The Problem with Social

Social media is currently broken, and most people don't even notice. Thats right those 5 or more social apps on your phone, tablet, computer etc. are serving a completely different use from what they were intended to do when being developed. 

A quick intro about the current flaws of social media, and why Beme was created.

Social media apps mostly share the same goal, to allow people to share their perspective of the world/their day with others. However with the recent launch of the app Beme launched by popular video maker Casey Neistat showcased the exact problem with social networks, that most apps have become a way for people to stylize their life or to filter what they show to other people. Social media is no longer about sharing your true life it has become a way to share a filtered view of yourself.

The problem, highlighted in the Beme video above extends to Beme itself. The fact that the app has to be opened and has to be activated in some fashion automatically means that the content shared will be picked and chosen by the individual. This is a vital flaw of most social media apps. 

No matter what app you use to share your life with others, you will be sharing a filtered version of yourself, these problems don't lie in the intent behind the app but rather the designs of the applications. 

Apps are designed to work certain ways, mostly for ease of use, which is why apps like Snapchat, Beme, Instagram, Facebook and others don't share every single little part of your life, every one of these apps allows you the user to choose whether or not to share that moment.

These design choices become accepted by the public and then become simply part of the status quo. People use apps like Snapchat because to them it seems like the current best method to share photos and videos that will disappear after a select amount of time. 

More and more companies will arrive to the social media market, claiming to fix the issues of all the previous applications in the same space, and most of the time these apps will fall to the same issues that all their predecessors have encountered. A word of advice when developing a social media application, don't claim that it is going to completely change the way people will share their lives.

As always feel free to sound off in the comments if you think these problems don't matter or don't actuall exist, or if you think that there is some interesting insight in the post you agree with. Also make sure to check us out on Twitter @SageDiscussions and on Facebook Sage Discussions.