A lot of FB pages out here are taken over by MAGAs. Sure we have a few, but not that many.
This is really the only forum I go to regularly, but I come here specifically because it’s so active.
Other forums I’ve been to you can post something and not get a response for days, weeks even, if at all. But just in the time I’m taking to type this, there will be a dozen new responses to various stuff on the board.
Depends on what’s considered “modern social media”.
Stuff like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Tik-Tok are all woefully bad for the sort of discussions you get on an old-school internet forum like this.
Reddit OTOH, can be pretty good, especially for specialized information/communities. The main trick is learning how to use the client or phone apps effectively.
I’m not on SM because I have distinct friendships, not one single gaggle of friends, and a lot of FB seems to be “Why are you still hanging out with That Person” and there’s no privacy. I do recall Tribe being a thing for 5 minutes in the early oughts, but by the time I actually tried it, the quality of discourse had dropped to zero.
The SMDB is moderated and I’ve referred to those ground rules when considering how to participate in other forums, for example at my workplace.
I don’t see much difference between Reddit and other Internet forums. To me, it has the feel of a very large message board. It is good for discussing events and opinions and memes, but that is half of what message boards are used for anyway. It is not so good at a back-and-forth discussion of a deep issue due to its nesting.
It is, however, better at avoiding trolls for several reasons. 1, the moderators are given a lot of leeway since the admins don’t want the hassle of policing millions of users. 2, downvoting, and, perversely, the nested nature of the board, makes burying a worthless or trolling comment a lot easier. I say perversely because it also makes admirable comments more likely to be buried. 3, again, perversely, it is so large that dedicated trolls don’t have the time to learn the ins and outs of their community to really get under peoples’ skin before they’re banned.
Like most of you, I am not at all active on social media. I have no desire to know what you ate for dinner, or to take photos of what I’m eating.
I have a Facebook account only because 4 years ago, my brother set up a page for “Xxxxx Family Reunion”, and all the cousins et al communicated on that one page. For that specific purpose, FB was great - one centralized place where we had, essentially, our own message board. But after the reunion was over, it’s gotten almost no traffic at all.
I love SDMB because I can learn stuff here, and offer to share my knowledge with others.
I use Facebook because it helps me link to real-world people I know, and keep track of what’s going on in their lives. I’ve got friends literally all over the world because of some real-life activities I do, and there’s really no better way to follow such a diverse group of people.
I’ve avoided the worst parts of Facebook largely because my group of actual friends and family are all pretty reasonable people, so I don’t get swamped by Trumpers and the like. My one racist uncle got blocked before the worst of that all started up.
But for anything more in-depth than who’s on vacation, or who’s started a new job, or who’s going to be at the Big Event next month, Facebook is pretty useless.
I echo almost all of what has been said here as great reasons to continue embracing message boards. I love the discussions, the complete sentences, and the anonymity.
I’m not on any social media except Facebook, and I curate that to a very small (maybe a few dozen) actual close friends and family members who actually know me in real life. We share photos and updates on our lives, which is nice.
I use a few internet forums, i use to be active on several mailing lists, i use Facebook (but see below) and i am very active in several discord servers, which have mostly replaced Google chats i used to be active in.
They are all different experiences.
A message board, like this, is good for extended conversations, and for getting answers to questions. It’s also good for stuff like book recommendations and chatting about politics.
Facebook is good for keeping in touch with your second-tier social network. First-tier people knew my mother was dying, and when she finally died, because i unloaded on them in tell time. But there are lots of other people i know well enough that i wanted them to know. I announced her death and invited friends to the on-line funeral via Facebook.
Facebook is horrible for discussing current events, for reasons others have already put forth. And i never post anything political on Facebook, because I don’t want to hijack a friend with a political sentiment out of the blue. In a message forum like this, you can choose whether you want to argue politics or hide your head in the sand. Facebook just gives you an undifferentiated feed.
Facebook groups can also be okay, because they stay on-topic. But it’s really hard to find an old post on Facebook. “Hmm, who made that cool jigsaw puzzle people were talking about a month ago? I’d that the guy whose ad just showed up in my email?” Facebook sucks for anything like that.
I haven’t been on Facebook in months, though. I guess i was hijacked by politics too often. Or maybe i just associated it with my mother dying. I object to how it polarized people, too, so partly i suppose i don’t want to support it
I don’t do Reddit. I’ve dabbled in it, but it has the same “can’t find stuff” downside of Facebook, without the “i actually know these people” upside. Maybe i just haven’t learned how to use Reddit.
Discord chats are great for keeping in touch regularly, and also for special events. I’m a huge fan. They kept me sane during the pandemic, when i had very little in-person social life.
Email lists have sadly been killed by Facebook. I liked them better, but i was clearly in the minority.
I do have a couple social media accounts, so in my case, it’s not that I chose to stick with Internet forums over modern social media. Rather, I use both for different purposes.
I would say the main thing that I like about this forum is that you can linger. There’s a growing body of research out there that shows the correlation between the rise of the Internet (and social media in particular) and the rise in ADHD and a general inability to focus on anything. I spent a good 10 minutes or so reading through all the responses on this thread, and if I wanted to, I could really delve deep into a topic on this site. Facebook and Instagram (the two social media sites I’m on) are so flash-in-the-pan that you can check them while sitting at a red light or taking a piss. If I spend a lot of time on those sites, I can feel myself start to get more jittery and less able to stay focused.
