A look at Raya, a secretive subscription-based social network with a rigorous user selection process and a rigid code of silence for accepted members
The app has created a space free of the problems that plague the rest of the Web, but only by leaving almost everybody out. Tweets: @michaelluo , @kari_paul , @dlippman , @chaykak , @newyorker , @simonowens , @markwby , @newyorker , @chaykak , @hels , @samuelaadams , and @evelyndouek Tweets: Michael Luo / @michaelluo : Last month, Raya granted @chaykak access to a temporary account. “I felt a bit like I was walking through a cocktail party I hadn't been invited to, and was in violation of the dress code.” https://www.newyorker.com/... Kari Paul / @kari_paul : “Raya, which has grown consistently in the past six years, is perhaps the most successful experiment yet in the search for safer, gentler, more private forms of social networking.” https://www.newyorker.com/... Daniel Lippman / @dlippman : “Raya's increased emphasis on work might be less a pivot than a reflection of how, for a millennial clientele, love, careers, networking, and identity formation often flow seamlessly together.” https://www.newyorker.com/... Kyle Chayka / @chaykak : For my @NewYorker column, I took a rare look behind the scenes of the “celebrity dating app” Raya as a model for private, safe social media — and got the full story of that whole Ben Affleck incident https://www.newyorker.com/... @newyorker : Raya has created a space free of the problems that plague the rest of the Web, but only by leaving almost everybody out—the app's admission rate is in the single digits. https://nyer.cm/BSKCnoQ Simon Owens / @simonowens : What if Mark Zuckerberg had decided to keep Facebook exclusive to Ivy League students? That's sort of what Raya is. https://www.newyorker.com/... Mark Byrne / @markwby : “At a certain point, intimacy is no longer scalable.” https://www.newyorker.com/... @newyorker : Demi Lovato, Channing Tatum, John Mayer, Lizzo, Cara Delevingne, and Drew Barrymore have all reportedly been Raya members. Once accepted, members must adhere to a rigid code of silence—even tweeting too much about Raya can be grounds for a ban. https://nyer.cm/KBNupXP Kyle Chayka / @chaykak : There are a bunch of new business details in my @NewYorker Raya column as well: — 1/4 of their 40 employees work on community management — They'll cross a million total applications this year — 87% of all new members already know people on Raya https://www.newyorker.com/... Helen Rosner / @hels : “The result is an unsettling kind of homogeneity, reminiscent of Facebook's early days as a network exclusively for Ivy League students—an élite group further solidifying itself online.” @chaykak on Raya!!! https://www.newyorker.com/... Sam Adams / @samuelaadams : if this article kills Raya would it be the last draggin' https://www.newyorker.com/... Evelyn Douek / @evelyndouek : “Raya is interested in the challenge of “scaling intimacy."" Fascinating profile of an opposite model of social media: ultra-exclusivity. Raises a fundamental q of the internet: can everything be scaled? How far? https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Raya is the extreme end of a retreat from the open feed that mainstream platforms have been circling for years: Instagram tested intimacy at scale with Close Friends, Adam Mosseri framed hiding Like counts as a way to depressurize the app, and Clubhouse's invite-gated rooms spiked under lockdowns. The New Yorker's access piece — built on a temporary account granted to Kyle Chayka — shows what the fully gated version looks like when scarcity itself is the product.
The follow-on Wall Street Journal profile of Raya's 2.5M-person waitlist confirms the model held: single-digit admission rates, 87% of new members already knowing someone inside, and a quarter of the company's 40 employees devoted to community management. The story matters because it prices the thing every platform claims to want — a space free of the Web's usual problems — and the price is excluding nearly everyone.
First-order effects
- Members operate under a code of silence where publicizing the app is grounds for ban, so Raya's growth depends on word-of-mouth it formally forbids its own users from practicing.
- Applicants face single-digit admission odds with a projected one million total applications this year, and a quarter of staff on community management shows enforcement of the culture is the operating cost of the product.
Second-order effects
- Mainstream platforms respond by importing the intimacy without the gate — Instagram's Close Friends and Project Daisy are attempts to offer small-audience feel to everyone, undercutting the scarcity premium Raya charges for.
- The 2.5M-person waitlist becomes its own asset: exclusion generates the demand signal that keeps the network homogeneous, since 87% of admits arrive already connected to insiders.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social products bifurcate into broadcast-scale feeds and small gated spaces, with platforms competing on who controls the boundary rather than who has the most users.
- The model suggests moderation economics invert at small scale: instead of algorithms policing an open network, human community teams (a quarter of Raya's staff) enforce norms that a rigid membership contract makes enforceable — an approach open networks have shown no way to replicate.
The trend: Social networking is splitting between maximal reach and curated scarcity, with Raya proving that exclusivity enforced by silence rules and human gatekeepers can be a durable business where open feeds cannot.