With social media’s rapid expansion, debates about healthy usage have sparked. Many people in our generation are stressed by the need for perfection brought on by social media standards.
Things like posting on Instagram can be a multi-day process. I know many people who spend a good chunk of a vacation trying to curate images for their social media. The idea of living in the moment is sacrificed for a chance to create the perfect feed. The influencer culture that has emerged in recent years has sucked all of the enjoyment out of most social media platforms.
While these apps can be a good way to connect with peers, they can also be a burden on mental health. Constant displays of perfection make it difficult for many to remember that a post online is not necessarily a depiction of reality.
Recently, there has been an increase in social media apps that don’t involve posting. These apps redefine what it means to share something on social media. A profile can showcase personality without needing a face attached to it.
Letterboxd specifically seems to have reached a large audience in a brief period. The app launched in 2011 and had 14 million users in 2024.
Letterboxd is a form of social media that allows people to rate and review movies and TV, curating a profile specific to their watch history. Like any other social media, it encourages you to follow friends and see their profiles and any comments they have left.
Letterboxd creates a more personal aspect of social media that I find extremely beneficial. It emphasizes connection without encouraging the unachievable standards rampant in other apps.
I am excited to see more apps like Letterboxd fill our phones. For the past couple of months, my friends and I have been rating different movies. Although I have always loved seeing new movies in theaters, I have never thought much about forming a genuine critique of the things I watch. This app has provoked conversations among my friends that we never would have had before.
Additionally, I love that there has been an increase in the recognition of apps catering to a specific creative niche. If you have no interest in movies, there are also apps like Goodreads and Airbuds that inspire people to connect through a mutual interest in varying types of media.
Stress-free social media like Letterboxd will not only ease mental health concerns that stem from other apps but will also create even stronger relationships. It is a platform that allows people to share a piece of their mind rather than focusing purely on aesthetics.
With apps like Letterboxd, people don’t need to worry about being fed only one type of media by an algorithm. Too often, social media apps will feed us whatever content is the most popular among other individuals rather than allowing people to deliberately seek out the content they want to consume. The app promotes new movies but ultimately does not push one genre more than another.
The Letterboxd “top four” has become a huge trend online, becoming a go-to interview question for many celebrities. The highlight of a profile is the user’s top four favorite movies. Letterboxd is my ideal projection for the future of social
media. It has created a community of people from all over the world who are excited to form and share enthusiastic opinions.
Apps like these will prioritize positive content with a purpose. Letterboxd can perfectly coexist with other forms of social media by distracting from some of the obsessive behaviors brought on by apps like Instagram. Doomscrolling and compulsively consuming stressful content has taken a huge toll on our generation. I don’t think we need to give up social media but having thoughtful, creative platforms will help create a much-needed balance.
If we continue to utilize platforms like this to connect, I believe our generation will find social media much more rewarding.
