There were two recent posts that offered ideas on how social media can help the world and do more than promote lolcats, Apple, and anti-Palin stories.

• A Plan for Social Media Sites (and Users) to Give Back
• With Great Social Media Power Comes Great Responsibility

The idea is simple. Social media sites send a lot of traffic to web pages across the Internet. There should be a way that these sites can send more traffic to pages that are trying to do right in the world. Causes, charities, and information about the two can find their way onto these social media sites and do more than promote the latest post on Huffington Post or Torrent Freak.

It just makes sense.

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Read more about social media on this blog.

The user base of social media users is strong. There is a large population of coders, graphic designers, and programmers who visit Reddit, Slashdot, Digg, and Mixx on a regular basis.

With that knowledge, have you ever wondered why the sites are so unattractive?

I wanted to post some of the screenshots of the top social media sites, but since this is also a graphic design blog, I didn’t want to taint the beautiful with the atrocious. It isn’t hard to see that they could use a freshening up of their look and feel. The problem is that they are already so embedded and user friendly that designs are not always met with enthusiasm.

Basically, we’re used to them and they probably won’t be redressing any time soon. Still, they probably should.