I agree with him. Although I like message boards which are a form of social media, so hypocritical.
On the Origin of (electronic) Species - Split from the West Finals thread
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I agree with him. Although I like message boards which are a form of social media, so hypocritical.
kingsboi
Hall of Famer
message boards were around long before any social media platforms, I don't think they compare.
They have some overlapping functions, though I've never liked nor used Facebook or Twitter.
People who try to and distance message boards from social media are just showing their age and/or their disdain for social media. They're totally comparable. They are the equivalent of what people use now, that were created within the limitations of the technology that existed at the time. It would be like saying that message boards "didn't compare" to B.B.S.'s and newsgroups. When viewed from a wide enough lens, they're all the same thing. Just like before there were Google Hangouts and group texts and Slack and Discord, there were irc's and ICQs and AOL Messenger. And Ham radio even before that. It's the same s***.
Basically, everything that's come out since the smoke signal was invented has just been people wrapping up smoke signals in whatever the newest technology is, with people occasionally finding new uses for it that previous generations hadn't considered.
Yeah I think of social media as more of a "look at me" type platform where message boards are just a place for people to get together to talk about specific topics.
And yet there are posters here who are/were very look at me. There are users of other social media that just want to talk and not draw attention to themselves or objects they have acquired.
I think that forums like this are mostly like a usenet newsgroup, with some moderation. They are more convenient/easy to find, etc. It's not a twitter or a facebook, but it fits many of the same emotional needs, and I am sure induces addictive/compulsive behavior by some. Maybe it isn't designed to do such the way twitter/facebook/tiktok are designed to keep you glued to the page to serve you ads though.
I think that forums like this are mostly like a usenet newsgroup, with some moderation. They are more convenient/easy to find, etc. It's not a twitter or a facebook, but it fits many of the same emotional needs, and I am sure induces addictive/compulsive behavior by some. Maybe it isn't designed to do such the way twitter/facebook/tiktok are designed to keep you glued to the page to serve you ads though.
I disagree with your analogy. While the smoke signal thing is a bit of a stretch, I generally agree with @Mr. S£im Citrus on this. Unicycles and A-10's have distinctly different *purposes*. KF and other forms of social media serve to allow folks that are far-flung to be able to communicate with each other about current events. Do they do it a bit differently? Sure. But what is a forum other than a location where a group of people log in to share their thoughts and read the thoughts of others? Seems about the same to me as Twitter or Facebook or whatever.
Insomniacal Fan
Starter
Clearly forums are a branch of social media. It's just a matter of scale.
I suspect that what people see as the primary distinction between the two is how user-centered the process is.
For what is traditionally considered "social media", the user account is the center. One logs in to "my Facebook page" or "my Twitter account", etc., which stands as a repository for one's own contributions. One then deliberately forms contacts with other users to read their content and to make sure that their content is available to be read.
On what is traditionally considered a "message/bulletin board" there is no such user-centered experience. I don't have a "KingsFans.com page" in any meaningful way. Yes, one can look at my profile, and even see a list of comments that I have made, but that's not the way the site is designed. Everybody has access to everything. You don't have to know who to connect to, and you don't really have any choice.
Or, to be more concise:
Social media: user-based experience; all users create their own experience; maximal curation of content based on direct account-to-account connections as primary experience.
Message board: community-based experience; minimal user creation of their own experience (e.g. ignore lists); minimal account-to-account connections as peripheral experience (e.g. personal messages).
Do they? In what ways are the purposes different?
The biggest reason why "traditional" message boards do not more closely resemble what we think of as social media is because either:
- Nobody conceived of such a thing,
- The desire for a user-based experience over a community-based one was severely underestimated, or
- It was dismissed as something that could not be plausibly implemented with the tech that existed at the time.
... But fundamentally, on a macro-level, it's still all the same thing.
I view an A-10 specifically as a weapon of war, intended to be a flying tank/enemy equipment-killer, and constructed to transport a pilot into the depths of a battle, survive an engagement with AA fire, and deliver the pilot back to an airbase.
I don't know that a unicycle was ever used to kill tanks.
If you compared a unicycle to a motorcycle, or Piper Cub, or some such, I would not draw the same distinctions, as all are generally transportation.
Fundamentally on a macro-level, everything is the same thing. It's just a question of what that macro-level is. You've implied above that an A-10 and a unicycle are the same thing. In the sense that both can facilitate getting from point A to point B, that is correct. But, at the same time, you can't use a unicycle for air combat so in that sense they are not the same thing.
One can go one direction and say that a banana and a volcano are the same thing, as they are both composed of matter.
One can go the other direction and say that a penny and a nickel are not the same thing. Sure, they are both coins, but they have a different denomination. Or, to go to an extreme, a 2006 D penny and a 1992 P penny are quite different to numismatists, even though they are the same thing in respect to currency.
So it is both fair to say that social media and message boards are the same thing (for a chosen level of distinction) or that they are different things (for a different chosen level of distinction). The only question here is which level of distinction should be chosen, and that's a matter of taste.
