[CuriousCosmic]

A list of reasons from my POV:

- The loss of the 3rd place in America due to commercialization of public spaces

- A lot of communities depend on social media for their existence. Ex: artists depend on social media networking for their livelihood. Traditionally they'd depend on a wealthy patron to support them but nowadays they support themselves off of a bunch of moderately well off patrons. The same applies to many types of musicians, content creators, etc.

- Social media presence and networking is weirdly important in the FOSS space for patronage so nowadays a lot of devs lean on it as well.

- Social media has become a support network for a lot of people. Jokingly said where everyone lends around the same 20 dollars.

- Niche communities only really exist on social media. Before "big social media" they existed on forums and before that they existed on the one big social media, the BBS. Without the internet these communities would just wither over time.

- Social media is really important for Open Source Intelligence.

[prmoustache]

> - Niche communities only really exist on social media. Before "big social media" they existed on forums and before that they existed on the one big social media, the BBS. Without the internet these communities would just wither over time.

I don't really see much "niche communities" striving on social medias really. There are less of them, but there are still a lot of old school forums which I believe still do a better job for small communities. I am still connecting almost daily to 2 of them + a few others more infrequently. I think the oldest was created in 1998. It is much smaller than at its peak but if you look at statistics it has been showing stable activity in the last 10 years with the usual seasonal variations (much lower activity in summer). I think there is still a place for those.

[immibis]

How did the comment next to this one warrant deletion?

[EA-3167]

That feels like a list of the best things social media offers, but not the typical use case. The typical use case seems to be arguing, trolling, toxicity, and showing off.

[CuriousCosmic]

Sure but your average user isn't sticking around for that. At least on Bluesky, Twitter, and Mastodon.

The average user doesn't really post all that often. They don't even necessarily retweet or like posts that often.

The average user is consuming content produced by your "high quality content" users. The artists, musicians, youtubers, streamers, journalists, blog writers, podcasters, and other types of content creators. They are the actual value add to the platform. The make content that the average user cares about consuming and maybe the average user pitches in their 2p here or there.

There are other types of users of course but by and large, you are going to expect that your average user is mostly consuming instead of contributing. Some platforms (like instagram) may encourage users to post their own content for their close friend groups but platforms like bluesky aren't really about that in practice.

[petre]

IG is like mostly ads and product placement mixed with user content now. In fact it encourages regular people to do product placement, even if the actual product is a tourist destination.

[CuriousCosmic]

Yeah. They built their platform as a close interpersonal platform ala facebook but much like facebook it's largely devolved into a wannabe tiktok-twitter amalgam.

[RACEWAR]

This is a solid list. Thanks.