There are a lot of social media “opportunities” out there in the wilds of the internet. From the mostly-dead Usenet, to whatever the really young people ditch TikTok for these days…
This is my attempt at classifying those, according to how long the communication posted is supposed to stay relevant – for most sites, the messages remain quite a bit longer, but mostly for archival.
There’s a whole bunch of things that don’t really fit in here (like e.g. this very blog), but I’ll either put that in a separate category or will extend this with another axis some day in the future™.
Permanent Outcome #
This is rather rare, where you have a social environment, but the end result is something that’s supposed to have permanent value. This also means that you can come back to and amend previous content.
There has to be some kind of personal element, otherwise this would hardly qualify for being social. This doesn’t leave a lot of candidates here:
- Original Wikis – Back when “WikiWiki” was still a common enough part of the names of them. Examples would be the first wiki (aka. the Portland Pattern Repository) and the* *Tcl’ers Wiki. There you have large generic blocks of text about some matter (often programming), but also personal blocks, containing some commend and a user name.
Wikipedia has gone far from this and is about as social as collaborative editing with Google Docs.
Long-running discussions #
In this category, I’m including anything that can lead to a longer back-and-forth between a group of people, where you can come back to a topic tomorrow, and nobody looks at you askew.
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Usenet – The great discussion medium of the ‘90s, where you had all kinds of newsgroups with varied topics, and within those threads that could last for several days or longer. Quoting posts was an important factor here that helped keeping information alive, and most clients were pretty decent in supporting that. Not a big thing these days, cf. Eternal September.
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*Email Lists ***– Similar to Usenet, just not as distributed. Whereas there were many usenet servers who passed messages back and forth between each other, a mailing list comes from one canonical source, making this a bit more fragile. Client support could be as good as Usenet (often being the same client, e.g. early Netscape or today’s Thunderbird), but also deteriorate quite heavily, where threads easily were broken and quoting mishandled. Early Outlook basically ruined this for everyone.
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*Internet Forums – ***The classic “bulletin board” format, with simple web frontends that present you a usually non-threaded view of a discussion. Made it easier to participate – you just need a browser, not a Usenet or Mail client – and enabled posting images and fancier formatting.
Often called dead these days, there’s a surprising amount of fora with heavy traffic these days, especially for specialized topics like role-playing games, synthesizers or pumping iron.
Ephemeral talk #
The time something remains relevant here is usually limited to a few hours to a few days. Their usability for reference varies, though.
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Slashdot-alikes – I name this after the original Slashdot site, where nerds posted IT news since 1997. Members of this category have a forum-like interface, albeit often simplified and threaded, with discussions being tied to news items.
So this includes reddit, digg, Hacker News, lobste.rs, and old sites like fark.com. -
Group chats – We had this since telephone-based bulletin boards and the Internet Relay Chat also fulfills this. The more recent ones tend to have a better archive of your previous posts. Prime example these days is Discord, or the more job-oriented Teams and Slack, but all the one-to-one chat providers like Telegram or even WhatsApp also jumped on this bandwagen.
(By the way, I’m not counting iMessage, WhatsApp etc. as two person communications have an even wider spread and barely are “social”…)
Alright, poop time #
This is where it’s all about stating your current personal news or opinion, with any textual feedback being secondary. Simple “likes” and sharing your “content” is much more appreciated and forms the true basis for social interactions here.
(Category name is coming from this Penny Arcade strip from 2008, and not a lot has changed since then)
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Microblogs – while this technically applies to regular weblogs where the entries are rather short, most of the bandwidth here comes from the commercial providers: Twitter/X, BlueSky, Tumblr and the more prominent bits of “the fediverse” (but see below).
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Image & video streams - At the low end of multimedia fidelity you’ll find things like Imgur, but the true giants here are TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. All of which feature comments, but it feels like those just serve as just another numerical feature, a secondary “like”.
Quite a few platforms cover several of these bases. Facebook is a poop stream, but also does news and even some longer discussions. Some “subreddits” are even more focused on news, some are basically image streams, some might even have discussions where you get new contributions after three days.