This is a First Look: It’s the first time any news outlet or blog has covered this startup. You can read more First Looks here. (We do this a lot.)
For young women like Olivia Joslin and Hannah Wei, posting to social media platforms like Instagram can feel like a job, where perfection and vanity reign supreme and a whole etiquette has emerged on how to compliment your peers’ agonizingly choreographed selfies. Don’t believe me? Just listen to this This American Life episode from November. Or check out this screed from Australian teenager Essena O’Neil, who accrued 612,000 followers in Instagram and later decried social media as fake, revealing the sad truth behind her “perfect” photos.
“There’s such vanity and competition, and it really pins women up against each other,” Joslin said. “It has definitely had a negative effect on women in our generation.” That is, Generation Z, the name given to the group of young people who were born after Millennials.
“There’s such vanity and competition, and it really pins women up against each other.”
Joslin and Wei, who are both Wellesley College students, told BostInno they came up with the idea for their new social media app CliqBit, which is available on iOS now, after realizing there wasn’t a social media alternative that provided a happy medium between platforms like Facebook and Instagram that promote permanence and a platform like Snapchat, where everything is temporary. Most importantly, Joslin and Wei wanted to create a safe haven where friends could just focus on the silly moments of life and leave the seriousness out.
Joslin and Wei said the idea for CliqBit first occurred to them after they experienced a hilarious yet unfortunate moment where Wei fell, dropped all of her books and slipped down the entirety of icy hill. And this happened while one of the only men on the all-women campus—the handsome campus police officer, as they described him—watched the moment that seemed like it came out straight out of a movie. Their biggest regret? No one filmed the incident, which would have made for a great first post on a social media platform dedicated to silly moments.
“We’re encouraging the more casual side of social media,” Wei said. Even if it means the retelling of someone hilariously slipping down an icy hill.
As described by Joslin and Wei, CliqBit works a little bit like Facebook and other platforms in that you have your own feed of content posted by your friends, but it also has features similar to those found in Snapchat, Instagram and elsewhere. For one, any post you make can be set to permanent or last just a few seconds or 48 hours. There’s different kinds of post types, ranging from status updates and photos to features not available on the aforementioned social media platforms, like the ability to create your own memes or stop-motion videos
Like Instagram, there’s also a popular posts tab, but unlike Instagram and Facebook, the app’s own version of “likes,” called “cheers”, is only visible to the user that receives them.
“Our ‘cheers’ are only seen by the creator of the post so we want to shift the way social media is heading,” Wei said, adding that it creates less of a competition between friends.
CliqBit also lets you create your own custom groups of friends, called “cliqs,” that you can directly post to. When I asked Joslin and Wei about the issue of posting items that some friends may not find funny or actually offensive, they said they built the “cliqs” feature with that in mind, knowing that everyone has their own sense of humor. It’s also just good for those inside jokes no one else will understand.
Joslin and Wei also acknowledged that while they’re intend the app to be a haven for funny happenings and silly things, they won’t have much control over the tone of the content created by their users. Joslin said they won’t regulate any posts as long as it doesn’t break the app’s policies, but that more importantly, by promoting and marketing a culture of lightheartedness, it will create a precedent for how the users act.
For any actual abuse that happens on CliqBit, such as cyberbullying, Joslin and Wei said they have their own admin app that lets them easily monitor any posts that have been flagged.
While the app will be free for users, Joslin and Wei said they do plan to monetize the platform with ads that fit the tone of the platform and a pro account option that would come with extra features and create a new way for comedians to reach their audience.
