Ask Lemmy

I prefer to think of them as antisocial media.

ive had this argument going for at least a decade. I agree with you, it is not social media. i dont think forums are social media any more than usenet.

its why i calll my instance a 'nonsense aggregator', as your verbiage also alludes to.

that said, im using an mbin server.. and the microblog/twitverse piece does seem to jump into the social media arena. so my server product is now integrated with that category whether i like it or not.

I think you’re both right. It’s really a semantic argument over what ‘social’ means in the phrase ’social network’.

For me I tend to agree with your interpretation. I suspect it’s because the phrase came into popular use(see Google Trend screenshot below) and in reference to the Xengas, MySpaces, and Facebooks of the world that were user-centric rather than the forums and BBS type paradigms that were more topic centric.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_social_media

If it is like writing on toilet walls,
then it is social media.

If you’re interacting with other users then there’s 0 question it’s social media.

You're literally asking a question for other people to answer. How is that any less social media than Twitter or Facebook? People post their personal achievements all the time, etc. If you respond to me, are we not having a social interaction?

How is it not social media?

Many people here are being incredibly pedantic about the words "social media", forgetting entirely that "social media" is a term invented to describe a certain type of website. Forums existed before the term was being widely used, for example, and whilst they would fit a dictionary definition of the words within the term they were always considered a separate entity to what was established as being 'social media' (e.g.: Myspace, Bebo, Facebook, etc.).

I'm with you, OP.

Yes. I also consider forums to be social media, but the good kind.

I don't know anyone from Lemmy IRL. No one on here blows up my phone while I'm at work or trying to sleep. I'm not "following" anyone. I don't hate myself and everyone else every time I log on here. I'd say it is NOT social media

We are, somehow, socializing here. And here is a kind of media. So, yes, it is a social media.

YouTube is also a social media.

Social media is a generic concept and should not be limited to Facebook/Instagram-like platforms.

Op you can follow Reddit and Lemmy users just the same as on Facebook or Twitter. So by your own definition, Reddit and Lemmy are forms of social media.

To me they are social media.

You can also follow topics/communities on other platforms, and on Reddit you can follow people/accounts.

There's not much difference.

I don't consider them social media.

Virtually nothing on it is about the poster, and that's mostly how I see social media. Even more baffling is people calling YouTube social media.

Two important caveats though.

1. maybe r/JohnQSmith type things are prevalent just not in my experience. There's plenty of content I've never seen.

2. The descriptivists won the day, so language is about what people do say not what people should say. If people call it that and the dictionary or whatever says something different, the speakers aren't wrong. The dictionary is wrong.

yes, but the key difference is how its. typically used. reddit/lemmy is generally following specific topics while other forms of social media tend to follow specific people or organizations

so yes, both imo are forms of social media, but brcause of how you interact more with it is different, it feels like it's not the same.

I don't think they are, they're more akin to forums.

In my mind, social media is where you follow people and people broadcast their lives. That's the social aspect of it.

With Reddit and Lemmy we follow communities on topics we're interested in.

I do get the arguments for it to be social media but that just makes the category way too broad, as you could argue any site with a comment section is social media.

To me Reddit like platforms are glorified forums. And I don't mean it as an insult.

It is a forum. A BBS.

It's media where you interact with other people. So yeah.

Yes, they just don't do the whole personal algorithm thing.

I believe it's in the same family of web environment as social media, but not necessarily the same clade of it.

Like comparing different romance languages.

It's more to a content aggregator.

I personally don't, because it's anonymous.

I think it's possible to use it like social media and a few people do. One obvious/dumb example would be Lord Douchewad himself: spez.

However, IMHO 99.9999% of people who use it anonymously are social media adjacent, but not on social media.

I can see good arguments to the contrary. Semantics.

IMO Lemmy is a social media, it allows people to socialize over shared interests. It doesn't need to facilitate IRL connections, even though they are likely to happen.

So yes i do think it is social media. But they are more akin to the old internet, or Facebook before it got massive and bad.

For exampke? There is not a massive algorithm, especially a personalized algorithm (obviously Top and Hot are technically algorithms, but they democratically place popular posts to anyone who hasn't blocked/is following the community).

For many comparisons they are obviously social media, but for other types of comparisons I don't think it's a great match.

Primarily anonymous forum style communication are social media like bicycles, scooters, and skateboards are vehicles.

Technically yes, but not really what people think about when they talk about vehicles.

Yeah.

My thoughts is that I come here for content, not people, so there's no social aspect to it.

No, not at all. I don't consider forums social media. Something like Kbin might fall into the social media category though.

I would say yes, it's a form of social media. An online place where, media and ideas can be shared by anyone (subject to membership requirements if any), and where there's a built-in way for the public to discuss and rate those shared items.

I've never seen Reddit as social media, more like a forum. Though I felt it was getting more like social media in recent years. But in one discussion such as this is was pointed out that forums pretty much are social media, they just existed before the term existed.

Then it dawned on me. Reddit didn't become more like social media - it always was one. It was just the enshitification that made it more like the other social media that I was noticing.

Lemmy is medium through which we are having social interactions. So yeah.

It's social media and how social media can be a useful utility without preying on its user base by selling info or advertising shoddy products or whatever.

The term social media is descriptive of an interactive web client like a chat forum. It's not necessarily bad the way propaganda is not necessarily false or malicious.

I agree that there is a difference in how sites like Facebook and Twitter operate vs Reddit and Lemmy, BUT I think they’re still both social media. One tends to emphasize personality and individuals more. You’re encouraged to Follow/Like/Subscribe to the people or accounts themselves. People are given big avatar images and/or profile pages, you can see who they’re following. The topics themselves aren’t as important, it’s more about, “What will Taylor Swift or Elon Musk say today?”. Individuals are given much more attention.

Contrast that with Reddit/Lemmy/forums, where people are more or less reduced to a name, less-emphasized avatars and minimal profile pages. The topics themselves are emphasized and typically communities as a whole come together and do things as a group (meme wars and whathaveyou). The individual is less important and the communities/subreddits are more the “stars” of these sites. You’re encouraged more to Upvote/Downvote/Comment, so you’re interacting a little different, but it mostly just amounts to different terminology. I’ll admit though, the only person I’ve ever considered following on forum sites is u/Shittymorph. Just because his posts were so goddamn hilarious, but finding them in the wild was what made them so epic, reading all the way through only to discover…. “Goddamnit!”

I think in both cases they’re still “social media”, but they are definitely in different categories and they emphasize different parts of the experience.