Metro Detroiter to launch ‘healthy’ social media app
Aim of project is to help people remain connected
It’s an app designed to get you offline. Inspired by the earlier, more personal days of social media, Dearborn resident Daniel Kastner founded Ruva.app as a healthier alternative to existing apps. Its mission is to keep people connected, not addicted.
“One of the values is to design something that can still connect us well, but does not have this pull to come back to the app, over and over,” Kastner said. “I wanted an app that operates in a social way that’s closer to real-life interactions.”
Projected to launch by the end of November, Ruva.app is free of features to which we’ve now become accustomed — for one thing: There’s no like button. Rather than employing the traditional feed layout, an unpredictable never-ending scroll, Ruva.app instead takes away the surprise factor and gives users control of the curation of their feed.
“These news feeds are essentially designed like casino slot machines, so when you open one of these social media apps, you don’t actually know what you’re going to get,” said Kastner, who has an engineering background. “If you opened one of these apps right now, you couldn’t tell me what you’re going to see. That’s actually done on purpose, so you get this extra dopamine hit when you open most of these social media sites.
“It’s like opening a little gift every time and you don’t know what’s inside — that’s really intentional.”
Kastner, 35, remembers the introductory days of social media, when people shared Chuck Norris jokes and dedicated entire photo albums to school dances, before smartphones were glued to every person’s hand. He’s witnessed the evolution into social media’s seemingly inescapable grasp firsthand.
“In the early days, social media was a lot more personal, people tended to share more personal things, and updates about their lives,” he said. “What we know today is that the algorithms that drive what we see are more interested in the attention that posts get rather than if the content is meaningful.”
Then, in September 2020, came a Netflix documentary: “The Social Dilemma.” The documentary is a warning from Silicon Valley tech leaders about the influence of social media on users’ mental health, fueling addictions and threatening democracy.
Kastner, sick of talking about the problem, decided to act. Thus, Ruva.app was born.
Mixed messages
A simple, surface-level search on the impacts of social media will yield millions of results. Countless studies show attention spans are shorter, anxiety and depression levels are higher, misinformation is running rampant.
Research by the Center for Humane Technology, which produced “The Social Dilemma,” outlines the impact of social media on users. It tricks users into believing trivial matters are urgent, employing notifications as false alarms and effectively diverting attention; it forces users to multitask by keeping them engaged with automated behavior that weakens brain function.
Not to mention its impact on our relationships.
One study compared the ability between two people to connect, purely based on the presence of a mobile phone. It found that the presence of a cell phone can disrupt the connection between two people, reducing levels of empathy and trust, interfering in the ability to develop intimacy.
Further, the use of social media can be detrimental to users’ view of their bodies and the development of eating disorders. A study showed that women’s ratings of their own appearance dropped in direct proportion to the number of “likes” attached to each celebrity Instagram post. It’s not only women who are affected — men exposed to “fitspo” are more likely to experience dissatisfaction with their own bodies.
However, these findings are not new: Social media use is consistently associated with negative body image, and this association only strengthens with time.
In September, a leak of internal documents showed that Facebook knew Instagram negatively impacts users — particularly teenage girls — leading to a hearing by whistleblower Frances Haugen before the U.S. Senate.
Extending beyond Facebook’s impact on teenage girls, the documents revealed internal studies showed the platform was ineffective in identifying and deleting COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and enabled human trafficking.
“Facebook understands that if they want to continue to grow they have to find new users. They have to make sure that the next generation is just as engaged with Instagram as the current one, and the way they’ll do that, making sure children establish habits before they have good self-regulation,” Haugen said before the Senate subcommittee.
It’s not all bad
However, while the research can be alarming, it’s no different from the moral panic experienced each time a new technology is introduced, said University of Michigan professor of information Cliff Lampe, who studies the positive and negative effects of social media.
“Every new information or communication technology we get comes with reasonable concerns about what’s the meaning of that tool,” Lampe said. “The thing that people fail to realize is that there are positive effects to the current social media sites that people get from them outside of just the dopamine rush. It’s easy to underestimate that there can actually be good things that happen in social media.”
When viewed as tools, social media is good for emotional support as it provides an immediate feedback loop of affirmation, Lampe said. They’re also good for “lightweight” social support from a wide network of people.
“In general, whilst we tend to worry — and there are mental health problems that can occur through social media — they tend to be more symptom than cause,” he said. “The folks who are really struggling with social media addiction or with increased anxiety through social media, mostly evidence says that they have other underlying anxiety and depression issues.”
The difference, Lampe said, lies in how users engage with social media: whether they’re passively scrolling through or actively engaging. When people passively scroll through their timelines, seeing vacations to white sand beaches and professional photo shoots of babies, that is when that dreaded feeling of FOMO — fear of missing out — seeps in.
Looking to the future of social media, Lampe said issues of privacy and the traditional business model can be overhauled.
“I always tell my students that if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” he said. “What happens is because the business models of these social media sites are predicated on attention and harvesting attention as much as they can, that creates some of the manipulative, dopamine, kind of stretching things that I think we worry about the most.
“How are you going to fund a social media site without needing to harvest attention? That’s the thing that will change the game.”
That’s where Ruva.app sets itself apart from popular social media apps.
Tackling the privacy issue, users will have no public-facing profiles on Ruva.app. To add friends, each user will have a private link that they can directly share with friends with whom they wish to connect. This eliminates fears of spam bots or parents’ fears of predators finding their children.
“Ruva is going to be the place where no one can even look (users) up, they’ll only be connected to people that they know in a private way,” Kastner said.
However, this feature is at odds with one fact of life: Humans are “conservative with their cognitive energy,” Lampe said — which is a nice way of saying that people tend to be lazy. Even while valuing privacy, people tend toward efficiency as opposed to privacy.
“It’s socially acceptable to say, ‘I value privacy’; it’s not socially acceptable to say, ‘I want everything to be easy,’” Lampe said.
In terms of its business model, Ruva.app will not feature any ads, steering itself onto the less-popular path toward profit. Instead, it will sell profile and feed customizations — like stickers — to users.
And if that doesn’t catch on, Kastner says Plan B is a freemium model, wherein most features will be free but others will require users to pay to unlock.
“My biggest hope is that people can connect in a healthy way, and feel good about using Ruva.app, that they can connect in a healthy way online and feel good about it, because we took out all of these negative incentives,” Kastner said.
“So when you use Ruva, you can think, ‘This app is not trying to manipulate me.’”
People can learn more about Ruva.app at www.ruva.app