Xkeeper's blog thing

20th January 2015

Post with 7 notes

On social media

I was thinking today about how “social media” type sites (Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) have sort of corrupted the idea of a community.

Consider Twitter; you aren’t really “friends” with people (just following), and there’s no real way to hold a meaningful conversation in only 140 characters. The nature of public tweets means anybody can jump in and retweets can easily discard all the context of a conversation, too. But even past that, I notice that it’s rare to see people communicate with each other without prompts (i.e., not spontaneously) – people will usually wait until a topic of interest is tweeted, then jump in, and sometimes it’ll move on to greetings from there.

I think the underlying thing is that these sites aren’t really for communities so much as they’re just a way for people to really just become content providers. You aren’t really making a relationship with anybody, you’re really just consuming content; trying to have any meaningful discussion on e.g. Tumblr is a lot like pissing into the wind, and on Twitter it’s so easy for everyone to drown in conversations / get caught up in things nobody has any interest in it’s almost pitiful. (I have seen “please untag me” too many times and the fact there’s no automatic way to do this is sad, but then again Twitter)

Facebook is similar in that it’s less community/relationship focused and more “post status, get comments/likes/shares”. You aren’t really communicating with people so much as just broadcasting thoughts and people can react to them.

Maybe it’s just a relic from having come of age online around the time of old-style forums and message boards, but I really miss the communities of old…

(These days you can still sometimes find these types of microcommunities on IRC or (say) Skype, but they seem to be on the way out.

And on that note, I don’t think I wrote this well, but…)

Tagged: social mediatwitterfacebookforumsthe death of communities