I participate in only 2 forums : this one and a French one dedicated to classical music. I like the quality of the discussions that I find in both places.
When I first heard of Facebook, my initial reaction was “But, why would I want this ?”. I admit I got a bit nervous when logging in via Facebook became big, because I thought I’d have to get one account just to access the content I was interested in. But that fear never materialized and, a couple of years ago, I was amused to hear some university students tell me that Facebook was ridiculously outdated. That’s one mega social phenomenon that completely passed me by. I know young people have other social media that cater better to their needs but I’m as uninterested as I was 12 years ago.
Not to derail the discussion into FB pro/con, but the only thing that makes it bearable for me is the use of FB Purity. It’s a browser extension that allows you to customize FB and weed out all the crap you don’t want. I have mine stripped down to the bare bones, and am always horrified if I have to log in on a different browser.
I still prefer simple boards like this, with mostly words and very few pictures, NO stupid gifs etc.
I do both. This is an interesting community to interact with. It doesn’t have my friends and family on it though. And it doesn’t have the “quick visit for entertainment” quality as the flood-of-content platforms.
I tried facebook and myspace(back in the day). Myspace wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t good for me. Facebook was a whole nother creature. Only took me a week to get that totally creepy stalker vibe that spooked me off the thing forever.
I go back to using a 300-baud modem to sign on to local BBS systems, which were pretty close in format to this kind of forum. It’s what I became accustomed to, which is one factor. That said, I’m not at all opposed to change. I’ll embrace it with great enthusiasm if I see advantages to the New Thing™. But to me, a forum like this has a much cozier, friendlier, and more cohesive feel than any social media, which I like.
I use forums because I like the anonymity but also the long text format that comes with it. While there naturally is going to be some personality among users on a forum who are long time members and/or get involved in heated conversations, you do not need to create a persona to have your say and to get involved. I feel social media rewards extremist opinions and in the case of Twitter because of its limited character settings a complete lack of nuance. The snappy and edgy takes can go viral but the corrections and explanations for actual facts of the matter will require time to put together and they do not get the same level of engagement.
I also like forums because they can be tailored to your specific interests such as a football forum. If you do not like football you are not going to be on it. And if you want club-specific forums so you are in contact with fellow supporters of your team you can find forums for that too.
At the start of the 2010s it was predicted that the rise and rise of social media would bring the end of forums but I probably use them more now than then. And I use social media far less in comparison.
As others have pointed out, the purpose of a forum (this one, at least) is exchange of ideas and information. The purpose of all other social media is advertisement.
The SDMB sells ad space – my understanding is that it’s through a third-party ad vendor, and the SDMB has no direct control over the specific ads that are served up. There have been threads in ATMB about issues with some of the ads that people see.
In the pre-Discourse days, being a paid Member of the board included, as a membership perk, an ad-free SDMB experience; I see that you have a “Member” tag on your profile, so you may not be seeing ads because of that. (The board hasn’t had a way to offer paid memberships since the Discourse migration two years ago, and TubaDiva’s sudden passing just after that, but I hypothesize that anyone who was a paid “Member” prior to the migration has kept it, along with the related settings.)
And, of course, many people are now using ad blockers, which also would be hiding the ads (though, as @Eyebrows_0f_Doom notes, that typically leaves a visible space between posts, suggesting where an ad has been blocked).
A few folks have mentioned the lack of moderation on social media, which is a completely fair point. But just as bad IMO is the power that individuals have to kill a discussion on their own page. I went to law school with a guy who would post these utterly tone-deaf missives on FB that actually generated nuanced, well-written responses from our fellow students, and he would inevitably delete the whole thread because it was ultimately critical of him. I’m not saying people shouldn’t have that kind of control over their personal pages, but that makes those personal pages not a good place for discussion. Groups often suffer from similar issues at the hands of one or a couple of petty tyrant moderators.
Message boards are better for back and forth discussion of topics. I am only on a few, this one, the Giraffe, and one devoted to the GM LS1 engine and cars that I am reasonably proficient with.
I have been anti-Facebook from the begining and see no reason to re-examine that position. I just won’t. Other social media is just too noisy, a lot of people posting marginally interesting stuff but never really listening to each other. I do read a few, like Reddit, but that is such a noisy piece of shit that nobody is listening to each other, it is fruitless to try. Anything that doesn’t reinforce the hive mind gets voted off the page. I might as well talk to the wall.
Other social media are geared toward cell phones and bringing in clicks and I am not really interested. I am really excited to ignore the Metaverse. It is going to be so awesome that I intend to know nothing about it.
Based on my post history here lately, that’s a pretty big assumption to make. However, I find the big advantage to message boards is they live forever. Social media is so in the moment, that if you miss a post by a day or two, it’s long gone and forgotten already.
This is my feeling. I’ve started using reddit this past year because it was the best place to follow some serious events that were happening in my city earlier in the year, but it’s essentially useless for having an in-depth discussion. A big part of that is that there’s just too many people posting, so the discussion moves past you almost instantly.
I’ll occasionally post something here, only to find someone else has ninja’d me on my point, but with reddit, that happens with great frequency.
Yeah, this is a good point. I post on another message board, where I used to have a small following for some comics I used to make with an online comic generating site. I hadn’t posted much for a few years, and then that site went away entirely when Flash was disabled.
But just this week, I found out that there’s a system that archived a lot of those kinds of Flash sites, and so I am able to make at least some basic comics again, just in time for me to find a new inspiration for some comics. And that old forum thread is still there, and the people who are still around are glad to see my new work. That likely wouldn’t happen on a place like reddit or Facebook.