Insomniacal Fan
Starter
To be fair, A-10's in reality aren't that much more effective than unicycles at killing tanks
I would argue that the use of algorithms to push content to users and increasing ads leaves users with a lot less absolute "control" over what they see on their own social media.
Insomniacal Fan
Starter
Yeah, I think the meaningful distinction isn't at the user experience level, but on the backend with the administrative issues and the business outcomes.I would argue that the use of algorithms to push content to users and increasing ads leaves users with a lot less absolute "control" over what they see on their own social media.
I don't expect forums to be creating a profile of my behavior to sell ads targeting me.
I would disagree, but feel free to try to take out a tank with a unicycle all you want. I'd much rather be sitting in the titanium bathtub in the sky slinging Maverick missles and 4,200 30 mm pieces of metal per minute at a tank instead.
And they can reportedly take out an Abrams if they hit it right, so even some of the more modern tanks are not impervious to this relic.
The Day We Took Out 23 Tanks | Air & Space Magazine| Smithsonian Magazine
Insomniacal Fan
Starter
I would disagree, but feel free to try to take out a tank with a unicycle all you want. I'd much rather be sitting in the titanium bathtub in the sky slinging Maverick missles and 4,200 30 mm pieces of metal per minute at a tank instead.
And they can reportedly take out an Abrams if they hit it right, so even some of the more modern tanks are not impervious to this relic.
The Day We Took Out 23 Tanks | Air & Space Magazine| Smithsonian Magazine
I believe that a unicycle in a modern war zone would be a dangerous thing, as you might fall and hit your head, whereas an A-10 would be suicidal, as the titanium bathtub would be detected and blown out of the sky by a SAM missile launched from 300 miles away.
A guy carrying a Javelin missile on a unicycle would be a safer bet than an A-10 carrying a Maverick missile
kingsboi
Hall of Famer
I think you are better off for it. This is my only form of communication with strangers and I've been a member since 2005 before any of those social media platforms existence
kingsboi
Hall of Famer
They are not the same, I know we as humans like to compare but social media platforms were created with the number one intention of making profit via ads and advertising, everything else is just a by product of it. When you look at your feed for example, algorithms are created the moment you hit the "Like" button and when you click on a article, video or make a comment on a specific topic. From that point on, your feed consists of only topics that you like, enjoy and agree with. I remember being a MySpace user when it first came out and from my observations even that differed from Facebook because you were able to style your profile with music and backgrounds of your choice, users weren't selling items and it was a different platform, at least from what I remember but my memory might be hazy.
kingsboi
Hall of Famer
Precisely. Social media is strictly for profit purposes via ads, videos, how to's, etc. It's also a place where many users compare their own lives to those of their friends or whoever else they added as "friends" and that's when one gets into a rabbit hole. This is all intentionally made with 100% disregard for consequences. Message boards on the other hand, while sure, we get posts from Tetsu with his Twitter floods, the main reason the majority of us signed up for this board is to talk about the Kings first and everything else that may come along, second.
Never get involved in a land war in Asia, and never engage @Capt. Factorial in a battle of pedantry. The Doryphore concedes.
Wasn't Facebook created by an Ivy League dork, so that he and his Ivy League dork friends could rate how "hot" their female classmates were?
kingsboi
Hall of Famer
perhaps at first thought, but the end game was in mind
Close. It was created so he could make a billion dollars and increase the quality of his dating pool astronomically.
Personally I don't see much basis for comparison between social media platforms and message boards other than both are forms of asynchronous communication facilitated by the internet. This board is more like a public forum where all comments have equal weight and the entire point of the communication is an exchange of ideas between individuals. Social media's primary reason for existing is revenue generation, whether each individual intends to use it that way or not.
... And that is the source of the disconnect. From my perspective, the part you dismiss as "other than" is the entire point.
Oh I see your point. But it's kind of like saying a space shuttle and a bicycle are both vehicles. It may be true but does that tell us anything useful?
Meh. I don't think that making a distinction between message boards and social media is a "useful" conversation to have in the first place. But, here we are.
I don't think the conversation is really about communication, anyway. It's about commerce and how advances in communication technology have allowed for the monetization of mental real estate starting with newspapers then expanding to radio and television and in our time social media. Social media platforms are the dominant mass media of the present and the proof of that is technology companies out-earning the media conglomerates who dominated the global economy in the previous 4 decades. The role of this technology in facilitating inter-personal communication is ancillary to it's true function, though it is what leads most of us to allow ourselves to be inundated with advertising.
I suspect that the principal reason some of us try to draw a line between what we're doing on this website (and others like it) and what happens on social media platforms is that we have the same need/desire for communication as any other human being but we're trying to distance ourselves from mass media and everything it represents. That is to say, I don't think it's nostalgia or lack of technological literacy which keeps me returning to message boards and avoiding Twitter, I think it's because this still feels like a relatively safe space to communicate without feeding the big-tech juggernaut. Maybe I'm wrong though.
Also... having now perused the rest of this thread, it's clear I'm just circling back to comments which have already been made. You were right in your original post. I'm old enough to remember when the internet was a niche platform with more of a grassroots hand-built feel and I don't particularly enjoy how it has grown up and become exactly like television. Which just shows both my age and my disdain for social media.
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