By Ava Arvand, Senior TYDE Research Assistant
For years, researchers have been investigating the effect of screen time and social media use on mental health. As studies taking this approach have found mixed results, it’s increasingly apparent that how young people use social media matters more to their mental health than how much time they spend on it. Youth perspectives are too often overlooked in research on this topic, which may further explain its inconclusive nature. During our second TYDE Hackathon, we wanted to engage young people themselves in creating digital interventions to help them use social media in healthier ways.
The problem at hand
On March 21, 2026, ten teams of high school and undergraduate students designed and pitched digital interventions to help young people reduce negative social comparison. Negative social comparison (NSC) is defined as comparing yourself to others in ways that make you feel like you are missing out or not good enough. Social media can intensify this experience by encouraging people to share only the best parts of their lives and placing constant comparison opportunities back-to-back in users’ feeds. Considering that 30-90% of youth make NSCs and that it’s associated with adverse mental health outcomes like anxiety and depression, it made a prime target for TYDE’s second Hackathon.
What happened during the Hackathon?
The day began with presentations about the problem at hand and strategies that participants could use to help their intervention’s users decrease NSCs (e.g., reframing harmful thoughts, emotional regulation, honing social media literacy, etc.). Then, each team worked on developing their digital intervention ideas in structured brainstorming sessions. Eventually, they developed mock-ups of what their interventions would look like and explained them in 3-5 minute presentations at the end of the day.
After each presentation, participants rated the proposed intervention on how helpful and appealing youth would find it in reducing NSC. Based on these ratings, feasibility, and clinical expertise, the Hackathon Planning Team selected the top three interventions: Apollo, SoftSpace, and Debunked.
What did the interventions look like?
All interventions were mobile-apps that spanned multiple sessions, suggesting youth prioritize continued support that’s situated in the same digital environment as social media itself.
Personalized reflection activities were a notable feature across many of the interventions. For example, winning team SoftSpace allowed users to log and track their mood in relation to social media use, using colors to represent various moods and a calendar feature to show how these moods changed over time. Other interventions, like Debunked, gamified these reflection activities. They used a short onboarding quiz to personalize games that would help users reinforce healthy goals and reframe automatic, negative thoughts that could arise from NSC. For example, they designed a game where users sorted traits into two buckets: positive traits they wanted to see in themselves went into a “Me” bucket, while negative traits reinforced by NSC went into a “Not Me” bucket.
Relatedly, gamification was common among interventions to help users stay engaged across multiple sessions. Apollo featured a detailed, space-themed gamification system in which users could travel to different planets as they completed reflection activities, like logging their mood and viewing statistics about how social media affects their mental health. They represented progress through light years travelled. This type of elaborate gamification system that made progress personal and motivating over time appeared in other interventions. For example, one team allowed users to customize a “mini-me” and virtually travel across the world as they progressed in the intervention.
Next steps
Following the precedent set by the 2025 TYDE Hackathon, this year’s top designs will be co-developed into a real intervention by an interdisciplinary team including a youth advisory board made up of Hackathon participants, engineers, and psychology students. Then, the intervention will be tested on real teens with anxiety and/or depression symptoms in a randomized control trial.
The success of the Hackathon in generating many novel, intriguing ideas to help solve problems that psychologists have been working on for decades is a testament to the untapped wisdom within youth themselves. By empowering them, we can transform persistent barriers into astonishing progress.
