The previous 1st part of the article can be accessed here: Part 1. This is the second part.
A possible positioning strategy
Arattai’s alternative to algorithm-driven social media
Part 1 started off with my caveat that I may not be competent enough to make this suggestion for as big an IOT product company as Zoho.
Then it made the big claim that Arattai’s real advantage, in its proposed avatar, is being one app instead of five, and promised answers to the hard objections, chief among them being: how does anything reach beyond a person’s own contacts, and how does this actually feel better to use than Instagram.
This part attempts to answer both objections in full.
How this reaches far beyond your own contacts
If Arattai’s strength is a closed circle of real contacts, how does anything reach a large number of people the way a post on Instagram or YouTube can? A closed circle sounds like a ceiling on reach, not a wide one like the social media platforms.
The answer is that reach doesn’t have to come from an algorithm pushing content to strangers. It can come from people forwarding things onward, the way news has always spread in real life: one person telling another, who tells another. WhatsApp forwards already reach crores of people across India within hours, without any central algorithm deciding who sees what. The mechanism is proven; Arattai only needs to make it better, not invent it.
Part of the answer already exists in the app, in the form of channels, a feature both WhatsApp and Arattai already offer.
Anyone who wants to build a following the way a creator builds followers elsewhere can open a channel and let people who value what they share choose to follow it.
Most people never start a channel. It takes a choice to show your work. Many great creators miss out because they stay quiet.
A simple fix closes that gap: if a person’s original posts are being widely forwarded across the network, the app can quietly offer them the option to establish a dedicated public Channel. This creates a separate broadcast feed for their posts without affecting their private chat threads, seamlessly turning natural reach into a formal follower base.
This turns a natural pattern into a formal follow system. The app already sees your messages spread. It does this without asking a quiet person to promote themselves first.
That solves how a ‘following‘ gets started. Discovery– how someone with no connection to that person finds the channel at all- still needs the following three things.
Three things make this kind of organic reach work well rather than turning into another rumour mill.
Public channels that anyone can discover and join, not limited to existing contacts, so a genuinely good channel is not trapped inside one person’s circle forever.
A directory or simple search so people with no shared contacts at all can still find a channel by topic, without that discovery turning into an addictive, algorithm-ranked feed.
And most importantly, forwarding that carries weight based on trust: a share from a close, reliable contact should count for more than a share from someone with a habit of forwarding things that turn out to be false, which is exactly what the private quality score described later is for.
Content that earns its way through many trusted hands travels means more than content simply pushed by a ranking system to as many eyeballs as possible. It naturally resists misinformation, since something implausible must survive being checked by real people along the way, rather than being blasted out in one shot to a million strangers.
A hashtag-style system can make the directory and search idea work far better in practice. A person searching a topic finds channels and posts tagged that way, with no algorithm inferring what they might want; they simply asked for it directly, which fits the whole approach here: discovery by choice, not by guesswork.
The weakness of hashtags on every platform that has them is that people tag inconsistently: one person writes startup, another writes startups, another writes StartupIndia, and the same topic splits into pieces that never find each other.
AI can quietly fix this, suggesting or applying a standard tag from a shared list, so a post reaches the right place even if the person typed nothing at all, which matters for a busy user who will never bother tagging things by hand.
The other weakness of hashtags is that they get gamed; people stuff popular tags onto content that has nothing to do with them, just to be seen.
Two things stop that here:
- First, AI tags are hard to fake. Accuracy decides the tag, not marketing.
- Second, trusted posts show up first. Post counts and new dates do not change this order.
Arattai will grow more slowly, like trends, not like fads. It will grow like a good name. People will trust it one by one. An algorithm will not force it to explode fast. It may travel slower than a viral post. But it will last longer and mean more.
None of this works if the numbers themselves can be faked. Every platform that has built a following around views, forwards, or subscriber counts has eventually faced networks of fake accounts and bots inflating those numbers artificially, buying a following rather than earning one.
A trust-weighted system is actually harder to game this way than a raw counter. A bot account has no real history of being read, replied to, or trusted by anyone, so it should carry close to no weight in the score no matter how many times it forwards something.
This only works if the system builds safety in from day one. It cannot wait until after problems happen. Accounts must use a real phone number. New accounts with no history must get flagged when they join a channel at the same time. Channels must not pay to buy top spots in searches. Good design from the start keeps the score honest.
Being a participant, not just a viewer, done better than Instagram does it
Instagram’s real hold on people was never just photos; it was the feeling of being seen and taking part, posting something and watching people respond to it. That feeling is what users value and is worth keeping. Arattai can offer the same feeling, but built around something more honest than a stranger’s like button.
On Instagram, participation is mostly a performance for people who do not know you, and the response you get is a number designed to keep you checking back. On Arattai, participation can mean something closer to being a trusted voice inside a circle that actually knows you, sharing something worth sharing, writing something worth reading, forwarding something worth someone else’s time. That is a deeper kind of participation than posting for strangers, because the response comes from people whose opinion actually matters to you.
This is where a private score for each person becomes genuinely useful, not as a public number for others to judge, but as a personal mirror.
A person’s own quiet score, visible only to them, shows how well the things they share tend to hold up over time, whether people actually read them, whether people forward them onward for good reasons, or whether they usually turn out to be exaggerated, wrong, or ignored.
Nobody else sees this number. It is not a badge to show off or a rank to defend. It is closer to a fitness tracker for judgment, a private way to know if you are getting better at telling what is actually worth sharing.
And because this is meant to help a person grow, not to trap them with an old mistake forever, a person should be able to reset their visible score and start fresh whenever they want, the same way a person can start a new savings account or a new fitness goal without their old numbers following them around forever.
This private score and AI coaching will function as an opt-in self-improvement mirror; users who want to message without feedback can disable or ignore it entirely, experiencing zero interference.
What the platform may still quietly keep, only as background information to protect the system itself from being gamed by repeated resets, is a separate matter from what the person sees and feels. The person’s fresh start is real and visible. The platform’s safeguard against abuse runs quietly underneath it, without becoming a punishment the person carries.
Users who want their ‘never reset personal scores’ to be public can be given that option.
Protection from a platform that can turn on you overnight
Anyone who has built a following on Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn has a quiet fear. The platform can change its rules any day it wants, shrink your reach without telling you why, demonetise a channel overnight, or suspend an account with little explanation and less appeal. The audience that a creator spent years building was never really theirs; it was rented from the algorithm, and the algorithm can take it back whenever the platform decides to.
Arattai’s structure protects against exactly this, because the audience is not an algorithm’s gift; it is a person’s own contacts and the circles that grow around them.
Nobody can quietly throttle a teacher’s paid doubt-clearing channel or a tailor’s order channel by changing a ranking formula overnight, because there is no ranking formula deciding who sees it in the first place. The relationship belongs to the person, not to the platform.
That is a real, practical protection, not a legal promise on paper, and it matters to anyone who has ever built something online only to watch a platform quietly take the air out of it.
What comes next
Part 3 (to follow) turns to the questions of cost and realism directly, whether all the AI described here is actually affordable, how a free and a paid version of AI coaching can both work fairly, how this design quietly builds a more responsible way of sharing information, and finally, an honest, bias-checked look at how quickly, or slowly, something like this could realistically grow against giants like WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube.
To be continued…
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
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