Is there research being done on human-friendly social media design?

It's a given that Facebook, Twitter, et al, are designed to monopolize people's attention and energy. This is obviously not great when a lot of public discourse (or attempts at it) happen on these platforms.

I've seen several submissions by HNers working on 'friendlier' social media platforms, but is there academic research being done on what features would constitute a human-centric social media? By human-centric I mean a space designed to encourage thoughtful communication, to the extent that it can, and one that does not exploit the properties of human brains to form addictions to said platform.

This seems like it ought to be an active area of research. I've tried googling, but all that comes up for the terms I can think of is articles on how to use social media for marketing.