Social Media Apps That I Use:

Discord <- Will be discussing

YouTube <- Will be discussing

Reddit

Impact of Social Media 

With recent creations of newer social medias, and old, their has been a defined point in which depression rates have increased.  There are a few things that could play into this interesting psychological outbreak. With more and more attention being brought to depression, many people have either discovered they have it, or feel like they’ve self diagnosed themselves based off of the information they’ve been given. The issue with social media is that it exerts extra pressure on societal standards. Due to this social issue, depression rates have risen due to those reasons, and in addition with the amount of disconnect between individuals.

Discord

As an application Discord doesn’t have a lot of issues when it comes to addiction, and promotes a massive sense of community for those whom use it. Discord likes to promote communities within it servers, as an example, a group of of subscribers can be kept up to date and even talk to their favorite YouTuber. As a platform Discord is an excellent area for friends and social groups to meet up and communicate while allowing the sharing of media to emphasize the feeling of community. If a redesign were to occur, I would suggest a way to expand the community based off of the interests of the users. Adding and finding friends with in this application is only limited to actual friends or and outreach of a community. It could be expanded upon to add a friend suggestion feature based off of common interests.

YouTube

Initially YouTube was designed for a multitude of people to share videos and media to keep in touch with one another and allow experiences to be shared on a free and open platform for those to use. At this point in time YouTube was young, and merely only getting into advertising to promote the platform itself, and create a revenue to keep the service alive, and allow those creators to earn money. The main issue, that also holds it back, is its hybrid many to many and one to many distribution. While this platform is great for content creation and entertainment, the algorithm for video suggestions are very wonky. YouTube wants the user to keep watching content, so they can display more ads relevant to the viewer, so it’s intentionally made to be addicting for the watcher. A great redesign for this platform is to develop a keep watching feature, or have the algorithm decay after a certain point, and start suggesting videos that wouldn’t be so appealing to the end user.