Comment by LemmyIsFantastic@lemmy.world on After a lifetime against, I'm considering joining social media. Any advice?

I’ve never had a Facebook account or any other social media. I know they keep shadow profiles, but I’ve never given permission. I never had any interest and frankly still don’t.

The problem I’m having is that I don’t exist online when people try to look me up. When someone tries to check me out, there’s nothing there and apparently that’s considered abnormal these days. I think it’s starting to affect my life negatively for various reasons I’d rather not get into.

I’d just like some advice about where to start if you wanted to dip your toes in and check it out. LinkedIn, maybe?

Jesus Christ this thread 🤣

Delusional users believing lemmy and reddit ain’t social media.

I thought I was taking crazy pills watching people tell the guy not to join social media, on a social media site!

I think the real question being asked is, should the OP make a social media account that is not anonymous or on one of the mainstream sites. Which I would say go for it if it helps with your IRL social life, just don’t post anything you wouldn’t say in person in public.

People say this shit all the time. “Reddit is social media too dura hurr.”

But anonymous social media sites are an entirely different entity and wildly different experience compared to ones that use your actual name.

“anonymous social media” is indeed very different, but still social media. It avoids some problems and runs into other problems.

Oh for sure, but I think it’s a really very incredibly important distinction

Pseudonymous is not even quite the same as anonymous either. It’s not just people randomly saying whatever nonsense like 4chan, there’s all the reputation-building and ego that other social media has, only less personal, for better or worse.

Whatever you need to tell yourself at night 🤷‍♂️

While I do consider this my social media outlet it’s different in a few ways. If I meet someone new in person and they’re interested in my online presence

I am not giving out this username
they wouldn’t understand or know what to do with it even if I did

Your username is a fairly common noun and an incredibly common, er, auxiliary verb?

They can’t do anything with it by sticking it into Google!

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.

Yes. Forums are social media. The mental gymnastics…

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.

It’s not mental gymnastics. My reasoning is straight forward, and I disagree.

People don’t really know what the term means. Any media where the users create the content is a social media. That’s what social media means! YouTube, reddit, Lemmy, Instagram, Snapchat… All of these are social medias! Perhaps we need some different term to differenciate them based on whether you’re more expected to interact with friends or anonymously with strangers though.

Yes, stupid delusional users who actually know what social media is and isnt, unlike a self aggrandizing imbecile making comments like yours.

People say that all the time, but I disagree. They’re link aggregators with a comments section.

It is an anonymous social media, and the post is talking about non-anonymous googleable profiles (Facebook, Instagram, etc.). Quite different if you ask me.

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