unless you're actively posting and commenting and interacting on youtube, you aren't though.

some of us just watch videos. I never had an account either until I was forced to get one due to them blocking so many vids from being viewed without signing in.

just like i sometimes read twitter comments, but i don't have a twitter account and i don't interact it, they just sometimes come up as links in stories i'm reading. same with tiktok or IG videos/images. I see it mostly through other websites that are using them as sources.

that's very different than most people who are using it to as a means of socialization. I don't even regard reddit/lemmy or internet comments as socialization. some people do. i have never have a 'reddit friend' even though I used teh site for over a decade. to me it was just shit on the internet that was fun to comment about.

So anything with a comments section? That would make pornhub and animekai "social medias" too LMAO

It's just TV, there's nothing social about it for many people

Like Netflix with a different library

If the question is "why not", I think a good reasoning is simply because it broadens the categorization to the point where the term begins to lose all meaning. Different websites inherently have different forms of structure for interaction.

The way you behave on Instagram, Facebook, tumblr, and Twitter all feel fundamentally different from the way you behave on forums and video sites. People on Lemmy don't "reblog" stuff, people don't send each other friend requests on Youtube. It redefines the core dynamic.

On Youtube, the dominating theme is channels and parasocial relationships, more similar (but not exactly the same) to an audience's relationship with traditional media like Film and Television and their responses to the various actors/artists/celebrities therein rather than a 1:1 reciprocal relationship. Sure, there are fan groups, which gets into an interesting subset where you can begin to socially interact with each other, but these groups often live in outside spaces (such as tumblr). Hence the point I'm trying to make.

Even classifying Lemmy and Reddit as "social medias" feels like a stretch. I mean yes, in a technical sense we're all "socializing" with each other in this moment and having (mostly) genuine conversations. But for the vast majority of it, I would say:

Another even simpler point I haven't seen anyone else mention yet is that social media is historically associated with being used to socially interact with friends and family, either people you know irl or closely-knit online groups you treat as legitimate personal relationships.

Though I suppose Twitter can be an exception to this, but anyone who remembers how Twitter started out knows that it was never intended to be that way lol (now that government and judicial agencies use it as a defacto form of official press release ontop of everything else)