I had this discussion with a friend, and we really couldn’t reach a consensus.
My friend thinks Lemmy (and other Reddit-like platforms) is social media because you’re interacting with other people, liking/disliking submissions, and all the content is user-generated.
I think it isn’t because you’re not following individual people, just communities/topics. Though I concede there are some aspects of social media present, I feel that overall it’s not because my view of social media is that you’re primarily following individuals.
In my view, these link aggregator + comment platforms are more like an evolution of forums which both my friend and I agreed don’t meet the criteria to be considered social media (though they maintain that Reddit-like platforms are social media while I do not).
So I’m asking Lemmy now to weigh in to help settle this friendly debate.
Edit: Thanks everyone! From the comments, it sounds like my friend and I are both right and both wrong. lol. Feel free to keep chiming in, but I have to go do the 9-5 thing that pays my mortgage and cloud hosting bills.
I prefer to think of them as antisocial media.
If I have to concede this argument to my buddy, that’s how I’m going to do it: antisocial media 😆
This is due to the anonymity of the situation and is the same direction my own answer went. I’m betting I know where this question came from, and I’d also bet courts would lean the other direction, based on the intent.
If it is like writing on toilet walls,
then it is social media.That’s an interesting and not inaccurate comparison lol.
I don’t know what else you’d call it.
IMO Lemmy is a social media, it allows people to socialize over shared interests. It doesn’t need to facilitate IRL connections, even though they are likely to happen.
I think you’re both right. It’s really a semantic argument over what ‘social’ means in the phrase ’social network’.
For me I tend to agree with your interpretation. I suspect it’s because the phrase came into popular use(see Google Trend screenshot below) and in reference to the Xengas, MySpaces, and Facebooks of the world that were user-centric rather than the forums and BBS type paradigms that were more topic centric.
I think it’s a massive forum.
I think of social media as Facebook where it’s your real name and contacts who you interact with (primarily anyway).
But this is any number of topics you can go in and out of, with a huge array of strangers that you may or may not interact with again. More links, discussion, specialities.
You can get into precise definitions to force Lemmy/Reddit into social media, but I’m still forum.
Aren’t forums technically social media as well?
We are, somehow, socializing here. And here is a kind of media. So, yes, it is a social media.
YouTube is also a social media.
Social media is a generic concept and should not be limited to Facebook/Instagram-like platforms.
That’s basically my friend’s argument. And I can see your/their point.
My argument against it basically boils down to the scope of what you follow. Following a group/community vs individual users. e.g. If I posted this on a forum back in 1997, we’d be having this discussion in a similar manner (though probably not threaded).
That, and “social media” carries a kind of stigma from the engagement algorithms they all use. Granted, that’s not a requirement for something to be technically social media, but it’s definitely something most people associate with it.
Algorithms is a consequence. Most of social medias are profitable, so they want you to be engaged as much as possible. At the beginning of Facebook or even the late Orkut, they were only a simple platform with no algorithm that only shows stuff like a showcase.
But as soon as Facebook starts to make money showing ads, algorithms started to become a thing. But look, it was a social media already.
Also, was Orkut a social media? Cause it was really close from what Reddit/Lemmy is today.
About forums I think there is a subtle difference. Forums are, generally speaking, communities driven with on purpose only, inside another website. For example, we can enter Acer website and go to the forums, which is used to talk about Acer products and support. Any other topic is off-topic, therefore deleted.
When forums are aggregated into a huge platform that can have different communities, with easy to-go click and follow this community, there is no specific topic and you can join any type of content you want with only one account, I call it social media, cause it’s different enough from forums and the main purpose is people interacting with each other
Lemmy is social media. Reddit is sociopath media
To me they are social media.
You can also follow topics/communities on other platforms, and on Reddit you can follow people/accounts.
There’s not much difference.
Yeah it’s more like a sliding scale where some platforms are deeply about following people, and some about topics, but I’m the end it’s all social media.
I think one aspect OP didn’t talk about is anonymity, for me the biggest differentiator is that on lemmy/Reddit you have no idea who the accounts are most of the time (and more importantly, nobody knows who you are).
Yes. I also consider forums to be social media, but the good kind.
Yes, they just don’t do the whole personal algorithm thing.
It’s media where you interact with other people. So yeah.
yes, but the key difference is how its. typically used. reddit/lemmy is generally following specific topics while other forms of social media tend to follow specific people or organizations
so yes, both imo are forms of social media, but brcause of how you interact more with it is different, it feels like it’s not the same.
If you’re interacting with other users then there’s 0 question it’s social media.
By that logic every comment section under a random newspaper’s article is social media. I dont think this forum esque, link feed with comment sections kind of social media that lemmy is, qualifies. Reddit didnt either for the longest time, before they started trying to form a culture and drowned in self referencing humor and repetitive one liner comments.
Yes, that is also social media. Being terrible, bottom of the barrel social media doesn’t make it less social media. It’s still people gathering in a place discussing topics. A fleeting place discussing news articles, but still.
You’re literally asking a question for other people to answer. How is that any less social media than Twitter or Facebook? People post their personal achievements all the time, etc. If you respond to me, are we not having a social interaction?
How is it not social media?
Because by that criteria every web page that’s ever had a comment box is “social media”.
Social media to me is, as the guy said, defined by the fact that you’re following a person/persona, not a topic.
This site and other sites like it are link aggregators. If you wanted to, you could use and contribute to a link aggregator without ever writing or indeed reading a comment.
Then what about the self help communities? They largely share stories and personal experiences.
Or the meme communities largely made up of 2 heavy posters that other people follow?
Acting like Lemmy is only a link aggregator is being obtuse.
They share them as a once off. Very occasionally you’ll get the “Update: MIL stole our baby” posts, but mostly it doesn’t matter (and shouldn’t matter) who is posting the content. In social media, who is posting matters.
You have the oddities on Reddit occasion like that terrible poet and the comic lady that has her OF simps brigade her posts, but just look at how utterly useless and rejected all of Reddit’s attempts to turn it into social media are: follows, journals, chat - features of genuine social media but done poorly and with the wrong audience who distinctly Don’t want to follow personalities.
You can’t just handwave away 90% of the content and claim that all these sites are really about the links.
For God’s sake, you’re citing reddit, a site renowned for people reading only the headline and then jumping into the comments to socially engage about the topic.
Or let’s point to “we did it reddit!”. That wasn’t a social collaboration? Or r/place? Or AMA?
Yeah, if you ignore all of the social interaction, reddit is a link aggregator. But if you really think reddit is equivalent to an RSS feed, you’re either being a troll or just oblivious.
Do you really think there’s an important distinction to be made or do you just not want to admit that you’re no different from the people who scroll Facebook all day? If it’s the latter, maybe it’s yourself you’re more upset with than the term.
