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They're forums though, are forums social media? I don't think services people use anonymously and not for the primary purpose of interacting are social media. The stat has always been 90+% of people are lurkers who just look at memes. Doesn't sound very social. Scrolling lemmy and reading articles doesn't get at that part of the brain. We're not a social group, looking at each others lives.
What stops being social media if we broaden the definition. YouTube is social media if Lemmy is imo.
Lurkers on Lemmy and Reddit don't seem too different from someone who is on Twitter or Instagram to follow celebrities.
Commenters definitely are in it for interacting, whether they realize or not. Like, just now, you felt the need to express your opinion to this crowd, and so did I.
I think another divide when it comes to "social media" is the idea of following someone.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc let me follow people (or brands).
Reddit however isn't about people or brands (and yes I'm away they added that feature, it's stupid), it's about topics.
Looking at Mastodon, it is also designed to follow people. They do however have the option to follow hashtags, which as a Lemmy user is something I like.
Similarly as a Lemmy user I don't care who any of you are. I'm not following anyone in this thread. We could interact every day or we could interact once a year, I don't care who you are and I like that.
Also, I don't care if you follow me. I'd prefer if you didn't. I do have an opinion to share, and I do want people to read it. Is that "social media"?
As other folks have pointed out, this is all more similar to Internet forums. Are those "social media"? I would argue they are not, but if you stretch the definition far enough... I guess?
It starts with something silly like an avatar or profile pic next to every comment. If you'ld have had a flag or a dogpic or so next to your name/comment, I wouldn't have read your comment in the same relatively neutral way. I dislike the persona stuff, it's why I prefer forums. Lemmy is a collection of forums to me. I profoundly distrust persona cult stuff, like influencers etc. Sure, I'll encounter same people here I'm sure, but frankly: I'm mostly unaware, usernames barely register in my mind.
The part about social media I dislike is the real connection between Irl and online, and the "profile"-focus, for now both is no issue for me on lemmy.
I don't think the definition needs to be stretched very far. In any of such cases, the function is social, it is about connecting people and enabling them to communicate in a wider, multilateral fashion, online. However asocial we might convince ourselves of being, if we truly had no interest in it, we wouldn't even be discussing anything here.
Even lurkers, at the very least, place trust on a group to bring them matters which they are interested in, and if you consider it, this is the manner in which Reddit and forums are most similar to following influencers. The only difference is that it is a crowd-driven highlight, rather than an individual one, and even then people don't tend to follow just one single influencer.
If the expression of opinion or interacting with that opinion is all it takes, then YouTube is social media, IMDb is social media. Blogs are social media, any news site is social media. It has to be more specific than that because every site has a comment section and it's a pretty useless definition.
I think the object of interest has to be people, and the engagement has to come from fixed personalities. Who develop a rapport. For example, you add friends and follow people, who you recognize, interact with and develop a social or parasocial relationship.
Although Reddit has maybe gone that way in some respects, sites like YouTube (maybe) Lemmy, 4chan, Q&A sites (Quora, stack overflow), and more traditional forums have anonymous people jumping in and out, and the focus is the idea (meme, article, creation, question).
Maybe we ditch the term altogether as everything is adding a social component and it will all devolve into a digital singularity.
It's not that far off, frankly. A lot of websites with user comment sections have a social aspect to them. But even if we discount those whose the primary focus is not that, and we take YouTube and IMDb out of it, Reddit and Lemmy lack the sort of stable end result that reference sites and wikis focus on, or the sort of separation between creators and audience that YouTube has (then again isn't Instagram like that too?). Even if we make a distinction here we are still left with a place whose content, curation and discussions are community driven. A subreddit or Lemmy community is nothing but that which the people who participate in it decide. Sounds like a social form of media if I ever seen one. An internet platform for public collective multidirectional communication.
Frankly, I think Reddit and Lemmy resist the classification as "social media" not because there aren't reasons to count them as that, but because the userbases in these sites see it as a dirty word and they like to believe they are above the unwashed, stupid, celebrity-worshipping masses.
