Social Media

What is a Social Media?

A social media is an online platform that allows users to post messages and other content (links, images, photos, videos, etc.), and view posts of other users. In this loosest definition, all online chatting platforms and online forums count as social media, since you can post messages on them and read what other people posted. However, the way the term is normally used is to refer to apps and websites that have a central feed of posts listing posts from users, communities and categories that are of your interest.

Examples of social media websites include: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest, Tumblr, Plurk, and a decentralized network called Fediverse that includes websites made with Mastodon, Misskey, and similar software, and Youtube.

Main Features

Central Feed: perhaps the only feature to separate social media websites in its strict sense from online forums is the use of a central feed of posts in its homepage, featuring only posts tailored for you. In traditional forums, the homepage of the forum would instead list categories of sub-forums that you would have to click to view a feed of threads posted by users. Reddit, which functions very similarly, does have threads, but they show immediately on the homepage's central feed. The exact appearance of this feed varies according to the social media's main post type. On Reddit, it's threads, on Youtube, it's videos, on Pinterest, it's photos.

Post Page: perhaps the only feature to separate social media websites in its strict sense from online chatting apps is that each post has its own page, and on the web, with webpages, this means its own unique URL. This means that we can link to any post on social media, to anything that anyone said or posted.

Feed-Based Content: perhaps the only feature to separate social media websites in its strict sense from online art communities is that social media websites do not impose any rules on what sort of content the posts may contain. The only thing that matters is that posts are pushed to feeds, like notifications. For example, the key difference between Flickr, a photo-sharing website, and Instagram, a social media website, is that on Flickr everyone is posting their own work, so you don't really see memes, while you can easily find memes on Instagram because there is no such rule. Similarly, while lots of people post their own work on Youtube, you can post anything on Youtube if you want. This is also the reason why you don't see any audio-based social media. Audio websites are generally to share music you created yourself, and even Spotify, which also has podcasts, doesn't allow you to just post whatever just because it's audio.

Post Comments: social media websites generally let users post comments on other users' posts, and sometimes reply to those comments. On most social media websites, a post and a comment are different things, however, there are exceptions: on Reddit, replies to a thread can have almost the same content as the thread post itself; on Twitter, a post is called a "tweet," and reply is also a tweet.

Post Forwarding: on some social media websites, it's possible to take a post you saw and send it to your followers. This practice is called a retweet on Twitter, a reblog on Tumblr, a crosspost on Reddit, or a boost on Mastodon.

Post Reactions: many social media websites provide a "like" button that can be clicked to like a post, sending a notification to the poster without having to comment anything. In some websites, you can find list of your liked posts, but this list can grow so incredibly large that it's common to have a second button, called favorite, bookmark, or "save," to actually save a bookmark of your favorite posts in a different list. "Like" buttons tends to be used to build a profile of posts you are interested in. Some social media also let you react to posts in other ways. Facebook, which pioneered the like button, also has other types of reactions. On Facebook, the like button is a thumbs up, but elsewhere it's often a heart symbol. On Reddit, upvotes perform the same function as the like button (regardless of what some people may say), and there are downvotes as well. On Misskey, each server has have a bunch of random reactions, which I assume is based on how Discord reactions work.

Feed Subscriptions: social media websites let you subscribe to other users to get in your feed what they posted when they post something new. This is also called "following" an user. Users with more followers have a larger audience that will read their posts. When two users follow each other, forming a mutually following relationship, we say they're "mutuals" or "moots" for short. Some websites also let you join groups or communities (or a subreddit in Reddit), and doing so subscribes to posts posted into that community. It's also possible to post to a category, often called a tag or a hashtag when it's written with an octothorpe (#), and to subscribe to such category so you receive in your feed posts posted to that category. In other words, if a website had all of these 3 things, it would be like there were 3 different types of feeds: feeds of posts of an user, feeds of posts from a group, and feeds posts in a category. By subscribing to any of these, you merge posts from those feeds into your central feed. Conversely, if this was the only way to see a new post, that means a post made by an user with zero followers, that wasn't posted in a group, and that has no tags, wouldn't be seen by anyone because it doesn't go into any feed. This is the case with Mastodon, for example.

Feed Filtering: because social media uses a single feed instead of the structured category layout that old forums used, all posts end up being dumped in that one single place. This means if too many people are posting at once, posts will get added faster than anyone can read them, and the most interesting or important stuff will get missed. Some social media do work this way, e.g. Tumblr and Mastodon. This is called a chronological feed, as it shows posts sorted by the time they were posted. The alternative is called an algorithmic feed, which relies on a computer program's algorithm to somehow decide which posts are most important and should be included in your feed. Naturally, this means that some posts will not be included, as they will be skipped. Seeing as this system gets more unmanageable the more feeds you follow, some social media like Twitter and Mastodon also provide the ability to create lists of users, such that if you click on the list you only see posts from those users specifically rather than from everyone you follow, e.g. you could put your best friends in a list so you can quickly view what are their latest posts.

Recommendation Algorithm: many social media websites will also recommend posts to you from feeds that you don't follow. This is sometimes called "The Algorithm," specially in regards to Youtube's algorithm. Recommendation algorithms may include a post in your feed for several reasons, such as it simply being very popular, it being rising in popularity quickly lately (i.e. trending), it being liked by users you follow, or by users the algorithm considers similar to you based on what you seem interested into, or the post being geographically related to your location.

User Mentions: on many social media websites, it's possible to mention an user by their username, generally by typing @ followed by the user's username, e.g. @admin. Exceptionally, on Reddit /u/ is used instead, e.g. /u/spez.

Hashtags: on many social media websites, it's possible to mark a post with a category by typing a "hashtag" in the post. This hashtag is a code composed of # followed by the name of the hashtag, e.g. #happynewyear. On Tumblr, there's a separate field for setting the post's tags. The reason why Tumblr's approach isn't common is that hashtags can be typed directly into the body of the post without needing to have a separate field.