Born a nerd in rural Germany, Karsten used computers to connect to others from the very beginning – well, almost, his first computer was a Commodore C16!
And that’s his story:
While the net moved from Usenet to forum to social media, I was a very active user loving the way the technical infrastructure was both enabling you to make contract to interesting people; people I would otherwise never been able to talk to. But I was also frustrated how the tech stood in the way of making something interesting out of that contact.
I studied law and became a lawyer, but my interest in tech and the interaction between tech and humans remained. My specialty was IT-law, but I later moved towards public procurement and privacy protection. I spent a lost of time in the past year helping people with GDPR-compliance.
In my free time I’m part of team of people who moderate a rather large special interest forum. It is really interesting to see real trolls in their natural environment! Trying to find the perfect balance of enough interesting (and even controversial) discussions and preventing those sometimes heated discussions from destroying the warm and welcoming community is hard. The forum software isn’t really helping us there – something we can do better.
I want you to own your own data, especially the derived data (not just your contacts, but also who you talked most to). I want that data in your hands, you being in control of who sees what. I want social media to use this data to bring you in contact with interesting people, talk to them, learn from them, be creative together – and most of all: feel safe! I think that advertising has poisoned the internet; algorithms that are geared to maximizing ad impressions and spying on you will always bring out the worst in people: An angry person creates more content, clicks more stuff – but who wants to spend their time being yelled at?
With my background in law my job will be to create a social media that complies with with the law. My personal focus will be to protect your privacy!