We’ve all felt that soul sucking feeling of scrolling Facebook at 1am only to ask ourselves “why did I do that?”

Nir Eyal, a thought leader in behavioral design, thinks the fact that our feeds are 90% lame is exactly why we keep scrolling. The “semi-stressful state” we feel while scrolling Facebook is a freak misappropriation of a survival instinct we needed to keep us digging through dirt looking for some edible tuber. And it’s addictive.

That’s depressing, let’s do something about it. If we want less dirt and more uhh… tubers, we need better curation. Curation is why Reddit’s front page is entertaining and why you’d probably like the 30 song Discover Weekly playlist Spotify makes for you.

How Discover Weekly works is interesting. It relies on other users’ behavior to curate the songs for you. Which is exactly how we’re going to fix our social media feeds. But before we get in to how this might work, let’s understand the problem.

We already have a place for friends to share cool stuff. It’s called Facebook. Why doesn’t it work?

The same reason Facebook is popular is what causes it to suck: all your friends are on it. Sociologists since the 1950’s have described a “front stage performer persona” that we all slip into when we know we’re being watched. And frankly, it’s not our coolest look.

“when users are acting (liking, posting, commenting) on Facebook, they are simultaneously trying to build an idealized image or face of themselves.” DE Wittkower (2014)

Facebook’s problem is it can’t replicate the natural boundaries that exist between our friend groups, family, and coworkers. It’s not that your friends suck. It’s that everyone is stuck in front stage performer mode and your feed reflects it.

This is why most of us have turned to Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, Netflix, Vine, Musical.ly, Medium, Pinterest, Blorgisborg, and Feel.ly

But now we’ve got 8 feeds to check. And let’s be honest, they’re 90% noise too.

Back to curation; odds are good that right now you’ve got a friend scrolling a social media feed.

Baby picture, baby picture, 2016 election, cat hugging dog! Jackpot!

If we could get your friends to share jackpots when they see them, we’d have a “best of” feed. It’d be our own Discover Weekly, but for social media.

The problem is how do you get good content out of 8 different closed platforms? It’s not easy. Maybe impossible.

My friend Steve and I thought a lot about this problem and decided to build an experiment. We’re calling it Snack. It’s free in the Play Store (we’ll build an iOS version if there’s interest). What follows is the thinking behind it.