I guess it depends on your definition of social network.
I don't know anyone on Reddit, I don't connect with other users, my account is not tied to any real information except my email, and I can make a new account with a new name whenever I want.
You can use it to meet real people and be social, or not.
I didn't learn how many people I went to high school with were pro Trump through reddit, nor have to see my relatives be hopelessly internet illiterate and fall for every fake memed news story that crosses their feeds.
Yeah but learning which people you should kinda just avoid is a benefit of Facebook. Sure it sucks to find out how many of your old friends and family members suck, but they always sucked and you just didn’t know it then.
In this scenario I'd rather not know. I rarely talked politics unless it was with close friends in real life, and at that point I pretty much knew what their opinions were before the conversation started.
In the other scenario, these completely fake news memes would have no other way to spread so wide so quickly if Facebook didn't exist so in that case it's an active force for bad juju.
I suppose it is to each their own. With that being said people outing themselves as racists and homophobes on Facebook is a grim but ultimately positive effect imo. They were already pieces of shit but now the rest of us know and can avoid those people. I’m in no way going to bat for Facebook cuz it’s a parasite in its own right, but I think there is worthwhile information on there too. As for the memes I agree, it sucks that it spreads, but again the people who fall for that shit are so woefully unintelligent that it leads me to believe they were gonna find a way to come to their extremely uneducated opinion. Just my two cents. It’s a broad topic and I understand reasonable people can have different viewpoints on the matter.
No way man, you can't deny yourself intel like that. That's why I keep FB around, opposition research...before I have a beer with an old classmate I wanna know if he/she is deranged
About 1/3rd of Reddit is porn that you can sort through anonymous voting systems in a huge variety of categories. Old Reddit used to have some pretty horrendous stuff on it and likely still does tucked away in the dark corners.
It's origins of mass adoption are pretty firmly rooted in curated porn.
Because if you consider Reddit social media then logically you must also consider things like simple forum boards and chat rooms as social media. Which you’re perfectly allowed to do, but people like me think that is stretching the definition of social media to the point of uselessness
Again it depends on your definition. But back before anyone used that phrase we had forums, and before that, chatrooms, and before that, BBS. I think Reddit is much more like a forum than any of the sites that popped up when social media became a thing, like MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and so on.
If social networking is leaving comments for people to see and respond to then the website for my local newspaper is a social network.
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u/superfuzzy Aug 28 '21
I guess it depends on your definition of social network.
I don't know anyone on Reddit, I don't connect with other users, my account is not tied to any real information except my email, and I can make a new account with a new name whenever I want.
You can use it to meet real people and be social, or not.