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Comment by Gud

15 days ago

We didn’t call forums back then “social media”, we called them discussion forums…

I was there, just go to the official phpBB forums and search my name..

I was also there. We (ie the people I interacted with) called myspace social media and considered discussion forums to be a specialized subset of social media.

We also considered myspace to be a social network (due to the friend graph) while forums were not.

The chans were a weird almost edge case. I think they qualify as social media but the lack of persistent identities significantly changes the dynamics (obviously).

  • As far as I know chans are always considered "image boards" and they are usually distinct by the fact that the information is "pushed off" the board after a time or amount posted afterwards.

  • Nobody called a phpBB forum “social media” 20-25 years ago.

    Nobody.

    • Not only did we do it back then, scroll around this thread - it's still a thing today, people are calling HN "social media".