partner of AME Cloud Ventures and co-founder of Yahoo!. “Social media connections are important to progressing intellectual debate, but these conversations cannot take place if they are buried by extraneous noise. We believe raftr is the future of engaging around personally relevant and informative content.”

Raftr’s serial stories focus on current news, TV shows and sports teams, with additional areas rolled out over time based on consumer interest and demand. Raftr is available on iOS and on the web at www.raftr.com. To download the app today, visit raftr in the App Store.

About raftr

Raftr is a place to talk about the world’s unfolding stories that most captivate you. Available on iOS and the web, raftr encourages you to share ideas and emotions about the serial stories that we all follow together, regardless of location or demographics. Founded in 2015 by Sue Decker and Claude Vogel, raftr is headquartered in San Francisco. To learn more and download the raftr app, visit: www.raftr.com.