One piece of social media that plays a big part in almost everyone's lives nowadays is YouTube, and a slightly small but upcoming social media is Twitch. We all know and love YouTube because it lets us watch things from all around the world whenever we want and we can find a video of almost anything on it. While we enjoy watching our favorite YouTubers each and every day I think we sometimes forget that we are watching other people and who those people are. There are many YouTubers out there who actually do a lot for the community and for others with not only their videos but through other means such as charities. One of my current favorite YouTubers is Markiplier, and while I love watching him for all his silly and foolish videos I also enjoy watching him because of the type of person he is. He is very active with his YouTube fan-base and tries his best to bring them together for a good cause, such as his monthly charity livestreams, and lets everyone communicate with each other and bring them closer together. I like him because he not only actively helps others with what he does but he cares about bringing the people who enjoy watching him together and helping them find people who enjoy the same things as them. He also actively tries to meet up with any fans that may be at social gatherings such as gaming conventions and personally talk to them and spend time with them and things like that.
As I've mentioned Twitch is a similar social media that is growing larger and larger with each day going by. It is a livestreaming site, which as long as you have a computer that can handle the processes you can stream anything you want over the internet for others to come, watch and chat with yourself and each other. You can find almost any game being streamed at any time and it brings a fresh experience to watching because you can interact with the person or people directly instead of waiting for a video to come out and commenting on it. It is a lot more interactive than YouTube and can bring people together a lot quicker. The downside of it though is that while you have the interaction with the audience continuously and instantly, you have to deal with the people who only come to your stream to annoy you and annoy everyone trying to watch and interact with you. While there are ways to deal with them, such as banning them from the stream or timing them out, it doesn't stop the initial action and they can find ways around the bans and time outs to come back and just bother everyone again.
I feel that both these social media websites are important on how we live our lives and how we communicate with the rest of the world. YouTube can let us see things we wouldn't normally be able to see in our daily lives and we can watch them as many times as we want. Twitch lets us interact directly with the person we are watching as well as everyone else watching them and it can help us grow closer as a community. Both of these sites work wonders for social media and without them we would certainly find a rift in our online community that only sites like these can fill.
