In-App Purchases are already real-money gaming (and gambling). You can already waste your whole finances on lootbox games chasing a rare reward. The only difference is that you can’t officially redeem them for money, it only features all the downsides of gambling. So… it’s pretty much the same. The division between gambling for fictional items to gambling for money is so small it might as well not be there.

For people who got phones with 5 cameras and decide “this doesn’t trigger my trypophobia badly enough”

There are some pretty cool games that were ported to mobile by Netflix, like Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, but if they are going to inject ads and in-app purchases into them (you know, on top of the subscription), they are going to ruin them

This ain’t Wikipedia. Nobody is just leaving their info and settling at that. Nobody is even trying to be objective (even if Wikipedia doesn’t always manage it). Threads don’t result in a single consensus reference page to be maintained indefinitely, but multiple discussions where everyone is making their opinions heard. As much as some opinions are highlighted over others, it’s not collapsed into a final conclusion.

Be honest here. Look at Twitter and then look at Wikipedia. As far as similarity in function and behavior, which is Reddit/Lemmy more like? If anything, to me saying Lemmy is the same as Wikipedia is calling cereal, soup.

The difference between Reddit/Lemmy and Twitter is that it’s based on subcommunities rather than personal feeds. Even then, Facebook has that too, in their groups.

It is social media. Some users just want to believe they are above that. It does get a rise out of them, because they refuse to believe it. It doesn’t mean it’s not correct, not only based on pedantic definitions but also how and why people use it.

Say, even in participating in this discussion, what is your goal here? It’s not like this thread will ever serve as a reference material for the classification of websites. It’s not even the main point of the thread (whether and how to join social media). Seems to me that you want to make your opinion known, and so do I. Whether or not you remember my username, this is social interaction. And by experience I can say the same sort of discussion happening here happens on Twitter/Mastodon near identically.

It’s not that far off, frankly. A lot of websites with user comment sections have a social aspect to them. But even if we discount those whose the primary focus is not that, and we take YouTube and IMDb out of it, Reddit and Lemmy lack the sort of stable end result that reference sites and wikis focus on, or the sort of separation between creators and audience that YouTube has (then again isn’t Instagram like that too?). Even if we make a distinction here we are still left with a place whose content, curation and discussions are community driven. A subreddit or Lemmy community is nothing but that which the people who participate in it decide. Sounds like a social form of media if I ever seen one. An internet platform for public collective multidirectional communication.

Frankly, I think Reddit and Lemmy resist the classification as “social media” not because there aren’t reasons to count them as that, but because the userbases in these sites see it as a dirty word and they like to believe they are above the unwashed, stupid, celebrity-worshipping masses.

They are not. We are not.

How much do we mock people commonly not reading articles and just commenting immediately in both these places? That shows link aggregation is not necessarily the main driving appeal of these places. Even for lurkers and outsiders, they often use Reddit to see what people are commenting, especially as far as advice and recommendations go. We are even in a community whose primary content are questions from other users for us to talk about our opinions and ourselves. How much more socially driven does it need to be for people to accept that it is social media?

Even if one argues it’s different from Facebook because we don’t use real names, Twitter also goes by pseudonyms and everybody considers that “social media”.

I don’t think the definition needs to be stretched very far. In any of such cases, the function is social, it is about connecting people and enabling them to communicate in a wider, multilateral fashion, online. However asocial we might convince ourselves of being, if we truly had no interest in it, we wouldn’t even be discussing anything here.

Even lurkers, at the very least, place trust on a group to bring them matters which they are interested in, and if you consider it, this is the manner in which Reddit and forums are most similar to following influencers. The only difference is that it is a crowd-driven highlight, rather than an individual one, and even then people don’t tend to follow just one single influencer.

Lurkers on Lemmy and Reddit don’t seem too different from someone who is on Twitter or Instagram to follow celebrities.

Commenters definitely are in it for interacting, whether they realize or not. Like, just now, you felt the need to express your opinion to this crowd, and so did I.

Pseudonymous is not even quite the same as anonymous either. It’s not just people randomly saying whatever nonsense like 4chan, there’s all the reputation-building and ego that other social media has, only less personal, for better or worse.

I hate how newer phones are designed to act like they are still owned by the manufacturer.

I haven’t seen a single phone that has more than one USB-C port, and I would like to listen to stuff while these these phones charge their miniscule batteries.