personally i think it's good that no social media platform has actually emerged as a viable replacement for the ones that are decaying and nevertheless all of them hate each other while some % of the users on every single one are constantly becoming embroiled in their own convoluted drama that actually i never glimpse firsthand and which does not actually affect my experience in almost any way but when i do learn the slightest bit more about the situation it is always some shit foolish beyond imagining
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in reply to @lutz's post:
I think ultimately the experiment in having an 'online public commons' has proven that such a thing shouldn't exist, and arguably splintering the above into various platforms and blogs may be a healthier substratum for how we treat one another -- but in the short term at least it certainly has reawakened the mid-2000s spirit of the Forum War
There have been studies that show humans can only really function in groups of a few hundred max before things go haywire and the difference between early forum culture and social media is the live case study providing strong evidence for it
in fairness I think people have sometimes an overgenerous memory of what forums were like. the hyperdensity of modern social media and the detached nature of moderation are certainly a problem, but we also found ourselves growing insular and cruel the moment a smaller forum began to form any sort of group identity
yeah i think the primary difference between the kind of harassment and arguing that happens on forums and on social media is just the number.
as someone who grew up on forums, we were pretty fucking vicious sometimes (a lot of the time in some cases, especially if you have a forum that splinters off from another one entirely, which happened a lot due to the ease of creating a phpbb/mybb/etc forum).
it's just that now instead of seeing it in your one forum from a couple users, now you just see it randomly as you scroll social media, and you just see so many more people engaging in that behavior.
forums were really no different from how moderately large discord servers are now. drama increases over time and eventually the admin(s) get fed up and the whole thing collapses
There are two types of social medie imho: the ones that make me go "shut the fuck up 🙄" and the ones that make me go "shut the fuck up 😠"