Are you often overwhelmed by enormous information on social media? Do you wish to only spend a short amount of time on social media and still enjoy the benefit of connection and community? As social media grow and penetrate every aspect of our daily lives, we are often tired or even suffocated by the dense of the information presented to us via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, TikTok, and more. I always wonder, what if there is a social media that promotes slow reading, quality connection, and off-line interaction.
The problem of social media
- keeps us on it and addictive mechanism. The mechanism of many social media platforms is to present content that keeps users on the platform as long as possible. Such an addictive nature might be harmful to users’ mental, physical, and social health.
- populated with low-quality content. Many social media platforms are populated with content that is entertaining and addictive but not important to users. Users are abstracted by low-quality content than engaging meaningful interactions with friends and relatives in social media.
- abused by brands and groups who saturate our timeline with ads and hidden agendas. Since brands and groups are realizing the value of the power of social media, they are creating profiles to advertise and promote their products and ideas. Social media platforms often collaborate with the brands and monetize the attention of users.
A minimalist social media platform - Minima
We name our new social media platform Minima since we design features of Minima to align with the philosophy of modern minimalism. Some features of Minima that are significantly different from other social media platforms are:
- Minimal posting: The platform allows one post per day per account. This feature encourages users to be selective on the content to post everyday. Also, this feature fundamentally restricts the information load for every user. Users won’t suffer from the unlimited feed on the timeline which might flood users with posts every second of the day.
- Minimal updating: the timeline of an account will only update once per day. Social media users often suffer the feeling of FOMO (fear of missing out), which leads them to check their phone repetitively and anxious about new post notifications. However, this feature allows users to be at ease, knowing that there would not be any updates until the next day.
- Minimal viewing time: while login into the platform, users are set to have a default 25-minutes viewing time and 5-minute break. Since many users tend to scroll unintentionally on the social media platform for a long time, it is beneficial to have a reminder for users to take a break and be mindful of the tasks on hand. After 5 minutes break, users can choose to get back to the platform or resume reading at another time.
- Minimal direct message: one account can only send a direct message to another account once per week. This feature encourages a well-thought message exchange. The users will have to wait a while until the message to be sent to the receiver. Meanwhile, due to the limitation of the direct messages, users might more cherish the one-message per week from other users and use their daily posts creatively. The limitation of one message a week also encourages users to create opportunities to take the conversation off social media. Thus, a chance for off-line communication can be established.
- No recommendation system: no recommendation on the interface. users can search by keywords for posts or users. Recommendation systems are very popular on many social media platforms to generate unlimited content for users. However, since it is against all the features and design philosophy of Minima. Hence, we only provide a keyword search function for users and content.
Stakeholder analysis:
- General users. For general users, Minima is a platform that will not disturb users for most time of the day. Since Minima is not emphasized in real-time information generation and consumption, users will be comfortable not looking at the app every other second. Instead, users can relax and enjoy the content at the end of the day knowing that all the valuable information before the last updating period is there and she/he will not miss any important things that happened. The viewing time limitation will also encourage users to consume content and also stay off the phone. With fewer posts to read and generate, users are encouraged to moderate their own feed carefully, meaning save to read later, like, dislike the content they read. Also, it encourages content to be rewrite and update which also increases the quality of the post.
- Key opinion leaders (KOL) and bloggers. KOL and bloggers might use the platform to attract traffic to their own website, which is encouraged and aligned with the purpose of slow reading and quality connection.
- Brand. The brand will have less workload for monitoring their feeds due to the posting and updating limitation of the platform. Also, brands have to build up their profile in a longer time period.
In conclusion, we proposed a minimalist design of social media with the goal of effective usage of social media. Our design can help many people to detox from social media addiction without going cold turkey and not using social media at all.
