Jubenhimer
Member
Social Media. A modern internet invention that on paper, sounds like one of the greatest ideas ever. Services that allow you to share thoughts, ideas, and moments to friends and around the world. Yet as we've seen over the years, it's been blamed for arguably making society worse by feeding narcissism, shallowness, degeneracy, and monolithic echo chambers, over meaningful discussions and fun. In many ways, that's true. Platforms like Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, etc. have all been known for being filled with vapid content, lame hot takes, obvious clickbait, trashy (sometimes dangerous) content, as well as biased censorship practices and shady backdoor relations with domestic and foreign governments, but we're not supposed to notice that last part ;P.
But back in the wild west days of the internet, the only real way for people to share their thoughts and ideas with friends and strangers online is through either chat rooms, or message boards, aka forums. Message boards don't really need an explanation, I'm writing this thread on one right now. But it used to be one of the main ways people shared ideas and thoughts to each other on the internet in the format's earlier days.
Yet it was only relatively recently that realized that, I myself at least, spend more time on message forums like this, over big, mainstream social media platforms. I hardly ever posted to Twitter, my Facebook account has been untouched since middle school, and the further I stay away from TikTok, the better. It's easy to see why social media is so popular. It makes the concept of sharing and communicating ideas and content to strangers, family and friends easy to use and instantaneous for the masses, and if there's one thing a lot of people want, its instant gratification. But for most of my life on the internet, I've always posted more on small, independent forum sites over social media, and I don't think I'm alone on that.
I think one reason message boards appeal to me is because they're much more fragmented. Big social media in my eyes, tends to be this giant mass of content and filler that just seemingly gets thrown onto your feed whether you want it or not. But with forums, its a lot easier to find what you want to share or talk about. There are many special interest forum sites that cater to a variety of niches. And even within those sites, there's still a lot of off-topic and alternative sections within them. I feel this not only makes it easier to discuss specific topics and events, but being so fragmented like this gives the user more control over what they want to talk about. I think forums also make it a lot easier to communicate more complex ideas or posts than social media. On sites like Twitter, your content is limited by the character limit, so you have to convey your message as simply and straightforwardly as possible, because every character counts. But on most forum sites, there's hardly a limit on how much you can type. This allows you to dive more in-depth into your thoughts and ideas than a single tweet could ever hope to convey.
Now obviously, forums have their big flaws as well. They can be intimidating to newbies used to social media. A lot of garbage communities and sites exist, and many of them have their fair share of blatant censorship and obvious political biases too, just look at ResetERA. And much like how not everything in forum sites is creative or good, not all of traditional social media is utter garbage either. In general though, I feel like message forum sites generally have more compelling upsides than mainstream social media apps. For all this recent talk about restoring free speech to places like Twitter and such. I honestly believe that a better way to encourage more free speech online, is to promote and create more independent forum sites. That way everybody can be happy and we can all have more resonable discourse on the internet again.
But back in the wild west days of the internet, the only real way for people to share their thoughts and ideas with friends and strangers online is through either chat rooms, or message boards, aka forums. Message boards don't really need an explanation, I'm writing this thread on one right now. But it used to be one of the main ways people shared ideas and thoughts to each other on the internet in the format's earlier days.
Yet it was only relatively recently that realized that, I myself at least, spend more time on message forums like this, over big, mainstream social media platforms. I hardly ever posted to Twitter, my Facebook account has been untouched since middle school, and the further I stay away from TikTok, the better. It's easy to see why social media is so popular. It makes the concept of sharing and communicating ideas and content to strangers, family and friends easy to use and instantaneous for the masses, and if there's one thing a lot of people want, its instant gratification. But for most of my life on the internet, I've always posted more on small, independent forum sites over social media, and I don't think I'm alone on that.
I think one reason message boards appeal to me is because they're much more fragmented. Big social media in my eyes, tends to be this giant mass of content and filler that just seemingly gets thrown onto your feed whether you want it or not. But with forums, its a lot easier to find what you want to share or talk about. There are many special interest forum sites that cater to a variety of niches. And even within those sites, there's still a lot of off-topic and alternative sections within them. I feel this not only makes it easier to discuss specific topics and events, but being so fragmented like this gives the user more control over what they want to talk about. I think forums also make it a lot easier to communicate more complex ideas or posts than social media. On sites like Twitter, your content is limited by the character limit, so you have to convey your message as simply and straightforwardly as possible, because every character counts. But on most forum sites, there's hardly a limit on how much you can type. This allows you to dive more in-depth into your thoughts and ideas than a single tweet could ever hope to convey.
Now obviously, forums have their big flaws as well. They can be intimidating to newbies used to social media. A lot of garbage communities and sites exist, and many of them have their fair share of blatant censorship and obvious political biases too, just look at ResetERA. And much like how not everything in forum sites is creative or good, not all of traditional social media is utter garbage either. In general though, I feel like message forum sites generally have more compelling upsides than mainstream social media apps. For all this recent talk about restoring free speech to places like Twitter and such. I honestly believe that a better way to encourage more free speech online, is to promote and create more independent forum sites. That way everybody can be happy and we can all have more resonable discourse on the internet again.
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