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.
I wish I had an answer for you, Madman, but I'm not on social media and never have been. (On the other hand, from all I've heard and seen of it, maybe that's a good thing). The only "social media" site I'm on, such as it is, is LinkedIn. I'm not active on it; I only used it for job-searches and such, when I was unemployed and looking for work. But from what I've seen on LinkedIn, I agree; the medium is "in one ear and out the other". Discussions there are very lightweight, and the subjects are quite obvious, so there's very little to learn. (That's one reason why I rarely use it). Yes, because: - They don't think about learning. - Or, other people think that they don't think about learning. - Or at least, they think that other people think that they don't think about learning. - And they're afraid that other people think that they don't think about learning. Logic is a wonderfully strange thing.
Social media is quick. Easy. It takes no effort. People flock to it for the same reason people flock to popcorn blockbusters. It doesn't require you to have your brain all the way on. I just saw I had somewhere around 841 posts here. A strange way of finding out that I'm actually way more chatty than I thought, but if this was social media, it would be well in the thousands. Here, when I reply, I think about what I say, even if it doesn't always look like it. It takes just that little bit more effort to post something on a forum so you have time to reconsider that "funny" joke, or to realize constructive criticism is actually more of a bitchy putdown. Social media invites less self awareness, I guess?
True, and ... ... true. *heaves a deep sigh* I can't tell you how many posts I didn't make because, having written them, I then re-read them, re-thought them, edited them, re-read them a second time, and then deleted the whole thing because I considered them to be in poor taste ... or, at least, that they might offend someone. And I don't want to offend anyone. Call me Old Mr. Cautious if you like, but ... *shrug* (And yes, I know that's an invitation for someone to post "Hello, Old Mr. Cautious!")
Social media invites an emotional response, not an intellectual one - you post there with your heart, not your head. And that leads to things spiralling out of control rapidly. A deep, thoughtful post on social media is TL;DR, give me the three word summary. The same thing happens on forums, to a much lesser degree, and forums are usually moderated. Not all of them are WELL moderated, but WF is, thank god.
As for Twitter (I refuse to call it X -- such a dumb name) ... *shudder* The horror. Now I'm curious: was Twitter full of bigots of all kinds before Elon Musk took over, or ...? The problem seems to have gotten worse once he began his tenure as boss. (I'm only asking for my own interest, not trying to start a political discussion!) It would be nice if I could shrink Twitter to the size of something that would fit in my lunch box. I could call it my X Box. (All right, I'm going ...)
Hmph. Would it be possible, then, to moderate Twitter? *shrug* I'm only asking because our senior politicians ... in their infinite wisdom ... are threatening to give social media companies huge fines (even in the millions of dollars) unless they can get their "products" under control and stop people from posting bigoted crap. Isn't that neat? Let's just think about that for a second. Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and so on has existed for a long, looong time ... and no-one seems to know how to stop them. A few people tried, but they were always shouted down by the so-called "moral majority". But now that these bigoted, moronic asshats are going online, suddenly it's the social media companies' responsibility to "educate" them different. Um, yeah. We'll get back to you on that one. Please don't get me wrong: I think bigotry of any kind, against anyone, is disgusting and abhorrent. (I'm guessing I'm not in a minority here). But I really doubt a social media company is going to change anybody's mind. What might have helped is if these people had been educated by their parents when they were growing up, I guess. But if some thirtysomething or fortysomething fat guy in Wisconsin is spouting racist or sexist crap, it's probably too late now. So, that's my question: is it even possible to moderate Twitter, or maybe we should just pull the plug on it and watch the Twitter "members" scurry off to places like 4chan (I guess...?)
You could moderate by automatically filtering key words and phrases. Banning people who post bad shit. There are many bots, though, and I still don't understand why no one's created a bot army that sends messages of unification and compassion.
