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I don't know, the older days also had IRC, messaging apps, internet forums and BBS systems too, and my experience is that the people on the last two tended to be more... mature than the kinds on social media sites. Even today the slower and more thoughtful pace of a traditional forum is more conductive to decent discussions than the obsessively upvote/view focused world of social media sites.


>I don't know, the older days also had IRC, messaging apps, internet forums and BBS systems too, and my experience is that the people on the last two tended to be more... mature than the kinds on social media sites.

Social media is just about as mainstream as the telephone now. Everyone who was on those forums and BBS systems and IRC is probably also on social media.. along with their parents and kids. The web long ago got too big to draw narrow demographic conclusions about. And everything you mentioned apart from BBS is still around.

I mean, my elderly mother uses Facebook and I wouldn't call her "obsessively upvote/view focused." She is obsessed with sharing pictures of her grandkids doing everything, though...


How much of that is the eternal September of going from something where a tiny niche of the population using a thing to the vast majority?

I don't think there's much structural about Yahoo Answers being what it is. I think it's mostly the population.


irc still exists and I usei t every day. The same jerks that you see on "social media" exist all over IRC as well.




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