Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube. The social media lists are endless, and the social media creators are always improving their product. No matter how much a social media website updates, they always miss a few things, or they never understand the consumer's wants or needs. Some social media sites change, but it doesn't always improve a users experience. Here are some things social media users want:
1. Getting a notification in your messages after you become friends with someone. When you get a message notification, it's a great feeling. You instantly assume that someone has messaged you on Facebook. Now, you can get a notification without a message, just because you are friends with someone new. It would be nice if you only got notifications when someone actually messages you.
2. Commercials in-between videos that are over five minutes long. Facebook makes millions of dollars by advertisements already, so why include even more, especially if it begins to interfere with users watching short videos?
3. Friendship anniversaries. If you are mutual friends with someone for a year, you're going to get a cute little "One Year Friendship" video made for you. Recently I had one made for me and an acquaintance from high school that I've never hung out with, we just had a few classes together.
1. More characters. A measly 140 characters aren't enough. Even 200 characters would be a huge improvement. Also, why should a space in between words count as a character?
2. The magnifying glass icon. Have you ever noticed how the magnifying glass icon changes its name often? Also, go to the "explore" icon and you'll notice there is a gif or a video before the hashtag trends. It seems a bit excessive.
Snapchat
1. News stories. In a previous article I wrote, I asked Snapchat if they can remove Daily Mail from my newsfeed. My problem was seeing a constant stream of articles objectifying women and body shaming them as their thumbnails. Update: Snapchat didn't respond, and I still have Daily Mail on my 'Discover' page. For news stories, it would be great if Snapchat users can pick which 'Discover' articles they can see, what articles they are interested in, and discover new pages by adjusting their settings. Also, second update: Daily Mail continues to do articles on women and their bodies in their Snapchat Discovery headlines; below is the screenshot I took from April 15th:
YouTube
1. Mature Content = LGBtQ+ content? Not sure if this is still a thing, but viewers had to sign in to confirm their ages in order to watch any video associated with LGBTQ+ topics, or a certain YouTube creator. That includes restricting some of the most popular YouTubers and their content. Update: the restrictions were changed to majority of other videos.
2. Ad's you cannot skip. Back in my day, what made YouTube great was the fact that you could skip ads. Nowadays, some advertisements don't let you do that.
3. Rearranging songs in a playlist. When you make a playlist on Youtube, you have no control as to rearranging the videos in what order you want to see them. Is it possible to rearrange them? Am I simply missing something obvious here?
