I can honestly say that I don’t enjoy scrolling on social media as much as I used to. With our feeds being flooded with negative and depressing news, AI-generated videos, and “brain-rot” content, I find myself putting my phone down after just a few minutes.
Doomscrolling, which “rose to prominence during the [COVID-19] pandemic,” according to Harvard Medical School, is still one of the most popular ways that people interact with news today. Doomscrolling is motivated by our curiosity to know what is happening at any given moment, but this practice can negatively affect one’s mental health in a myriad of ways, including increased anxiety and stress levels, concentration problems from cognitive overload, and even trouble sleeping.
But could doomscrolling be educational? One app is trying to redirect the human curiosity that drives doomscrolling towards learning instead.
Created by Bluesky user Lyra Rebane, a developer, Xikipedia is basically a social media “skinned” version of Wikipedia. It draws from the pages on the Wikipedia website and presents them on a “pseudo social media interface” where users scroll down to view more content. It started as a website, but now users can download an app for easy access on their phones or other devices.
So how does it work? Essentially, Rebane created a new visual layer, or “skin”, for Wikipedia that mimics those associated with traditional social media to make it easier for users to access a wide variety of information. This allows people to interact with the app in a way that is familiar and scratches the “doomscrolling itch” while focusing on more educational content.
The site draws its content from “Simple English Wikipedia”, which is the version of Wikipedia that uses “shorter sentences and easier words and grammar than the regular English Wikipedia”. Currently, Simple English Wikipedia has over 278,000 different articles, meaning that Xikipedia can create “hundreds of thousands of potential posts for users to explore through continuous scrolling”.
Upon visiting the site, users are asked to choose a few categories to get started. This essentially acts as a way for users to curate a “for you” page. Once the site loads, users are free to scroll to their heart’s content. Clicking on a “post” will bring users to the complete Wikipedia page, and users can even like and save different “posts”. Also, once the site loads, it is available completely offline. Clicking on a “post” will bring users to the complete Wikipedia page.
Considering the average person spends over an hour doomscrolling a day, this app provides users with the same experience as doomscrolling on social media without all the “AI garbage and brainrot content”.
