Why I started Sanity Media

If you have watched The Social Dilemma, read Stolen Focus or Hooked you probably already know that present-day social media is designed to be addictive. The more time you spend online, the more money social media companies make.

You may also be aware of how social media algorithms can inadvertently create echo chambers, where people are only exposed to views they already agree with. This leads to increased polarization and political extremism.

I’m trying to build a service that's more down to earth. A place where you can log in, read some news or stories that interest you, and then forget about it until the next day. No infinite scrolls, no constant streams of notifications, and no incentive to keep checking the site throughout the day. While it might be a hard task to remove echo chambers altogether, I hope can at least limit them.

How Sanity works

Here are the main features in a nutshell:

• All posts created on a given day are published simultaneously at midnight UTC time.
• You can only make a single post a day - make it count.
• No infinite scrolling - the number of posts you’ll see is limited.
• You can upvote and downvote posts - but there’s a combined limit of ten a day.
• The algorithms are simple. For example, everyone sees the same top posts. This should reduce echo chambers.

I hope you find Sanity useful! If you have any feedback you can reach me at contact@sanity.media. Or just write a post about it on Sanity.

- Tomasz