A forum is an online place or media where you have social interaction, hence a social media.
You control idea by controling the language. It turns the internet is actually the social media and each and every thing online is de facto also a social media.
Email is a social media, a blog is a social media, bbs is a social media, usenet is a social media, a forum is a social media, a wiki is a social media, and so on.
The name social media is a marketing ploy akin to the "cloud" to manipulate opinion and mind into thinking a certain way about large companies whose business is massively collecting user personal data without providing any meaningful service other than sitting in between the people wanting to interact.
It's a good old switcheroo. When you hear "social media" you could actually revert it back to "the internet" as it used be.
But when you hear social media you actually think facebook / twitter, which means the marketing ploy succeeded in its attempt of replacing the internet by facebook/twitter.
And it's not only the word, facebook has actually tried to replace the internet in several countries, notably with the facebook basics program outrageously disrespecting net neutrality.
But a few companies are also quite literally replacing the internet infrastructure by their own and the decentralized distributed design by a centralized one.
What's the distinction? They both have a community and social features. Commenting, upvotes/liking, posting links, user profiles. HN mainly lacks private messaging and groups.
persistent identity and status, that is to say the 'social' part. A lot of damage of social networks arguably is rooted in the competition for status and attention that you get when you get twitter likes and people complementing you, and the horror when you end up in a shitstorm and your reputation is suddenly ruined. It's also what makes it addictive.
Most people on HN just seem to post more or less anonymously. The upvote or downvote mechanisms aren't even particularly visible.
The worst thing you get here is 4 downvotes and a heated discussion. This is not like twitter where your career and face is on the line.
Anonymity is a major key why older forums were much, much better than our social media of today.
Most forums were based around a hobby or a particular subject, and communities formed around that. Sure, you'd have arguments, or someone stepping out of line, easily solved by a moderator. Sometimes moderators got to powerful and people left and joined another or did something else.
Most of my forum days were based on PC building or video games. Most of them had a bunch of boards with varying topics - and possibly a politics one. You could always separate it out easily because it wasn't visible by default.
Social media today everything is visible by default without anonymity. There is no effective way to filter content - only people, or profiles.
> Anonymity is a major key why older forums were much, much better than our social media of today.
I really doubt this. The mask of anonymity completely removes accountability on forums. Pseudonomity is a better approach, along with moderation, and ultimately, a community committed to civil discourse. But the quality of commentary on any forum is a fragile balance, as the evolution of HN has demonstrated.
> The mask of anonymity completely removes accountability on forums.
Accountable to whom? What accountability? Why was this necessary? Accountability wasn't necessary, as most forums were never big enough to really matter. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter are now forces of nature, especially in politics and matters of public opinion.
> Pseudonomity
This has varying degrees of anonymity - you need to further express what you mean by this, because on its own you could support anonymity through pseudonyms.
> and ultimately, a community committed to civil discourse. But the quality of commentary on any forum is a fragile balance, as the evolution of HN has demonstrated.
Yep, something much easier to do on the old forums of yesteryear - they were much smaller, much easier to moderate, and much easier to remediate if they were unfairly moderated.
> Accountable to whom? What accountability? Why was this necessary?
Accountable to the community represented by the forum itself. Participants in a forum need to have some kind of skin in the game, even if it's based on their pseudonymous identity, which brings us to ...
> Pseudonomity
> This has varying degrees of anonymity
By this I mean a consistent identity that has a history, credibility deriving from a track record of adhering to the community standards. It doesn't have to reference your legal identity, but things like the HN "throwaway" drive-by accounts are a problem, IMO, except in rare cases where the individual would take a great personal risk by speaking out even as their pseudonymous identity. But in that case, the bar of evidence for assertions should be very high.
This existed just fine with anonymity - even if you were anonymous, after time and following the rules, others would "know" who you were based on your interactions - thus having skin in the game.
The term "social media" seems to have arrived a good time after forums did on the internet. I remember standing up websites and paying for a vBulletin license in order to add forum functionality a decade before I first heard the term "social media." I could entertain the idea that those old forums were "social media" the whole time, but they sure didn't feel like the cesspool of anger that twitter and facebook seem to represent.
The explanation is simple, twitter and facebook rely on ads to make profit. to maximize their profit they need to have people spend as much time as possible on their websites.
The most efficient way is to infuriate people. Hence the business model of these companies is to have people outraged and infuriated.
This is a similar strategy to using the media spread fear so people consume more. Simply said someone who's happy, live a fulfilling life free of worry does not feel the urge to buy and consume.
I would say the difference is that forums are about topics/discussion while social media is about people.
There is a difference if you use it to discuss your interests with like minded individuals or if you broadcast to an audience.
I think this is why social media mostly works in small groups or why many people on facebook still find groups with limited topics useful even if they hate the rest.
It is also my main gripe with things like SSB or the fediverse. They work much better than other social media, because they encourage smaller, more tight knight communities, but they are often still people focused, not discussion focused.
