I want to be upfront about two things before you read the rest of this.
First, this is an opinion piece. I am labeling it that way because Ekta is built on the idea that opinions are welcome but undisclosed bias is not. I have a perspective. You should know that going in.
Second, I am writing this with essentially no audience. Ekta just went live. I have no followers here yet, no readers waiting for the next post, no list of subscribers to email. I am writing into an empty room. That is the right way to start something like this — quietly, before the noise, with the platform's principles already in place rather than retrofitted later.
So: why build this in the first place?
I have spent better half of a decade trading for a living. Markets have a useful property — they are incentive-aligned and give monetary feedback in real time. In other words: if you have an opinion, you put your money behind it and the market tells you via your Profit & Loss whether you were right or wrong. It is uncomfortable, but it is honest. Reality pushes back.
Every day, after work, I would close my trading screens and open the regular internet, and I would notice that the same feedback loop did not exist in other platforms. The loudest claim won. The most outrageous framing got rewarded. Being early mattered more than being right, and being right mattered less than being shareable. The thing that disciplined me at work was completely missing in the place where most people now form their view of the world.
That gap is not an accident. It is the design. And it did not happen all at once.
Twenty-five years ago, most people got their news from newspapers, the evening broadcast, or the radio. That world had real flaws — gatekeepers, narrow viewpoints, slow corrections — but it had one quiet feature that mattered. Editors were paid to be right over time, because subscribers paid for a product they could trust. Reputation was the business.
Then the internet arrived and broke the bundle. Classified ads moved to Craigslist. Display ads moved to Google and Facebook. Newspapers lost the revenue that used to fund the journalism, and the parts that survived had to compete for attention online against everyone else.
At the same time, the platforms we now spend hours on every day discovered something. They could grow faster, and earn more, by ranking content not by quality but by engagement — clicks, time-on-site, comments, shares. The companies did not set out to break public discourse. They were just optimizing for the metric that paid them, which was attention.
The trouble is that attention and accuracy are not the same thing. They often point in opposite directions. A careful, nuanced article does not generate as many clicks as a furious headline. A correction does not travel as far as the original mistake. A complicated argument does not perform as well as a simple, angry one. When the system is paid per click, those differences compound, year after year, into the information environment we have now.
This is why I am skeptical of the usual fix, which is "more moderation." Moderation is a patch on top of an incentive problem. You can hire thousands of reviewers and write a long policy book, and the underlying pull of the system will still bend creators toward whatever the algorithm pays for. What I have learned in my trading career is that incentives are what drives our behaviour. Telling moderation to fix the attention economy is like asking a goalkeeper to win a match where the rest of the team is paid for own goals.