So that’s the main reason. Just to give my two cents on a couple of the points raised up above:
(1) I have an ad-blocker installed in my browser, and I like how the ad blocker actually blocks the ads. On Facebook, I don’t know what it is but my feed has recently gotten worse than ever, with ads making up about 50% of the content. I saw saje posted a link to FB Purity, and I have that link opened in a separate tab to explore after I post this comment. The ads and suggested posts are so frequent that it’s interfering with Facebook’s utility as a way to stay connected with friends.
1b. But I will mention that staying connected with friends is the number one reason why I have not chosen an Internet forum OVER social media. On a forum, I have a conversation with strangers I may or may not like. On social media, I know and am friends with whomever I am conversing with.
(2) I have to disagree with the sentiment that’s been repeated several times in this thread about the forum being a good place to have a spirited debate. This forum is so liberal that (IMHO) you’re mainly just reading about liberals disagreeing on the finer points of their platform and how extreme they want to take their ideology. My friend base on social media is much more balanced in terms of political views, and I can have constructive conversations with people who disagree with me where no one is making fun of you for being dumb because you don’t think like they do. (I mean, sure, you have the assholes. But I have good taste in friends, and I have plenty of friends on there who won’t be assholes if I try to talk politics.)
That’s me, too. It’s great for hobby stuff and useful for neighborhood and city news and questions. But, I also get an enormous amount of entertainment from some of the defaults (funny, pics, askreddit, mildyinteresting, etc) and others I’ve subscribed to. I can whip through SDMB in a few mintutes most of the time but Reddit keeps me clicking until bedtime.
ahhh–and that’s the difference between Reddit and us Dopers.
At Reddit, I do just what you described–keep clicking.
On the Dope, I click on something, and --gasp–think about what I just read. And if I post an answer here at the SDMB, I can expect it to be part of a good discussion with people who may be strangers, but still feel connected in a community.
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At Reddit, I love the constant clicking on interesting stuff. It’s fun.
Examples:/r/kidsarefuckingstupid (mostly clips of toddlers doing funny stuff.)
/r/showerthoughts (funny.one-liners )
But when you want serious debate, for example at /r/politicaldiscussion , you lose the personal touch we have here. Threads run for hundreds and thousands of posts, and you can read lots of interesting arguments, but they are often one-time, “drive by” posts, well written but with no followup. And because of the massive size of Reddit, the posters are all total strangers. I don’t feel any sense of community or belonging to the site
This is the great and terrible egalitarianism of Szociál Media nowadays. It is automation of the lowest common denominator taken a step beyond by programmable censorship filters.
Fondly I recall the days not so long ago when the USENET discussion board rec.motorcycles (Reeky) was a hotbed of satire. It purported to be the digital equivalent of a three-patch 1% club, and it had been in operation since before graphical browsers such as Netscape Navigator and the Eternal September came into being. Of course the best-kept secret was that it was populated by geeks with sincere love of motorcycling. Anyone could assume a bad-boy persona and hold forth, spewing unjustifiable opinion about brands of motorcycles and behavior of those in and out of the hobby — the more political, the more outlandish the better. It was a wild trip. There were some excellent performance artists online there over the years.
The death of Reeky was foreshadowed by an incident with posts from a well-known cat-hater. His recipes for tormenting cats were not universally appreciated as a superlative level of satire. He had made the mistake of posting from work and was traced by vocal opponents who weren’t with the program, wished to shut him down, and finally achieved their goal of silencing him. It was only a few short months before Big Media news organizations made it plain that Big Government was turning an ear to the burgeoning Szociál Media, tracing counter-cultural opponents domestically and abroad who were using it to speak out, and making it a point to silence them by any means. Shocked, the satirists of Reeky held their breath, bit their tongues, and let the discussion group fade into disuse rather than pour more effort into what had seemed a risk-free diversion but turned out not to be.
I remember passing a billboard sometime early in the Facebook era. It was a standard car advertisement for Buick. It had a big picture of a Buick, plus whatever their tagline was then.
At the bottom it said “Like Buick on Facebook!” I thought, what in the hell does that mean? Why in the world is Buick directing prospective car-buyers to any site on the WWW other than Buick.com (or possibly GM.com)? And why are they going all Sally Field on us (“You like me. You really like me!”)
Why send them to FB instead of the manufacturer’s site? I wondered. Well, you see Buick.com has stuff other than advertising. Probably owner’s manuals, safety stats, car specs, etc., whereas Facebook gets right to the point and only has one purpose–nothing but full-strength marketing.
Oh. I get it now. We are so fucked.
You know the rest. Turns out Facebook is just one giant interactive advertisement consortium. A place where suckers will go to post a photo of the Domino’s pizza they just had delivered… because the pizza box enthused “Upload a picture of your delicious Domino’s pie to Facebook!” I don’t think they even offer anything in return. Just— “Voluntarily do work for our marketing department!”
Might this be connected to how this country ended up with a huckster for a president?
Normally this is where I’d include a link to Bill Hicks ranting about how advertising and marketing people should all kill themselves. But, 1) you can find it if you want. It’s classic. And 2) I think most of you here already understand how toxic FB is.
Funny, Hicks died before Facebook, or even the internet, was a thing. As always, he was a visionary more than he was a comic. Way ahead of his time.
I suspect this worked originally because it was a bit novel. People thought it was kind of fun. Does it still work now? I don’t see as much of this sort of marketing and I suspect it’s because it has become a big yawn.