[From Left to Right]: Shahan Rizvi (COO and co-founder), Ryan Bogle (CEO & Founder) and Asad Rizvi (CTO & Co-Founder).

A fusion between the clean display of Pinterest and the photo-sharing ability of Instagram has inspired a university alumnus to help create a new app that allows users to like and dislike others’ posts for more honest sharing.

The two defining qualities of its collaborative appearance and dislike option introduce a fresh approach to social media that is the Steeze App, which is named after a portmanteau of style and ease, said Shahan Rizvi, who earned his bachelor’s degree in government and politics from this university in 2008 before setting his sights on mobile media. The app is now available in the Apple App Store.

“The vision was to bring in something new and cool,” said Rizvi, chief operating officer and co-founder of Steeze LLC. “That’s what ‘steeze’ is — it’s the definition of cool, and that’s what we wanted [the app] to be.”

Steeze’s creators modeled their site around photos and visual posts, but they also use other text-based components, including a feature called “the mag”, which is an in-house trending topics blog that provides users with news at any time of the day. With these features, Rizvi said he hopes to compete with Pinterest and Instagram.

The Steeze team differentiates its app from other social media platforms by its distinctive visual design, created by sneaker artist Martin Figueroa, and by its use of what is essentially a dislike button, Rizvi said.

Although some social media users have voiced their support for a dislike option, Facebook and other sites have shied away from it, likely to avoid the potential bullying that could result from its use, Rizvi said. However, the Steeze founders said they think their use of the dislike button could avoid the possibility for negativity.

Using what they call a “peep or toss” system, users of Steeze — who now number in the thousands, Rizvi said — can express their approval or disapproval of a post. The peeps, similar to “likes” on Instagram, are available for all to see, but the tosses are only visible to the poster. That way, people can know if something they post isn’t liked, without the shame or crowd-bullying that could be possible if everyone else knew the number of dislikes, Rizvi said.

“So if you have a new pair of shoes, you say, ‘Hey guys, what do you think of these, peep it or toss it?’ And then they can see what people really think,” he said. “You’ll get honest feedback from it.”

However, this feature can be turned on or off by the poster, said Ryan Bogle, co-founder of Steeze. So while users might not be able to dislike a political statement they disagree with publicly, for example, they can express their dislike privately if the poster permits this setting.

This function could also allow easy access to both positive and negative feedback for companies and brands who spend millions on product control groups, Bogle said. In the future, he said he hopes to monetize this Steeze function by selling companies promoted posts and analytics of the kind of people who peeped and the kind who tossed.

Right now, Steeze is only available for iPhones, but Rizvi said they hope to adapt it for Android and as a standalone website in the coming months, when they plan to increase promotion and awareness.

Rizvi and Bogle both expressed boredom toward current social media and said they hope Steeze will catch on with college students who may share their ennui regarding tired apps that have lost their freshness and appeal.

“I want them to know this is sort of their app,” Rizvi said.