Which Social Media Platforms Do You Use?

[Belen]

Neither Discord nor Reddit function as a forum does.

Discord is just a stream of thought essentially, one big long thread. The other, is actively toxic in how it controls discussion.

They are not forums.

Discord also started as competition for TeamSpeak and other gaming voice chat channels. It morphed heavily as Microsoft has made it worse. It was made more like Social Media to prey on consumers.

Reddit is a bit more valid as a heir to forums.

 

[Scribe]

Reddit is a bit more valid as a heir to forums.

With upvote/down vote to hide things is not great. I've never had an account but that.kind of mob silencing, nah.

 

[Belen]

With upvote/down vote to hide things is not great. I've never had an account but that.kind of mob silencing, nah.

Never used it outside of googling for how to fix things on my pc. No account.

 

[trappedslider]

Discord also started as competition for TeamSpeak and other gaming voice chat channels. It morphed heavily as Microsoft has made it worse. It was made more like Social Media to prey on consumers.

I remember when i first started playing WoW with a guild, they used Ventrilo before switching to discord

 

[Ryujin]

This.

Social media arose from places like MySpace and were corporate ad vehicles.

Forums are places for conversation and interaction.

Companies started shutting down forums because they did not help sell the product and they were sources for accountability.

Forums also tended to be community-driven spaces rather than individual-driven corporate owned. Corporations then mass the product worse while deploying addictive algorithms.

Forums do predate social media and are much different beasts.

If y'all could see what Usenet was like, you'd think that social media had been around since the '80s. It predated http but the interactions were pretty much the same, right down to the flame wars. Pretty telling since the majority of people with access to it had connections to military, research, or education.

 

[Ryujin]

call me simple, but i classify forums as social media because you are being social by discussing things

 

[Thomas Shey]

Neither Discord nor Reddit function as a forum does.

Discord is just a stream of thought essentially, one big long thread. The other, is actively toxic in how it controls discussion.

They are not forums.

I acknowledge you think so. Now you'll have to acknowledge I think they have considerable overlap in how they work in practice. I've seen discussions in all three that were not meaningfully different than they'd have been in one of the others.

 

[Thomas Shey]

If y'all could see what Usenet was like, you'd think that social media had been around since the '80s. It predated http but the interactions were pretty much the same, right down to the flame wars. Pretty telling since the majority of people with access to it had connections to military, research, or education.

Or, as far as that goes, mailing lists (and, yes, I was around for both).

 

[Deset Gled]

If y'all could see what Usenet was like, you'd think that social media had been around since the '80s. It predated http but the interactions were pretty much the same, right down to the flame wars. Pretty telling since the majority of people with access to it had connections to military, research, or education.

I'm still a member of an active listserv.

I can't help but feel like people claiming ENWorld and other forums aren't social media is a bit like the folks who want to claim they never watch TV but also swear DVDs/streaming/whatever doesn't count.

 

[GrimCo]

Why is Whatsapp on the list? It's app for voice calls and messaging. People use it as a substitute for regular calls and SMS. Same with Signal. Sure, you can add status, and they introduced channels, but no matter how much Meta tries to push that crap, people don't really care for those features.