Around five billion people use social media, and the average user spends a little over two hours a day on it. Whatever those feeds amplify shapes what billions of people feel, fear and do next. In Humanity's Checklist, social media is the nervous system of the human superorganism.
Right now that nervous system is tuned for alarm.
Why feeds reward outrage
Most feeds are ranked to maximize engagement: the time you spend, the posts you react to, the things you share. Content that makes people angry or afraid tends to win that contest.
Research backs this up. A 2017 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by William Brady and colleagues found that each moral-emotional word in a tweet about a political issue made it spread more widely, by roughly 20 percent per word. A 2018 study in Science by Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral found that false news spread farther, faster and more broadly on Twitter than true news.
No one designed feeds to make people miserable. They were designed to hold attention, and outrage holds attention.
The victim state
The result is a population that spends hours a day watching problems it cannot touch. That breeds a particular mood: anxious, divided and waiting for someone else to fix things. Humanity's Checklist calls this the victim state.
A nervous system stuck in alarm cannot heal the body it runs. It sees threats everywhere and acts on few of them.
The problem-solving state
The opposite is a problem-solving state: people who see problems they can actually help with, people who could help them, and evidence that effort works. Same attention, different direction. Moving the nervous system from one state to the other is the flip for this item on the checklist.
Bloomscroll
Bloomscroll is the checklist's beachhead for attention: a feed built to leave you better off than it found you. Its principles are simple to state and hard to build:
- Rank for value added. Measure success by who you become, not how long you stay.
- Show solvable problems. Surface things you can actually help with, near you or in your field.
- Connect, don't just inform. Route people to collaborators, in partnership with the Social Router.
- Make progress visible. Share stories of problems being solved, so the feed feeds the new story rather than the old one.
Not the first to try
Bloomscroll builds on a decade of work. The "Time Well Spent" movement, championed in the mid-2010s by former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris, pushed tech companies to design for wellbeing rather than raw engagement, and grew into the Center for Humane Technology. Researchers and designers have proposed many alternatives since.
What the checklist adds is position. Attention is not a separate cause to be fixed on its own. It sits beneath the story, coordination and vision, and changing it moves all three.
What you can do now
- Notice how you feel after scrolling, and follow accounts that leave you able to act.
- Share solutions as often as you share problems.
- Support tools and builders working on feeds ranked for wellbeing.
Doomscrolling is a habit of a nervous system in alarm. Bloomscrolling is what the same system does when it remembers it can heal.