Views on Forums and Facebook in 2013

May 2013 - Medium.com post - The Facebook experiment has failed. Let’s go back.

We need to go back to smaller communities. Where people aren’t lost in the mediocre averages of large networks. That’s where ideas flourish.

Hacker News discussion

Nothing has yet approached traditional web forums, IRC, and even old-school Usenet in this capacity. These forms of online community are clearly-defined social spaces, in which everyone has a direct view to who is and isn't participating.

There may be many separate contexts going at any given time, with lots of overlap among participants, but each one is still an independent venue with legible boundaries. Modern "social media" lacks this sense of defined space, which, I think, is necessary for anything to be legitimately called a "community".

Forums and IRC are like a few dozen friends sitting around a table, with everyone engaged in a single coherent conversation at any given time. Twitter and Facebook are like two hundred acquaintances having 40,000 conversations by shouting at each other across the floor of a gymnasium.

#socialmedia - #forums - #blog_jr