Comment by [deleted] on 14/10/2014 at 20:22 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)

View submission: Is Reddit considered social media?

I'd say the best term for sites like reddit and 4chan would be a "meta-forum". That is it is a collection of individual independently-themed forums strung together. I'm going to say that these can be related to established forms of social media enough to be included.

To separate a "meta-forum" for just a large set of forums I'd make the distinction that the there is no overarching theme. There is no "theme" to reddit aside from a collective community. Take for example that /r/explainlikeimfive is about explaining topics in a simple manner where as /r/aww is about pictures of adorable animals.

Now that I've defined a meta-forum, let's look at social media. In general, we can see some similar functions:

• Profiles: A page that a user or group moderates which is themed to that user or topic.

• Discussion: A method of organized discussion. For Facebook, it's status updates and comments. For Twitter, it's tweets and hash tags.

• Rating: A way to vote in support for a comment or link. Implemented as likes or favorites for Facebook and Twitter respectively.

• Sharing: A way to repost a comment or link you came across for other users on your profile.

Reddit fulfills all these criteria. Profiles are the biggest difference but Reddit is essentially a Facebook of themed group pages so I consider it fulfilled. Discussion takes place in subreddits and PMs. Rating is done in the form of upvotes and downvotes. Sharing is a little more ambiguous but you have x-posting which fulfills this criteria.

I don't believe social media to be necessarily limited to the criteria above. I was using it for the sake of argument. Social media is likely to be too broad of a term for such a rigid definition. It is more of an umbrella term for such "user networks" as Facebook and Twitter, which could probably be used to encompass meta-forums as well.

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There's nothing here!