FeedMate: You decide what you consume
Teenage years are pivotal in everyone’s lives. For me, this came in the form of social media. I was 13 when I heard of Instagram and my screen time went up by almost 600%.
Luckily, or unluckily, I am not alone in this. An average American spends 31 minutes a day on Instagram. Add other social media apps and this number jumps to 147 minutes.
But if you ask someone about the type of content they consumed and what they got out of it, the answers are hardly better than a monkey with a typewriter, mostly because the content is addictive, non-productive, and most importantly, you don’t choose what you consume.
With FeedMate, we want to give users the ability to be more mindful about the content they are consuming and the time they spend on social media.
The problem
Instagram, and other social media apps, are a great stress reducer at times. Taking a couple minutes of break in between work sessions to scroll through your friends posts can be a great way to reduce mental frustration. But that is not how most of us use social media now. It has become way easier to get FOMO looking at Instagram, go down night-long rabbit holes on YouTube, and engage in extremely aggressive and absolutely pointless debates on Twitter.
The dilemma
Our addiction to social media has given rise to a super profitable model for MNCs. The more time we spend mindlessly scrolling, the more $$ bills roll into their bank accounts. This means companies are not gonna change their recommendation algorithms.
The only remaining solution is on the user side and the one that is the easiest (ha!) is a change of mindset.
The Solution
If users can be more mindful while using social media, it can combat most of the negative effects. The solution we have found for this is three pronged:
- Mindful about the time you spend on these apps
- Mindful about the content you consume
- Reflect on consumption regularly
For the time limit aspect, we noticed that a lot of people have the tendency to ‘use their phone for 5 minutes to clear their head’ but end up using it for hours lost in TikTok reels. The same goes for content. I have caught myself picking up my phone to read an article about something but my fingers automatically move to 1010! (my favorite and highly-addictive mobile game — open the link at your own risk). The result is that I did not read the article I was supposed to but did end up beating my high score after 3 hours of gameplay.
So how does FeedMate help me?
In FeedMate, we introduce the concept of sessions where every time you open the app, you have to choose what category of content you want to look at. There is also a time slider to choose how long you want to be on the app for and your session automatically ends when the timer runs out. This mental check-in whenever a user starts the app is to make them reflect on why they are on the app and keep track of their usage goals.
The feed page follows a minimalistic design and all the content is embedded within the app so the user does not have to leave the app for anything.
Wait, how is it different from ScreenTime on iOS?
ScreenTime is a great feature but I, along with almost every other team member, have used ScreenTime in the past but found ourselves taking unlimited time extensions on app usage. Once we got tired of pushing the extensions button, we all just chose to remove the time limits altogether.
Since sessions are a core feature of the app, the user has to ask themselves how much time they want to spend on the app with no way of removing the timer. They do get the option to extend the session but this comes in the form of a 5 minute extension only possible once per session. The amount of extensions used also show up on the stats page so users can keep track of how many times they have gone over their set time limit and change trends if they feel the need to.
Progress
After deploying on TestFlight, we rolled out the app for beta testing to the campus. Our marketing strategy includes email marketing, word of mouth, group me promotions, and collaborations with student clubs. Since the first demo open to the public at Technigala at Dartmouth College, we have had 86 signups and an average of 32 sessions a day. We are expecting exponential scaling once the app is out of Beta and listed on the app store.
What next?
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and FeedMate wasn’t built in 6 months. We have a clear value proposition and to move in that direction, there are more features that our team has discussed and plan to work on over the next couple of months.
One primary addition is to add authentication to the APIs that we are using. Right now, the data being pulled from Twitter, YouTube, etc. is the home page data for an anonymous user and the same is shown to every user of the app. It could prove useful to add authentication so users can log into their accounts on our API endpoints and view data that is more personally relevant. An additional feature that we would need here is sentiment analysis to make the data that is being pulled self-select into different categories like Education, News, and Entertainment, instead of the current way of categorizing which used keywords.
Our team thoroughly perused the feedback from our Beta app and have recognized the need for a search bar. Multiple users mentioned that even within a category, Education for entertainment, they might want to see posts about a specific topic and a search bar would be the easiest way to provide that ability to the users.
The Team
And, it’s Time for Testing
As developers geared towards making an app that genuinely helps our users, we are always looking for more testers, users, and feedback. Try out our app on Testflight
