[throwaway156503]

None of them. I'm not sure what your experience has been like on the World Wide Web, but for me, immediately preceding social networks were just forums, and the best Internet community experiences of my life were on those websites. So there are entirely different models of communities outside of "social networks." The latter most is just the most recent phenomenon. And it will be replaced sooner or later.

In fact, I think we're overdue.

Anyway, at least forums were actual communities, where you recognized people's usernames, people had reputations instead of likes or karma, and people made up their own mind about things instead of having signals tell you what to think.

What we have with social networks are too many people spewing their worthless opinions with such velocity that any meaningful discourse or information you might hope to extract is drowned in uneducated or uninformed quips and blurts.

[macando]

You are right. Ephemerality and velocity is what influence the current state of social. With forums you had a community (often local) with a common (usually offline) interest. You had permanent topics and memorable members. I frequent subreddits which grew from 10k to 200k and 100k to 1M subscribers and I haven't memorized a single username. Maybe a creative troll or two but even they eventually gave up. Maybe all this is caused by a rapid growth and a lot of new people still figuring the things out.