Comment on Australia to ban under-16s from YouTube

• borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Exactly. The only thing that I really have to add is that I personally draw the line between social media and other types of websites or internet services is whether the service is intended to be used anonymously or connected to a real identity. I’d further divide the anonymous stuff between whether they are intended to be used with handles or without an account at all.

  Under that personal definition, I would not consider stuff like BBS, Usenet, forums, AIM, etc., to be social media.

  I also wouldn’t consider Discord to be social media tbh, it’s a messaging application. If Discord is social media why isn’t iMessage?

  Something like Twitter, BlueSky, or Mastadon could be social media depending on how you use them, but since many people do utilize them with accounts linked to their real identity I would consider them social media.

  Then you have the obvious social media stuff like FaceBook, and LinkedIn.

  Now that I’m typing this out, stuff like Insta, TikTok, Snap, etc., get weird. I would personally consider them social media, but tons of people use those apps with handles. Maybe in addition to the anonymous or real identity thing there’s also the consideration of whether the site or app is intended to connect you with people you know in meatspace or online.

  Yeah, I guess the distinctions I personally use are becoming a bit meaningless now.

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  • locuester@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I also used to make a distinction for apps where the majority of content was rando internet user created. But all the apps are now just fulltime creators and very rarely does a true rando go viral.

    The “going viral” technique got ruined similarly to how seo ruined search. Completely ruined to the point that the little guy never appears.

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  • locuester@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yeah when musically/tiktok came along, twitter, insta, snap, and YouTube all copied the model so you’ve got this dual use thing going on there.

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• tyler@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

  Exactly. The ‘academic’ source that roguetrick (not who you replied to) supplied that apparently ‘37 thousand citations’ are using, was written in 2009 and states that Usenet was a social networking site. Just a complete rewrite of history. Notably that ‘academic’ source was from a business school.

  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.

  Thank you for understanding my point of view. This is complete rewriting of history by (mostly) news corporations that serve only to make people mad. And ‘social media’ became an easy buzzword to refer to anything that had something wrong with it. This got very bad in the past 5-10 years (time passes weird now).

  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.

  you can argue with the dictionary, that’s what I’m doing here. A term that refers to everything under the sun is a meaningless word, especially when it’s weaponized against its citizens, exactly like the UK is doing with ‘social media’ currently, by having it literally encapsulate every website out there, but making citizens think that it doesn’t. The only way you convince the dictionary to change is by telling people that social media doesn’t mean forums. That social media doesn’t mean YouTube. That social media doesn’t mean Wikipedia. (I have some other words I’d like to argue as well, but they’re completely unrelated to this thread).

  So that’s what I’m doing here. Telling people that including these things in this all encompassing meaningless word not only devalues the word, but makes it so that politicians can fuck us over anytime they want by using the ‘social media’ boogeyman, and then firewalling Wikipedia, or anandtech.com, or fordf150ownersforum.com, etc.etc.etc.

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• roguetrick@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  What you’re hinting at is a little broader. It’s not so much language redefining things as much as users rejecting labels doesn’t matter. For a functional definition like social media, people do and did reject being defined as that to preserve some sense of community distinctiveness. But just like punk artists rejecting that they’re in the genre or even musicians, the small groups view on the subject isn’t as important as the functional reality and the greater social utility of the term.

  In regards to rewriting history, it’d be like rejecting calling da vinchi’s helical air screw a proto helicopter. Just because the term was coined later doesn’t mean that it’s rewriting history to apply the concept. It’s not unhelpful to define a concept and review it’s impacts. I honestly think it’s very helpful in examining eternal September myself, for example, and seeing it’s parallels in the walled gardens and subsequent social networks and how they all approached the same challenges and implemented some of the same tools.

  In essence, the broad term exists precisely because it defines something that is useful in ways “the Internet” is not.

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