Thought-Provoking Social Media Site Limits Your Life To Just 100 Posts
Image via Minus / Ben Grosser
While social media has allowed us to stay in touch with far-flung family and friends throughout the years, there’s hardly any doubt it’s brought a whole lot of downsides along with the positives. Just last month, internal presentations showed that Facebook acknowledges Instagram makes teenagers “feel worse,” confirming what many already know.
In response to the undeniable mental health strains social media has placed on society, Ben Grosser, artist and professor at the University of Illinois, took it upon himself to come up with a thought-provoking social network that had the opposite effect.
The platform, called Minus, seems similar to Facebook at first. It allows users to upload personal posts, and interact with others through comments. However, there’s a stark difference—users are only permitted 100 posts for their entire lifetime.
Image via Minus
According to Fast Company, there are also no likes, timestamps (to show when something was posted), or follower counts, but users can leave unlimited comments on others’ posts, allowing them to focus on interacting with others.
Previously, Grosser had created the Facebook Demetricator in 2012, which was a browser extension that allowed users to remove the numbers of likes, shares, or comments from their profiles. While Instagram has introduced that option in recent years, the artist clearly pre-empted the issues surrounding these social metrics.
“Minus revolves around the question of what would happen if social media didn’t always compell you to participate it, but actively worked to limit participation. So you don’t feel like you always need to be on it, or feel like you could step away for a period of time without consequences,” Grosser explained.
Image via Minus
Grosser also noticed that there were few political or troll posts, which he thinks is because controversial posts on Minus don’t generate more likes, or rank higher in users’ feeds. Instead, users spend more time in conversation with others.
“The only way to gauge the success of your post was if there was a conversation in response to it. That’s how human interaction worked until social media,” said Grosser.
“We didn’t go to parties and walk away with lists of numbers about how we were being seen. We had to listen to someone, think about what they had said, and respond if we felt compelled to.”
Image via Minus
Image via Minus
Unfortunately, with how desensitized we’ve all become to likes, shares, and other popularity metrics, sites such as Minus probably won’t get the traction they deserve.
Social media was designed to be addictive, and with new features added to platforms every other week, it’s going to take a lot to tear users away from their smartphones.
[via Fast Company, images via Minus]
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