When you join a new social network, you have zero friends, zero followers, zero likes. But as you start posting content, you might get more and more likes and comments. This could lead to new followers. And that dopamine boost will encourage you to post even more. A new application is called Palmsy it tries to act as social media methadone by letting you post anything and get likes on it.
But the catch is that no one can see the posts.
You can publish as many posts as you want. The app even lets you add photos to your posts. But you are sending these posts into the void. Programmer Pat Nakajima told Threads that no posts leave your device and all likes are fake.
Image Credits: Palmsy
The free app — which works on both iPhones and iPads — essentially reads your contact list to assign fake likes to posts. While the app reads your contact information, because all posts are local, contact information is not sent to a server.
“It can be fun to see Likes come from people you haven’t thought about in years. It can also be useful for deleting some contacts you may no longer need,” Nakajima writes in the app’s FAQ section.
Palmsy shows you the contact who “liked” your post. Image Credits: Palmsy
Beyond contacts, you can treat the app as a personal diary or even a place to get bad puns out of your system – no one’s going to judge you. Depends on you.
The developer recently updated the app with some advanced options that allow you to limit the number of likes on a particular post and how long you want those likes to appear: a few seconds, a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days.
There have been many time-blocking apps that try to help in reducing social media addiction. Some developers have also released very basic apps to post dumb posts without consequences.
In 2018, former Google Reader product manager Jason Shellen relaunched Brizzly as a website that lets you put anything into a text box and hit send. Posts don’t go anywhere and you can’t see them when you hit send.
