Is anyone here so hardcore that they don’t even bother with mainstream social media? If its not on Lemmy or Mastodon it must not be important? Anyone that hardcore?

  • tyler@programming.dev
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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      9 months ago

      Who set those rules? Is there standards body that promulgates them? I remember that social media emerged as a term to describe media on which the users provided the content, rather than traditional gatekeepers like newspapers and TV networks. Wikipedia agrees, using special jargon, distinguishing between monologic and dialogic media models.

      Reddit is quintessential social media.

    • lazynooblet@lazysoci.al
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      9 months ago

      Hmm. For me social media is where end users create the media. So Reddit, Lemmy, YouTube all fit this.

    • incogtino@lemmy.zip
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      9 months ago

      The reason I would call reddit social media is that I don’t agree with any of those rules

      The closest I would agree with is 2, and not based on lack of anonymity but instead on persistence of identity, and that being core to the experience

      I was part of subreddits where users knew each other as distinct personalities, and could converse across different threads across time, and occasionally IRL from various meetups

      When a website doesn’t have a lively and persistent ‘local’ community (maybe geographic, maybe subject etc) it can’t really be social