The full receipts on feed apps.
Every damning stat we could find about what feed-based social media has done to attention, sleep, and real friendship — sourced.
This is a running list. We’ll update it as better data comes in and as we find sources we trust more. Treat it as a live receipt, not a pamphlet.
The thesis is simple: we kept the phones, and somehow ended up more alone than ever. Below is the evidence that prompted us to build a different kind of app.
On attention
- Teen and young-adult attention span on a single task has fallen measurably since the smartphone-and-feed era began. The exact number varies by study, but the direction is not in dispute.
- Heavy social-media use correlates strongly with poorer sleep across every age cohort that has been measured. Sleep is the silent casualty. Nothing else in your day gets better when sleep gets worse.
On loneliness
- Serious psychological distress among teenage girls has roughly doubled since 2011. Teen boys are not far behind. The curve bends sharply around the year the smartphone-plus-feed combination hit critical mass.
- The share of Americans who say they have no one to confide in has grown substantially in the last two decades. “No one” is not a typo.
- Face-to-face social time is down across every age group that the American Time Use Survey has tracked.
On what replaced the neighborhood
- Most Americans cannot name the people two doors down from them. Many can name, in detail, the Los Angeles apartment of an influencer they have never met.
- The number of “third places” (bars, rec centers, coffee shops where you can sit for three hours without being asked to leave) has declined in every major American city since the 1990s. Some of this is economic. Some of it is that we all started staying home, and then the businesses that needed us to not stay home closed.
What the companies knew
The companies that run the major feed apps are not mystified by any of this. They ran their own internal studies. Several of those studies have been leaked, subpoenaed, or otherwise dragged into the light. The findings, in every case, said roughly what you would expect: the product hurts the users, especially the young ones, in ways the users cannot easily see. The products stayed. The studies got buried.
This is not a conspiracy. It is the logical output of a business model that makes more money when you scroll longer.
What we are not saying
We are not saying quit the internet. We are not saying throw your phone in a lake. We like the internet. We like our phones. We grew up with both and we are not going back to rotary.
We are saying: being social should not mean watching strangers, and any app that calls itself social should be measured by whether it gets you into rooms with real humans.
Everything on disconnectd is measured against that bar. If we don’t clear it, we deserve to fail.
This is a placeholder letter. A fully sourced, footnoted version is in progress. Subscribe via RSS to read it when it ships.