Thing Twelve: Social Media Sites

I researched the social media sites and joined Mixx, then posted a BBC article on global warming onto Mixx and tagged it "climate change." Personally, I cannot think of a reason why joining a social media site, such as the ones listed under Thing 12, would be of any more benefit than receiving an RSS feed from my favorite news sources. I do not see the value of joining a community where the only prerequisite to membership is to have an email address. Voting is very important to the social media sites; voting decides what stories, videos, podcasts, etc. are deemed the most important. I would rather think for myself and decide what news stories are most important. I do not want to be a part of a "community" where you have online conversations with anonymous people. The comments posted by users on the social media sites that I read were mostly short with little thought. That said, I can see the benefit of having a select group of people, such as an English class, have their own social media site in which they select stories of interest to them and have discussions about what they think about the stories.