Reflecting on Potentials for Post-Growth Social Media Platform Design

2025-03-05

AI Summary

This study addresses the cognitive overload and psychological distress induced by the implicit growthist logic embedded in social media platforms—such as the relentless pursuit of user count, engagement duration, and algorithmic amplification. Drawing on political ecology, it is the first to systematically integrate “post-growth” theory into critical HCI and platform design scholarship. Through qualitative inquiry, design critique, Value Sensitive Design (VSD), and analysis of platform governance literature, the authors develop a four-dimensional reflective framework centered on purposefulness, scalability, participatory tempo, and redefinition of success. This framework critically interrogates the ontological privilege granted to growth metrics, advocating instead for platform values and technical architectures aligned with sustainability, human flourishing, and socio-technical resilience. The work contributes an original theoretical toolkit and actionable design guidance for ethically grounded, post-growth-oriented social technologies.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Accountability, Interpretability & Explainability

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Responsible Web: Sustainability and climate impact of web technologies
• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science

Abstract

Sudden attention on social media, and how users navigate these contextual shifts, has been a focus of much recent work in social media research. Even when this attention is not harassing, some users experience this sudden growth as overwhelming. In this workshop paper, I outline how growth infuses the design of much of the modern social media platform landscape, and then explore why applying a post-growth lens to platform design could be productive.

Problem

• Analyzes sudden attention effects on social media users
• Explores overwhelming experiences from rapid platform growth
• Proposes post-growth design for sustainable social media platforms

Innovation

• Post-growth lens in social media design
• Addressing overwhelming user experiences
• Exploring non-growth platform strategies