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.
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