I've made an observation that to me, is odd. More people seem to use social media for their writing groups and writing communities rather than forums. One group on Facebook that I am a member of has over 200 000 members. Whereas this forum has fewer. But, I have found that the quality of social media is both fleeting and subpar. Posts and discussions don't hold the same quality as that of forums. And even if a post had high quality discussion, it would be gone in two days, and good luck searching for it. Yet more people seem to want to use social media? Why is that? Why would you go to a place where you will learn less rather than to a place where you can learn more, better, and with a solid community? I mean this as in forums being better, in my opinion. Why is all this?
The closest I am to social media is when I gotta use Discord for gaming purposes, so I probably won't have the best answer for you. However, I think that many people have become accustomed to a sort of social micro dosing. It keeps them in with the, "new/cool crowd." Doesn't take much effort as far as I can tell. And, it's easy, because it's in one ear and out the other. Perhaps it's not as much about learning as it is about being seen as someone who is thinking about learning.
I mean, you could ask that about anything on social media, no? Half the kids were raised all the way by social media and the other half were raised only partially so.
Dopamine. With SM, you get an instant dopamine hit because you get answers to your comments immediately. The algorithms are designed to direct attention to the latest content, so older content quickly gets forgotten about, but latest content gets the attention of the whole community directed towards it. It's good for people whose minds can only focus on one thing at a time. Here, you can end up getting comments on threads and posts you made years ago, which may or may not be a good thing. S&M can also give you a quick dopamine hit, but that's different.
i did join a writing group on facebook, but quit the group after a while. This may or may not be a gender specific thing, but the group was a female writers group and people were catty as all get-out! And it was more of a gossip group than anything else. they would post gossip and screenshot other peoples business and use to as "research" saying "hypothetically, what would you do in this situation?" and "if you need inspiration, look what my niece's cousin's boyfriend's etc. etc. just said!" and the mod was the worst of the instigators, inciting arguments and then banning kicking people out of the group for calling them out on their shit. the icing on the cake for me was when they added a Beta Reader component to it, but all the beta readers wanted to be paid, and when someone didnt want to do that and wanted a swap instead, an argument broke out. i was gone. Basically, the WFs and Discord are my only writing groups now, and thats fine with me. I only joined the facebook one because i was invited to it. honestly, if we are talking about social media groups, the best ones i've been in as a writer are the book club ones. they discuss plot and tropes, and through their sharing of books they've read, I can see whats trending. plus, they are always down to talk books, even if its a WIP. The one i'm in has 3 group chats: one chat to discuss fantasy, a group chat to discuss steamy romance, and a group to discuss general fiction. my only issue is, the chat notifications are always going off and it gets a little annoying. but i can always turn it off.
I asked a similar question as my OP, but on social media. One good point was traffic, SM gets way more of it. But in my experience, only if you manage to get lucky. Otherwise your question or discussion is only going to get three likes then get buried in the void. One user had to google what a forum was, hehe.
