Good question, especially as Blind was a big "inspiration" for us (in that we wanted to build something explicitly not like Blind).
I think there are 2 things here:
1. The paywall creates a positive "walled garden" effect - Very few people are going to spend $50+ just to come in and be a jerk. The paywall alone should do a lot of work making sure that folks who come in are positive and non-toxic.
2. Heavy moderation - Rahul and I actually built a free version of this software engineer community called Tech Career Growth (https://www.linkedin.com/company/techcareergrowth/), which was the inspiration for us taking the model freemium so we could quit our jobs to pursue this passion full-time after the community grew to 15,000+ members. Despite its size, we were able to moderate it very well with almost no instances of toxicity (more spam than anything) through a combination of empowering other community champions, having a clear code of conduct, and a 0 tolerance policy for the kind of abuse you see on Blind. Taro Premium will naturally be more limited in terms of user numbers as it's paywalled, so we're pretty confident we can scale a positive atmosphere for quite a while (10k+ members) as that's something we've already done with the much more open Tech Career Community.
Thanks so much for the great feedback and consuming our content! The Taro app definitely has a long way to go, and we're also investing a lot into the web app right now as we know that a lot of folks prefer to consume professional content on their desktop.
Taro is very early, and we know that a lot of product right now sucks. If you or anyone else here has any feedback, we're all ears at team@jointaro.com!
> The Taro app definitely has a long way to go, and we're also investing a lot into the web app right now as we know that a lot of folks prefer to consume professional content on their desktop.
I definitely find this discrepancy interesting, since I found the app to work much better than the web application! Although this was mostly a couple months ago, so I'll have to take a closer look at the web app these days.
That being said, I found the content super useful - although I found the ordering presenting in the free iOS app to be rather confusing, as I ended up jumping around a lot.
We had a landing page a few months ago (back when it was still Tech Career Growth), but this web app at app.jointaro.com just came out in the last 1.5 weeks! Try it out and I'm always open to feedback -- my direct email is rahul@jointaro.com.
There are definitely more toxic ways to get promoted, "gamifying" the process like you said. The prime example is playing infamous corporate politics, providing the perception of doing great work without actually doing it. I hate those kinds of games (I saw it ruin various orgs I've been on across my ~8 years working in Silicon Valley), and because of that, Taro isn't a product to teach software engineers how to play politics and other tricks.
On the flip side, we really do believe that promotion, especially in the more innovative, modern tech companies, has many components stemming from actual growth. While Meta was far from perfect, I largely felt like promotion pushed me to develop skills that genuinely made me a better software engineer and person to work with. I learned to empathize with other parties, especially those who weren't in engineering, and factor in their perspectives when building alignment on projects. I learned to think proactively, clamping down risks early instead of letting them blow up the project and team later on down the road. I learned to work through others, mentoring more junior engineers, and taking on responsibility for their well-being. The even cooler thing is that I found myself applying those skills outside of work as well: I became a better listener and got better at hectic life activities like vacation planning.
Taro is a product meant to teach those kinds of aforementioned, more "wholesome" skills, and Rahul and I have historically found it hard to find guidance to learn those skills. I didn't start seriously building those deeper behaviors until I rolled some incredible managers ~5 years into my career. We believe that this kind of learning should be far more accessible, and by doing so, we can help empower a workforce that's far more productive and positive.
I think there are 2 things here: 1. The paywall creates a positive "walled garden" effect - Very few people are going to spend $50+ just to come in and be a jerk. The paywall alone should do a lot of work making sure that folks who come in are positive and non-toxic.
2. Heavy moderation - Rahul and I actually built a free version of this software engineer community called Tech Career Growth (https://www.linkedin.com/company/techcareergrowth/), which was the inspiration for us taking the model freemium so we could quit our jobs to pursue this passion full-time after the community grew to 15,000+ members. Despite its size, we were able to moderate it very well with almost no instances of toxicity (more spam than anything) through a combination of empowering other community champions, having a clear code of conduct, and a 0 tolerance policy for the kind of abuse you see on Blind. Taro Premium will naturally be more limited in terms of user numbers as it's paywalled, so we're pretty confident we can scale a positive atmosphere for quite a while (10k+ members) as that's something we've already done with the much more open Tech Career Community.