They are not. We are not.
How much do we mock people commonly not reading articles and just commenting immediately in both these places? That shows link aggregation is not necessarily the main driving appeal of these places. Even for lurkers and outsiders, they often use Reddit to see what people are commenting, especially as far as advice and recommendations go. We are even in a community whose primary content are questions from other users for us to talk about our opinions and ourselves. How much more socially driven does it need to be for people to accept that it is social media?
Even if one argues it's different from Facebook because we don't use real names, Twitter also goes by pseudonyms and everybody considers that "social media".
Content curation and discussions sounds like Wikipedia to me, and honestly most information sites. As basically everything on the Internet is community driven by a small vanguard of committed posters. I guess we can just call all websites with social interaction social media.
My issue is, to me, lemmy, 4chan, and old forums are completely different to Twitter, Facebook, bebo, Instagram, Snapchat, tiktok etc etc in look, form and function. But I think if we still are just calling them social media, and there is no consistent definition that also umbrellas most of the Internet, it seems silly at that point. Much easier to just not call lemmy social media.
I could also argue people calling lemmy social media are trying to be contrarian and get a rise out of people. Like calling cereal, soup.
This ain't Wikipedia. Nobody is just leaving their info and settling at that. Nobody is even trying to be objective (even if Wikipedia doesn't always manage it). Threads don't result in a single consensus reference page to be maintained indefinitely, but multiple discussions where everyone is making their opinions heard. As much as some opinions are highlighted over others, it's not collapsed into a final conclusion.
Be honest here. Look at Twitter and then look at Wikipedia. As far as similarity in function and behavior, which is Reddit/Lemmy more like? If anything, to me saying Lemmy is the same as Wikipedia is calling cereal, soup.
The difference between Reddit/Lemmy and Twitter is that it's based on subcommunities rather than personal feeds. Even then, Facebook has that too, in their groups.
It is social media. Some users just want to believe they are above that. It does get a rise out of them, because they refuse to believe it. It doesn't mean it's not correct, not only based on pedantic definitions but also how and why people use it.
Say, even in participating in this discussion, what is your goal here? It's not like this thread will ever serve as a reference material for the classification of websites. It's not even the main point of the thread (whether and how to join social media). Seems to me that you want to make your opinion known, and so do I. Whether or not you remember my username, this is social interaction. And by experience I can say the same sort of discussion happening here happens on Twitter/Mastodon near identically.
My purpose is to work out if Lemmy is social media, and solidify my position on it through debating (arguing) with people about it, I'm afraid I'm using you for my own ends 😉.
My point about calling lemmy Wikipedia is like calling cereal soup. I agree, because if we widen this definition to include Lemmy, we start having justifications for calling things that clearly aren't social media, social media.
My ideal is that we just have old style Internet platforms in their own box called forums. And social media can continue on its way with phone number verification, blue check marks, and whatever else goes on.
I suppose the actually productive thought process is to think why we need to differentiate sites from each other like this, and come up with a definition that has function without being confusing. I'd argue the endless debate and confusion around this topic, especially on Reddit, for years and years, indicates a poor definition.
Yes. Forums are social media. The mental gymnastics....
It's not mental gymnastics. My reasoning is straight forward, and I disagree.
Is it my imagination or do you think people that don't consider forums to be social media are doing it out of denial, as if they consider social media to be inferior and they want to be the superior ones without social media, but by encountering you telling them these ugly truths, they deny and defend themselves almost in a tantrum?
Because that may happen with a person or two, but no, many people don't have problems having social media, just don't consider Lemmy a social media for various reasons (e.g. not used with a real name, they do not personally message from here, etc.). If their criteria is wrong or right, I don't know. I do consider this a social media, but it's open to discussion.
It'd be helpful if you stop looking at situations as if they were the crying wojak (them) vs chad wojak (you) because that's not how we all work.