So let me get this straight, you’re also stating that Twitter wasn’t social media then? Blogs aren’t social media? That social media isn’t media being social? What the fuck is it exactly?
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tyler@programming.dev 3 weeks agoNone of those are social media. God I fucking hate how we’ve somehow gotten to the place where anywhere with people on the internet talking to each other are always defined as “social media”. A comment section or a forum aren’t fucking social media. They’re comment sections, or forums. Reddit is a forum. Lemmy is a forum. Slashdot is a forum.
Calling all those things social media just makes the term completely meaningless.
roguetrick@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
tyler@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Social media is a subset of social networking. Twitter -> social networking. It’s not social media. Anyone claiming that fucking Wordpress or LiveJournal is social media is out of their goddamn mind. Just because you’re talking to someone in a comment section doesn’t mean it’s a social networking site and it sure as hell doesn’t mean it’s social media.
Social media -> a social networking site where the majority of users are sharing media. Example: Flickr. A literal social networking site built around all users sharing their photos. YouTube -> not social media, barely a percentage point of users are commenting much less making their own videos. It’s more akin to a TV station than any sort of social site, and this is readily apparent when you actually compare it to TV show websites!
Social media was never a broad Web 2.0 term, how old are you!? It literally referred to sites like MySpace where you friended others and put fucking MEDIA on your goddamn profile page! It has never once included anything like LJ or WP and that’s such a backwards rewriting of history it’s pretty apparent you’re just saying shit to make it match up with the definition you have in your mind.
rumba@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Anyone claiming that fucking Wordpress or LiveJournal is social media is out of their goddamn mind.
Somewhere in your life, you have gathered a misunderstanding to the definition and categorization of social media. You are absolutely incorrect based on the understanding of others and every single dictionary I have at my disposal. (we’re up to 7) Honestly, I can’t even make up a solution to answer where you learned that they weren’t social media. The term is used so often and is so clear about the sites being social media. I can only guess that you’ve been going off for a decade now every time someone says social media because you heard It wrong once, or someone you respect ultimately told you that’s not what they were.
Social networking platforms are a subset of social media, not the other way around. You have that backward.
The insanity of it is you saying that it doesn’t matter what everyone else thinks or what the 7 dictionaries I’ve reviewed now say.
From your post history, you’re not generally this obtuse, dying on this hill is frankly silly with the mountain of evidence against you.
locuester@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I think the words were used not just by different generations, but also different level of users.
As someone who was around and heavily involved in tech during the bbs days, then walled garden services, then internet forums, THEN social networking and media, I agree not with you but with the prior comment.
The dictionary definitions are rewriting history based on a word that hadn’t even been coined yet. They created a definition which retroactively lumped nearly the entire internet under that term. It’s incorrect and unhelpful to do so.
However, given that language changes and us old geeks don’t make the rules, “social media” now indeed includes the entire internet. I can’t argue with the dictionary, but I can explain the reasoning behind my disagreement with the term. I think that’s the same the last person was saying.
tyler@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
nah I’ve never ‘gathered a misunderstanding’ of it. Somewhere in the past 5 years, everyone and their mom has started referring to idiotic things as being social media, like roguetrick claiming that Wikipedia is social media (they even provided an ‘academic’ source (from a school of business mind you)).
Social media must be a subset of social networking because the literally concept of a ‘social’ website implies networking. So if all you’re adding to the social element is ‘media’ (rather than just text, like Twitter), then it is by definition a subset. If you see ‘adding’ media as expanding the category, rather than restricting the set of social networking sites to only those with sharing of media, then sure I could see how you think that social networking sites must be a subset of the media sites, since they don’t have media. But I see it as a subset of sites that allow for connections and follows of other users, which would make it a subset in the direction I stated.
From your post history, you’re not generally this obtuse, dying on this hill is frankly silly with the mountain of evidence against you.
I honestly do not care what ‘mountain of evidence’ there is. Some things people are just frankly idiots about and it doesn’t matter what the actual justification for it is, in the current world it’s dumb to continue calling it that. I can give two other examples if you would like, where the majority of people in any given region might refer to something as but it makes no sense from any logical, political, social, ethical, moral, legal, etc. standpoint. The only reason being historical (or etymological), which frankly is a dumb reason, especially in this day and age. We should use words so that they communicate something.
If ‘social media’ refers to anything that exists on the internet (which by the arguments I’ve seen so far, it would literally include 99.99% of websites out there) then it’s a pointless, meaningless word that serves only for politicians to use as a battering ram to remove civil liberties and personal freedoms from citizens. Instead of a law stating “You are now required to verify your ID on every website on the internet” they instead can state “You are now required to verify your ID on social media sites” and then that suddenly includes Wikipedia, World of Warcraft, a website bookmarking service called Delicious, and the General Motors blog site (all of these according to roguetrick’s ‘academic’ source of what social media is)! What is the point of the word if it refers to anything and everything under the sun…
roguetrick@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You’re defining Twitter and Tiktok as not social media and calling everyone else out of their mind. You have lost the plot entirely. You’re far from the academic and long accepted meaning of social media and are confusing social networks as an integral part of social media. That has never been the case.
tyler@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
It has always been the case. Please provide a few sources for your claim of “academic and long accepted meaning of social media” because as far as I’ve seen the only places calling these things social media are you and news sites. And I’ve literally never even heard a news corp call fucking Wordpress “social media” because that’s so meaningless even they aren’t dumb enough to do that.
rumba@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/social media
Those are all by definition social media.
tyler@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
I honestly do not give one shit what merriam Webster says, nor any dictionary. It’s an idiotic way to describe what amounts to almost every website on the Internet. That definition includes personal blogs and news websites for fucks sake. You might as well just say “website” because that’s just as descriptive.
Merriam-Webster added that as a definition because that’s how people started referring to everything they did or didn’t like. It’s not because it’s the actual definition or even a good definition.
rumba@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Ahh, yes, the old I don’t care what the actual definitions are or what people in this community are telling me it means, I have my own definitions and you all are wrong defense, smart man.
roguetrick@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Perhaps you should realize that social media features predominate in the modern web and have similar complex problems due to that. It’s a sea change but that doesn’t make it useless. Example: some news orgs did shift heavily into social media citizen journalist models to enable retention but realized that they were not making money from it and the content moderation came at a cost that was onerous. That’s why it’s a useful term. It’s not some categorizing specific websites term. It’s a functional term about how a website operates. And it hasn’t changed despite your belief that it once was very narrow. If anything your narrow usage of the term is what makes it entirely useless because you’re tossing out a descriptor for functionality and it’s associated problems because it doesn’t match whatever imaginary categories you’ve developed.