Comment on Is This Social Media?
tyler@programming.dev 1 day ago
No: you don’t follow “real identities”, it’s a forum, not a user generated feed of personal life details, the votes are not likes/dislikes of personal content, but upvotes and downvotes to indicate whether that post belongs in that forum or not. For the most part users are not generating any media at all, though they can (exactly like a forum). The basis of the site isn’t around following anyone or the content they’re generating, but instead subscribing to communities.
It’s only social media if your definition of social media is “people commenting on stuff” which would mean that almost every website on the planet is social media. Clearly one of these definitions is wrong and I don’t really understand how we got to the place where “commenting on stuff” made it social media when it’s clearly not.
null@lemmy.nullspace.lol 1 day ago
Wikipedia strongly disagrees with your definition
tyler@programming.dev 1 day ago
I don’t give one shit what Wikipedia says. I’ve argued this on here before. Wikipedia’s definition includes every website on the planet because of how wide ranging and useless of a definition it is. Defining social media in that way makes the meaning useless and only serves politicians who want to block things they dislike on the internet. Essentially “social media” == internet to them.
null@lemmy.nullspace.lol 1 day ago
You’re welcome to your whacky opinion. Just pointing out that it’s uniquely yours 🙂
tyler@programming.dev 1 day ago
But it’s not. Someone edited wikipedia to put a definition only cited in one business article from 2010. It was never the common definition until news companies started calling anything they didn’t understand “social media” because it became a catch all. Forums aren’t social media.