Jimmy Wales' WikiTribune, which launched as a crowdfunded news site in 2017, relaunches as WT:Social, a donor-funded social networking and “news sharing” site
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a rival to Facebook and Twitter that he hopes will combat “clickbait” and misleading headlines.
Context & Ripple Effects
WikiTribune arrived in 2017 as a hybrid newsroom — paid journalists working alongside volunteer fact-checkers, funded by crowdfunding (launched by Jimmy Wales to combat fake news). By late 2018, Columbia Journalism Review reported the site had burned through its initial crowdfunding funds and grants, leaving the model in question.
The WT:Social relaunch answers that question by abandoning the newsroom framing entirely: the product is now a donor-funded social network for news sharing, positioned against Facebook and Twitter's ad-driven feeds. It is also Wales' second attempt at a charitable social network, after TPO.com in 2015 — a track record that matters for judging whether this pivot sticks.
First-order effects
- Original WikiTribune supporters who crowdfunded a journalism operation now hold stakes in a different product — a social platform — with the revenue model shifting from crowdfunding and grants to recurring donations.
- WT:Social enters direct competition with Facebook and Twitter for news-sharing behavior, differentiating explicitly on the absence of clickbait-driven ad incentives.
Second-order effects
- Facebook and Twitter face no immediate commercial pressure from a small donor-funded rival, but WT:Social gives critics of ad-funded misinformation a concrete alternative to point to when pressuring the majors.
- Wales' ecosystem demonstrates the model can be subsidized elsewhere — Wikia's Fandom platform raised $106M in 2018 — meaning losses at WT:Social can be cross-subsidized rather than forcing an early shutdown.
Third-order effects
- If the donor-funded structure holds where advertising failed, noncommercial social networks could consolidate as a durable niche alongside the Wikipedia-style model, with philanthropy rather than ads setting editorial incentives.
- The broader shift is that trust-focused challengers keep emerging each time mainstream platforms stumble over misinformation, normalizing repeated experiments until one finds sustainable unit economics.
The trend: News and social platforms are splitting into two camps — ad-funded scale players versus donor-funded trust plays — with Wales' pivots marking the latter's search for a workable business model.