Social

Presence was the unlock.

People were already in the same place at the same time, watching the same game, holding the same opinions. They just had no way to feel each other there. That was the opening.

The easy version of this brief is a list of social features. A chat tab, a comments count, a like button. I made the case for the harder version, a holistic, discovery-led social layer that made the app feel inhabited. Social you can feel, not social you can tick off a list.

Moments, not a feature list.

The bar was high and specific. The social layer had to feel substantial, like it had always belonged in the app, not a gimmick bolted to the side and not a reinvention of the thing people already came for.

To get there without guessing, I pushed the team to work in hypotheses instead of a roadmap. What do we believe about how people will behave, and how fast can we find out if we are wrong? The brainstorms were built around moments, not features. Not "what should we build," but "what is someone feeling right now, watching this, and what would make this moment feel more alive?" That kept us in the experience instead of a checklist.

A few rules held throughout. Surface community energy only when it is real, because a feature that highlights an empty room hollows out the very thing you are building. Protect the core, because these screens are already dense and social could not come at the cost of the game. And treat every idea as data, including the ones that did not ship. Some were compelling in theory and too slow to validate. Some fell apart the moment we looked hard. That is not waste. That is the method working.

Make the room feel full.

Insight

Users consuming content simultaneously had no way of knowing others were there, an absence that made the experience feel emptier than it needed to.

Decision

I reframed the brief early. The goal wasn't to build a chat product, it was to recreate the feeling of watching something with a crowd. That changed the design questions entirely from "how do we handle message threads" to "how do we make the room feel full?"

Outcome

A live chat experience that surfaces real-time reactions alongside content. Users who engage with chat show meaningfully longer session lengths.

Low-effort, high-signal participation.

Insight

Commenting has a participation ceiling: most users don't do it. But most users were already using the single available reaction, signaling an appetite for a lower-effort form of engagement.

Decision

I kept the team focused on reactions as a different form of engagement, not a lesser one. I pushed for something expressive and fun rather than clinical, and challenged early concepts that defaulted to a plain thumbs-up. I also pushed hard on placement and timing — when is the right moment to invite a reaction, and where does it live without distracting from the content?

Outcome

Reactions measurably increased overall participation rates and created a new signal layer, giving users a quick read on crowd sentiment and surfacing what was resonating across content.

Let the conversation sell itself.

Insight

Many users didn't know commenting was available, and those who did weren't drawn in because they didn't know whether there was anything worth reading.

Decision

I reframed the problem in brainstorming. The comment section needed to market itself. I challenged the team to stop treating it as a destination and think about how it could pull curious users in from the content view.

Outcome

Click-throughs to the full comment section increased significantly. An unexpected secondary effect: seeing a quality comment raised users' expectations of the community and made them more likely to contribute.

Early, and pointing the right way.

These are early reads, and they point the right way.

Sessions run longer among users who touch the social features. The data suggests the social touchpoints are pulling people back, returning to see new reactions and replies to their conversations. And in interviews, people describe the app the way we hoped they would, as a place with a sense of community and connection that was not there before.

Social by the numbers

+15%

Comment visits — Visits to the comment section per session rose more than 15% after the Comment Sheet launched.

Re-engagement — People are coming back to check new reactions and replies, which multiplies the value of every piece of content.

Longer sessions — Users who engage with the social features stay in the app longer.

Where user value and the business meet.

The features matter, but the bigger outcome is what they set up. I left a foundation for social on B/R, and a team that knows how to build on it, how to think in moments and hypotheses instead of feature lists.

That matters because the early results all point one way. Adding presence makes people more satisfied and brings them back, which is exactly the place where user value and the business meet. This was not a one-off. It was the start of a direction, and the first proof that the direction is right.