Hot thought

(Cos I literally just had it now)

What if the reason that social media always becomes an absolute bane

Is

Because

Our feeds of posts are

1D

?

It becomes an endless tirade of scrolling through a list of items that no longer pique our interest as once before

Perhaps this is because it's nothing like real life.

A 2D pane of items would make a big difference to our interactions.

Firstly, we can see spatially instead of.. listically.

Secondly, UI can be designed completely differently. People panes with faces and micro profiles floating around, grouped by recent post topic, by profile tags, by region. Online panes. Post panes, posts in bubbles floating around, linked by topics.

A 2.5D interface would make it even more interactive, without becoming like virtual reality. I don't think anyone really wants actual full immersion virtual reality. A 2.5D UI could allow basic avatar navigation. I'm really only thinking as much as a simple Pokémon style exploration, nothing exciting or graphically intensive, just enough to have some contextual navigation.

The problems that keep arising on platforms like these (standard, 1D feeds) is that the VAST majority of us never get many followers, so we don't get much reach, we don't get to interact with many other people.

If we all just follow anyone and everyone, the feed turns into unusable digital noise.

But if our INTERFACE were arranged differently, perhaps it would be better… We could discover each other spatially, in that, spaces allow more dimensions, and dimensions are the axes to contain variation. Thus, following and finding people to have these conversations with would be much simpler and more organic.

There must be a reason that our world evolved in 3 spatial dimensions! One and two just weren't enough :)