Moderating something that big is going to be a nightmare. Facebook tries they have legions of paid moderators but even they can’t keep up with the torrent of shit In his wisdom Elon fired most of his moderators in the name of efficiency and free speech, hence why twitter is now a fetid swamp of despair also a hell of a lot of the crap is posted by bots not real people. If you look down the bottom of our main page all the names in pink are in the spam trap, and they are nearly all bots. The staff generally also spend a fair bit of time mopping up those that got through the wire
Sounds like an excellent way to ruin everything. I'm sure there's been a politician somewhere at some point who said something reasonable and maybe even did something good, but in general those people have no clue how people actually use the real world. Fining any social media company, or any other company for that matter, for what their users do will only result in the users not being able to do anything of note anymore. Obviously I and anyone else directly responding to this will agree, but the inconvenient fact is that bigotry is just another setting on the human-dial. Hell, I'm probably bigoted towards something and I can guarantee you if you spend an evening with my best friend and myself, you're gonna be convinced we're very bad people. I think we're not, because we know it's only jokes and we know not to do it in the face of people who might be offended by them. I'm not justifying bigotry, mind you. I think it's a consequence of small mindedness and possibly lack of adequate intelligence, but at the end of the line it also falls under free speech. Should one always practice that particular kind of free speech, no. Most definitely not, and if I'm very unnuanced about it, I'd say free speech is a little too free. But when one spends most of their online life in an algorithm created echo chamber, "FREE SPEECH, Y'ALL!" is no longer a right but a shield. Anyway, that's a really long winded way of saying that another big social media problem is the echo chamber that silently forms around someone. Hell, I've got a really fun one concerning slightly underdressed girls shredding on guitar, but that doesn't mean it's all I wanna see. Yes and no. Context matters. I used to make loads of racetracks in GTA Online, where they really need to filter bad words. So I couldn't name one race after the town it was in, because Grapeseed has "rape" in it. Another problem I have with bad word filtering is that it makes telling you about the above example impossible. Sure, rape is a bad word, or more accurately, a triggering word, but in the context of an example I should be able to freely use it. I actually feel the same about worse words, like certain slurs, but I am also a hypocrite in that I'm sure as fuck not gonna try it out.
Oh, no! *hands on hips* We can't have that. If the people of this beautiful blue-green planet ever realized that we are all one, one people, united in compassion, peace and love ... what would happen to the arms industry? It'd totally collapse, which would fuck up the economy ... which would be a real bummer, you know. So, you can see why successive governments have cracked down on unconditional love. (Thank you to Bill Hicks and Gifts of Forgiveness). Well, filters like that are not entirely a bad idea. It's only that people who create filters like that don't think ahead. If, instead of banning the word "rape", you encircled it with a space on either side - i.e. banning the word " rape " - then you would only trap the word "rape", instead of, say, "grapefruit". OK, I'll give you that. There's a big difference between a article about the commonality or otherwise of rape, and person A threatening person B with rape. Or Cockermouth, Shitterton, Penistone, Broken Wind, Crapstone, Twatt, or Bell End. (And those are just a few examples within the UK). Norway has a village called Hell (in Stjørdal Municipality, Trøndelag county). But the state of Michigan also has an unincorporated community called Hell. (In fact, if you pay a modest fee, you can even become Mayor of Hell for a day).
Yeah, but I get why they went "just ban even the smell of the word." It would work the way you say, but we're working with humans, and in GTA's case, a lot of them were the kind of humans who were sad it wasn't possible to beat someone with a purple dildo. The kind of people who will just as quickly threaten to grape you. I don't remember what point I'm trying to make, though. ;o) I think I'd kinda like Scunthorpe. Things happen there.
Which in San Andreas, you had to pick up FIRST in the police station so it was auto-equipped BEFORE you picked up any firearms, less you accidently auto-equipped a fireman. The wanted level went up to 4 if you picked up a gun but wouldn't go up at all if you picked up a melee weapon like the purple dildo. There's some discussion about the word "melee" in another thread, so we can add the GTA purple dildo into the definition.
The other thing about the WF is that unlike social media, you aren't scrolling and getting hit with drama 24/7. Like, I logged back into Tumblr, then left. Because my carefully curated feed as now full of recommended drama and news. Something I am avoiding this year as much as possible. Meaning, I don't Intentionally engage. If I stumble on it, I leave. If a friend mentions something, I reassure them, but don't ask further questions. Sure, I kinda skirted around it the other day in a weird way, but I am still in the dark about 99.9% of news. But I was intrigued by the banning of TicTock and so started reading the Supreme Case Court Transcript. And it made me laugh.
