Cuz the comments throught Lemmy/Piefed seems to indicate that literally every user on here is a FOSS/Dencentralization Purist and has 100% abandoned mainstream platforms.
I wonder if this is actually true or just a small minority of users being overrepresented.
Why would YouTube not count as social media?
Pre-rebuttal in case you go in this direction: Being a social media platform and being a video sharing platform are not mutually exclusive.
Another even simpler point I haven’t seen anyone else mention yet is that social media is historically associated with being used to socially interact with friends and family, either people you know irl or closely-knit online groups you treat as legitimate personal relationships.
Though I suppose Twitter can be an exception to this, but anyone who remembers how Twitter started out knows that it was never intended to be that way lol (now that government and judicial agencies use it as a defacto form of official press release ontop of everything else)
If the question is “why not”, I think a good reasoning is simply because it broadens the categorization to the point where the term begins to lose all meaning. Different websites inherently have different forms of structure for interaction.
The way you behave on Instagram, Facebook, tumblr, and Twitter all feel fundamentally different from the way you behave on forums and video sites. People on Lemmy don’t “reblog” stuff, people don’t send each other friend requests on Youtube. It redefines the core dynamic.
On Youtube, the dominating theme is channels and parasocial relationships, more similar (but not exactly the same) to an audience’s relationship with traditional media like Film and Television and their responses to the various actors/artists/celebrities therein rather than a 1:1 reciprocal relationship. Sure, there are fan groups, which gets into an interesting subset where you can begin to socially interact with each other, but these groups often live in outside spaces (such as tumblr). Hence the point I’m trying to make.
Even classifying Lemmy and Reddit as “social medias” feels like a stretch. I mean yes, in a technical sense we’re all “socializing” with each other in this moment and having (mostly) genuine conversations. But for the vast majority of it, I would say:
It’s just TV, there’s nothing social about it for many people
Like Netflix with a different library
Would you consider tiktok to be social media, then?
Tiktok is the definition of social media imo. You respond directly to each other with videos that reveal who you are in real life. It’s almost aggressively social lol, like neighbors yelling at each other inside of the same apartment building, even if you live on opposite ends of the continent.
But that’s not how most people actually use it
yeah because it’s mostly talking heads and the tik tok videos are meant to be replied to by other videos.
a lot of youtube isn’t like that. it’s just videos.
do some people use youtube as a social platform? yes. like the massive genre of talking heads and ‘reaction’ videos.
I don’t think many people use tiktok like that. Most people are just commenting, or lurking. It’s functionally pretty similar to how YouTube is used for the average person.
I remember there was actually a time (probably way back in the late 2000s) where youtube used to have a little “video reply” feature, and they would nest the replies beneath the video in a little banner! I miss those days…
That’s a way to use it (and the one I prefer) but it’s still media with social components, ergo social media.
That’s too broad.
There’s a pretty general consensus that it counts, and it makes good sense from a media literacy point of view to treat it as such.