Do you consider RM to be social media?

[Bammer]

Or is it something else?

[Jorge]

Not exactly but it's not too far off

[coptheriotact]

If it were possible to react to posts with a “like” then it would be

(That would be awful)

[Anders]

[Anders]

It clearly is. So the answer is yes.

[dimejinky99]

A lot of the residents of rm of late seem to have been infected with the far right culture wars brainworms

Dunno if it’s social media but it’s sad to see rm slide into the shit like this.

[BurtReynolds]

Hating Star wars is right-coded.

[Bammer]

That’s the whole internet

[Jorge]

Yeah that definition is super broad and doesn't quite line up with how the term is actually used in regular parlance

[BurtReynolds]

Proto-social media

[The Argonaut]

Reddit is social media and that is the closest big name corollary to RM. But I wouldn't say RM is social media

[tree_]

yeah literally everything is social media

[Anders]

How would you describe the difference between Social Media and RM in a dictionary?

[Jorge]

I think a big difference is how the content is prioritized and shown to users; social media as we know it today is largely driven by algorithms that prioritize engagement, whereas forums like RM are remnants of an older era of the internet, when structured, threaded discussions were simply shown in chronological order. Also there's less emphasis on individual user profiles (sure, you can have an avatar and a signature, but I can't go to your profile to look at your photo collection or read in-depth, carefully curated information about your background).

Social media also supports a wider variety of content types and they are usually self-hosted (photos, videos, livestreams) whereas here we have mostly text-based interactions and if we wanna post photos we have to rely on external services through BBCode (which is basically a crude variation on HTML, placing message boards like RM solidly in Web 1.0).

[tree_]

How would you describe the difference between Social Media and RM in a dictionary?

that's not what dictionaries are for

[Bammer]

Reddit is social media and that is the closest big name corollary to RM. But I wouldn't say RM is social media

My spinoff thread was gonna be asking if y’all consider Reddit to be social media.

[BurtReynolds]

it's on the bubble. A transitionary entity between a forum (RM) and a social media site (Facebook).

[spike]

If different, which is better?

[pepperwhiteMFC]

Same thing but there are differing technological features.

Social media platforms (as we know them today) were based off of forums/message boards, which were based off of Usenet lists.

[bodysnatcher]

Social media is something I usually do on the toilet, and so is RM. so they are the same.