An experiment to fix social media
We’ve all felt that soul sucking feeling of scrolling Facebook at 1am only to ask ourselves “why did I do that?”
Nir Eyal, a thought leader in behavioral design, thinks the fact that our feeds are 90% lame is exactly why we keep scrolling. The “semi-stressful state” we feel while scrolling Facebook is a freak misappropriation of a survival instinct we needed to keep us digging through dirt looking for some edible tuber. And it’s addictive.
That’s depressing, let’s do something about it. If we want less dirt and more uhh… tubers, we need better curation. Curation is why Reddit’s front page is entertaining and why you’d probably like the 30 song Discover Weekly playlist Spotify makes for you.
How Discover Weekly works is interesting. It relies on other users’ behavior to curate the songs for you. Which is exactly how we’re going to fix our social media feeds. But before we get in to how this might work, let’s understand the problem.
We already have a place for friends to share cool stuff. It’s called Facebook. Why doesn’t it work?
The same reason Facebook is popular is what causes it to suck: all your friends are on it. Sociologists since the 1950’s have described a “front stage performer persona” that we all slip into when we know we’re being watched. And frankly, it’s not our coolest look.
“when users are acting (liking, posting, commenting) on Facebook, they are simultaneously trying to build an idealized image or face of themselves.” DE Wittkower (2014)
Facebook’s problem is it can’t replicate the natural boundaries that exist between our friend groups, family, and coworkers. It’s not that your friends suck. It’s that everyone is stuck in front stage performer mode and your feed reflects it.
This is why most of us have turned to Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, Netflix, Vine, Musical.ly, Medium, Pinterest, Blorgisborg, and Feel.ly
But now we’ve got 8 feeds to check. And let’s be honest, they’re 90% noise too.
Back to curation; odds are good that right now you’ve got a friend scrolling a social media feed.
Baby picture, baby picture, 2016 election, cat hugging dog! Jackpot!If we could get your friends to share jackpots when they see them, we’d have a “best of” feed. It’d be our own Discover Weekly, but for social media.
The problem is how do you get good content out of 8 different closed platforms? It’s not easy. Maybe impossible.
My friend Steve and I thought a lot about this problem and decided to build an experiment. We’re calling it Snack. It’s free in the Play Store (we’ll build an iOS version if there’s interest). What follows is the thinking behind it.
#1 No names. No names = freedom to be interesting. You share a feed with your real friends, you just won’t know who posted what. It should be fun :)
Comments are gone too. RIP front stage performances.
#2 No self posts. You can’t set a status about yourself on Snack. You can only share links to content.
#3 Follow/unfollow friends without them knowing. Snack uses your contacts to produce a list of possible friends. Pick whoever you like. Don’t worry about insulting anyone, they won’t know. And since posts are anonymous, you don’t have to worry about who’s following you either.
#4 Ranked feeds. In addition to the Friend feed. Snack has a “Mine” feed that works like a personal bookmarking tool, and a“Global” feed that’s kind of like Reddit.
And like Reddit, we’ve added upvoting so the best content rises to the top. You can heart any post up to 3 times.
What you’re left with is a ranked feed of cool stuff your friends found.
#5 Share from any app without leaving. If we plan on having your friends do the work, it has to be easy. Most apps have built in ways to share content. But when was the last time you did this?
Yeah, me neither.
Instead, imagine you’re cruising through Spotify and hear an absolute jam. A small green rectangle appears when Snack sees something is sharable on screen. Just long press the rectangle, then tap on what you want to share.
That’s it. Snack will do the rest. You don’t have to leave the app, you don’t have to pick who to share it with. You’re done, it’s posted to a feed you share with friends.
#6 Tag friends. Since sharing is personal, Snack lets you “tag” friends in posts. Tagged posts are delivered to your friends via an anonymous notification. If friends aren’t on Snack yet, you can send an SMS (obviously that’s not anonymous).
That’s it. No nonsense. Just a convenient way to share without leaving an app. We’ve currently got Snack’s automatic sharing working for Spotify, Instagram, Chrome, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, NYTimes, Netflix, and Medium. But you can share from any app using the built in share tool and picking Snack from the list.
Making a new social app is stupid. You face a notorious Chicken and Egg problem. And beyond that, we’ve removed what social media experts say is the reason people share; to get recognition. But that’s the problem, the dynamics we have now are all messed up. Snack is taking a gamble that
(a chance at better content) > (getting a pat on the back)If you like that idea, come join our experiment and bring some friends :)
Snack is free in the Play Store
P.S. if you’re interested in this stuff I highly recommend reading Platform Revolution by Parker, Van Alstyne, & Choudary. Lots of our thinking came from it.
