Does anybody remember Usenet newsgroups? Those sure were the days.
Here’s my thoughts on the evolution of the internet as a platform for human communication.
Usenet -> bulletin boards -> discussion forums: These worked ok (not always great) as constrained hobbiest domains. The feedback loop was conversational engagement. Your contributions earned your way into a community. Conversations were listed, usually sorted by date or recency of latest contribution, rather than by intensity (eg, number of comments in a thread). Successful communities were tribal, generally with strong moderation. Trolls were generally not tolerated by the communities and eliminated by moderators.
Reddit: trolls endure but fall to the bottom of threads…out of sight out of mind. I don’t have a lot of experience with it but the format seems to eschew moderation. My sense of the user interface is that it favors drive-by Q&A/response over a tighter knit enduring community. But I’ve never really rolled up my sleeves and tried to join a sub-reddit, so I ould be mistaken.
Facebook/Twitter: I call this ‘broadcast’ social media. You just yell stuff out and hope someone notices. These platforms are purely for self-promotion. Their feedback loops are almost exclusively algorithmic, based upon engagement count (not quality). The feedback loop also strongly favors recency, which disfavors conversational engagement depth that’s you’d find on forums. Algorithmic attempts to drive endurance, particularly on facebook, are so, so, so poorly executed. For example, I once received a poke from fb to remind me to say happy birthday to my sister…who had died of cancer 4 years previously. Her fb account still exists even after requests for it to be deleted.
LinkedIn: I have no idea what purpose it serves,mostly because it has no feedback loop. LI profiles perform well in google search, making it easy to find people you know. But everybody ignores their profiles and LI emails, so it’s a horrible way to actually reach out to someone.
And don’t get me started on the technostalking…
These modern social medias (fb, twitter, probably linkedin) are just horribly failed social experiments.
We all need to stop using them.