Founders’ Remarks

Hi everyone! This is Michelle Lin and Rose Kuan, co-founders of the Remee Application and we want to share a bit more about our project with you. Social media has become a central focus to our generation’s social life ever since Facebook launched in 2004 and even more so during this past year of quarantine and social distancing. The use of social media allows us to live vicariously through others and connect with one another across the world. Yet, in order to participate in this process of socialization, we often end up sacrificing our mental well-being to perpetrate a toxic cycle of flaunting the good and hiding the bad in our lives. As avid users of social media ourselves, we began to recognize and reflect on the price we pay to socialize through social media.

Unsurprisingly, increasing use of traditional social media have been associated with increasing anxiety in young adults. However, scholarly studies investigating social media usage in conjunction with mental health have been oriented towards providing clinicians with more insight to diagnose anxiety and depressive disorder. Though research on this issue in academia is relatively new, many of us have already felt its profound effects. We began Remee as a remedy to address this drawback in social media usage.

Remee’s mission is to revolutionize the age of social media. At Remee, we aim to preserve the socialization aspect of social media and remove its anxiety-inducing aspect. Social media should not have to consume and deteriorate your identity. It should instead serve as a medium of self-expression and informational exchange.

So, what would the new age social media look like? The core themes of our platform are college-based, anonymity, and positivity. We designed Remee to promote interactions between college students because we are in the crucial stage of developing our identity. Research has demonstrated that peer interactions have an influential impact on young adults. Moreover, the sense of a cohesive campus community is associated with students’ feelings of being cared about. Our goals is to foster this sense of community virtually and impact students in a positive way. In terms of anonymity, we believe that this theme would prevent unnecessary and unhealthy comparisons between users and thus reduce resulting feelings of inadequacy. Our last theme is positivity: it is both the culture of Remee’s virtual community and our company. While users decide the content they post on the platform, we condemn hate speech and discriminatory language. Our platform has devised an extensive backend moderation plan to prevent the misuse of Remee’s platform.

The format of our application will include functions that allow users to register anonymously through a college email account and pose questions to the platform. The range of questions is undetermined, users can decide on whether they want to post about their career or relationship and many other topics. Other members of the community would be able to discuss this topic with one another. There are also special features that we will debut at the launch.

From Rose and Michelle: we would like to invite you to check out our website and Instagram to stay updated for the launch!

Picture by: Rose Kuan

Edits by: Christine Lin and Rose Kuan