BROOKLYN, N.Y. - s4story -- A year ago Joe Barbour was mad as hell. He was sick of feeds built to keep people angry, of bots posing as people, and of every click being tracked and sold. He had never written a line of code, but he kept hearing that AI could now build websites, and he wanted to see how far that really went. So he set out to build a complete social publishing platform by directing AI alone, with no investors and no engineering team. He worked 15-hour days for a year. It worked.

That platform, LENDZ Social (lendz.social), is now open, and it does literally everything except track you. Members post to a feed in plain time order, publish paid newsletters, host live podcasts, face off in debates the crowd scores in real time, read a daily newspaper built for them, and step into virtual nightclubs. There are no algorithmic feeds, no ad tracking and no investors.

"For fifteen years the big platforms have decided what we see, and sold us to advertisers along the way," said Barbour. "I got tired of complaining about it, so I built the alternative and I'm handing it to the people. There's nobody behind the curtain here. There's me, and a feed that shows you what you chose to follow, in the order it happened."

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The idea at the heart of LENDZ Social is fifteen years old. While running nightclubs in San Diego, Barbour pitched it to a contact at Twitter, which never built it. On LENDZ Social it is called View Their World: any member can borrow another member's feed and read it exactly as that person does (minus private accounts).

LENDZ Social is invite-only. Every member gets three invite codes a day, newsletter writers can bring their whole readership in through one preview link, and verified musicians can bring their fans in from their Showcase page.

LENDZ Social takes only 10 percent of newsletter subscription revenue. Verification means a confirmed human identity, and before opening, LENDZ Social reserved the handles of more than 12,000 public figures and companies so nobody can impersonate them.

Barbour spent 25 years in nightlife and live events. He ran Body English at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, ran the Brooklyn Mirage, and in 2016 opened Live On Air in Brooklyn, which he calls the world's first live-streaming restaurant. He built LENDZ Social with Anthropic's Claude as his engineering partner.

Barbour's founding letter, on why he built LENDZ Social: https://lendz.social/read/why-i-spent-a-year-building-lendz-social-the-social-media-network-silicon-valley-nf5ztvcw