arcane spoilers
oh no jinx is totally alive
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imo “social media” as a useful, non-overly-broad term has a few key differences from most internet forums, none of which are required for something to be social media but the absence of all of them is imo meaningful
“true” social media sites generally have these things that we don’t:
- a focus on real identity instead of usernames
- no defined single topic (or set of closely-related topics) that the platform exists to discuss
- algorithm-based feeds that attempt to show you more relevant things you might interact with
- ability to follow specific other users and get updated on their actions on the platform
so like yes by a broad-strokes definition we are technically social media, but I think most people would not think of this if you asked them to start naming social media sites
for an example, I think Reddit is probably safely on the side of social media (has points 2, 3, and 4) but an individual subreddit on its own is probably not truly a social media website (usually)
this way of figuring out what’s a “true” social media site makes Discord a grey area, but even moreso than Reddit it’s really broken up into discrete servers with essentially no crosstalk between most of them so I think that’s fair to have in that murky zone
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Yeah I feel a social media platform will usually be pretty general/main-appeal, like a big thing social media companies are always trying to do is be everything platform. They all want to be everyhing. They want to be the central place people communicate
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Sometimes “people” is a little narrower (“working professionals” or “gay people” or whatever) but like they still aim to be General Communication places
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Insane distinction: FoL during no-cookie-thread era was not social media, but FoL with a cookie thread is social media
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Huh very big change of avatar. I didnt imagine you as a white haired anime girl
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why’d you become the boring mahjong girl
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do you have plans to call the fbi on someone
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i didnt really care much about them so :P
i can play whenever
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what did people even do here before the cookie thread
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I wanted to do a wildly different avatar
is girl taking the mahjong test
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doing her mahjong homework? going to mahjong school? what is this universe
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May has the avatar of a hardcore gamer man in his mid to late 20s whos about to say some heavy slurs
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bold, tutuu.
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I’m in my mid to late 10s
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I would not consider identity as a part of assessing whether a platform is “social media”
The reason real identity is focused is because that’s what people want to know. The true criteria then would be “social media provides something that people want to know”, which is true, but not necessarily identity-related
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this should not exclude reddit or discord from being social media
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You:
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