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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Social media emerged as a term to describe Facebook and MySpace, places where you added connections between friends and shared moments of your life with them, not a comment section on a website. Using the term “social media” to describe something that existed before those sites existed devalues the actual worth of forums as a meeting place. There is clearly a difference between something like Twitter and Facebook who’s only purpose is to show you ads and things to get you angry using algorithms and places like Lemmy and really any sort of comment section (Reddit and 4chan included) that are simply people talking to each other.

    I would expect most people here would be able to understand the difference and how referring to things that are distinctly not Facebook or Twitter as being in the same category. Reddit, Lemmy, your random double edge razor forum, etc are not social media. They’re forums. They’ve existed for thousands of years.

    forum
    noun
    fo·​rum ˈfȯr-əm 
    plural forums also fora ˈfȯr-ə 
    Synonyms of forum
    1
    a
    : the marketplace or public place of an ancient Roman city forming the center of judicial and public business
    b
    : a public meeting place for open discussion
    The club provides a forum for people interested in local history.
    c
    : a medium (such as a newspaper or online service) of open discussion or expression of ideas
    2
    : a judicial body or assembly : COURT
    3
    a
    : a public meeting or lecture involving audience discussion
    The town has scheduled a public forum to discuss the proposal.
    b
    : a program (as on radio or television) involving discussion of a problem usually by several authorities
    


  • Reddit isn’t social media, YouTube isn’t social media. People started branding anything with a comment thread as social media and it’s nonsensical. Criteria for social media: 1. Must allow following any user 2. Users must not be anonymous 3. Must be able to interact with, chat, send messages to, etc. any user. 4. All of the above must be the main point of the site.

    Reddit is a forum of forums. The point is aggregated news feed for different forums. User to user social interaction is not the main point, and the user to user interaction that occurs is forum interaction, which existed decades before social media.

    YouTube is a video sharing site. It has comment sections just like any news site.

    If YouTube is social media then literally any news site is social media. If Reddit is social media then every forum on the planet is social media. Neither of those things make sense, therefore they’re not social media.

    Sorry I just absolutely hate that everyone refers to anything with a comment section as social media now. It completely devalues the word and makes it meaningless.