Reflecting on Potentials for Post-Growth Social Media Platform Design

TL;DR

The paper frames a problem: current social media systems privilege growth, leading to user overwhelm and various harms. It advocates a post-growth information ecosystem and reframes design through slower temporalities, citing HCI work on alternative timescales. It draws from Slow and degrowth movements and analyzes concrete platform examples (BeReal, Minus Social) to illustrate how slower constraints can reshape incentives. The contribution is a conceptual and design-oriented roadmap for healthier information ecosystems, offering ideas for resisting extractive and accelerationist dynamics and guiding future empirical work.

Abstract

Sudden attention on social media, and how users navigate these contextual shifts, has been a focus of much recent work in social media research. Even when this attention is not harassing, some users experience this sudden growth as overwhelming. In this workshop paper, I outline how growth infuses the design of much of the modern social media platform landscape, and then explore why applying a post-growth lens to platform design could be productive.