Forums vs. Social Media/Reddit

What we currently know as “social media” is merely a degradation of the old internet and forums. The smartphone lowered the bar of intelligence and computer aptitude required to espouse your thoughts online. Hell, Myspace expected you to learn basic HTML to get your page looking good. Now they expect you to have to learn nothing. It has not done us any real favors aside from short term dopamine feedback loops.

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Ehhh, it was only a day old or so when you posted… :wink:

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I don’t think its so much an age thing
I’m in my 20s and the forum is so much better than Social media

I don’t know anyone old who has quit facebook,

– but I know about 4 or 5 people my age and younger who actively avoid social media and have deleted all their Instagram & facebook posts

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There’s definitely age differences across platforms. Lots of older people quit Facebook too bc it sucks

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Personally I don’t like social media. The idea of something being constantly tailored and adjusted to my likes and interests, constantly tweaking itself to make sure I spend more and more time on it is a little scary.

I have Instagram. But try to limit my time.

I enjoy this forum more for sure

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I’m not a fan of social media. I strongly believe it is why everyone hates each other now and causes division. I do have a reddit account though and have spent some time on r/throwers. Reddit is truly it’s own rabbit hole. I know for a fact there was times it caused my blood pressure to rise. That doesn’t happen here in a proper forum.

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I use Insta for uploading photos only, the problem is that they dont have a sub feed like youtube so I cant really tailor it to my liking. Forums are great, good recource and platform for chit chat where anyone can drop in

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everyone has hated each other for roughly the last X000 years lol

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I agree with most of what you said. I did enjoy r/Throwers, but I dumped reddit after the whole API debacle. I like forums such as this better, since Tech Giants are so centralized and generally out for their own profit more than the benefit of the users.

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Yeah I really like this place, old school style hobby forums are the best. I used to hang out on so many different ones as a kid. Mostly lego and guitar related stuff.

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Yeah but reddit is nothing but a propaganda factory if you stray to far from the hobby subs. Even some of the hobby subs will ban you for wrong think.

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I honestly wonder how much of reddit is just karma-farming bots arguing with each other and making the same comments over and over.

Social media as a whole is a plague on society. Engagement is the name of the game with anger and outrage getting the most clicks. I try to stay away from anything that isn’t related to my hobbies and interests. Forums like this are great because they give niche communities like ours a safe place to discuss our interests with like-minded individuals without all that noise.

Smart phones were never meant to make us smarter.

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Forums for me have never been able to match the video sharing ability that social media like instagram has. Social media has never been able to offer the longer form content present on forums. I think both have their place in the yoyo media sphere but to say one is better than the other when they both do different things is difficult.

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I actually thought that imgur might be a fun vehicle to post yoyo tricks on… Famous last thoughts, because it’s so mainstream, leaving my videos on public lead to a bunch of keyboard warriors talking garbage and leaving undesirable comments I don’t need. Quickly learned to make them invisible unless I’m sharing the link here where I know it will be viewed and enjoyed by fellow throwers. Imgur is very toxic otherwise…

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I find specialty forums and Reddit are both really useful sources of information. But I feel like you also get a lot more nonsense and casual comments without any value on Reddit … too easy to just hop around. With specialty forums, I think generally you get more passionate people who are seeking out a focused community.

I only use Instagram for updates on new products. Otherwise, I find the interface to be absolute garbage.

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Anyone look at the pretty not great platform threads and decide how they feel about that yet? Anything yoyo related make it there yet. Seems like twitter but bad which is hard cause twitter was also bad to begin with…

I had a twitter handle that I didn’t really use, so I didn’t feel the need to sign up for threads. So far most of what I’ve seen on threads is Elon Musk bashing :joy:

I prefer this forum the best.

I only use FB to keep up with YoYo BST, Colorado Springs YoYo Club, and Mile High YoYo club in Denver.
I have been done with FB for a while now, friends and Family making so many Political posts or they are making posts complaining about their problems.

I got Instagram, just to follow Yo-Yo companies and overall I hate Instagram a little bit more than FB.

Reddit, I only have some game subreddits marked and I just can’t get into r/throwers.

Discord, I know being Gen X, I still feel youthful enough that I should try it, but I am currently in Boomer mode of “I don’t got the patience for this”

TikTok, I never got past their dumb name to even attempt.

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I think that’s part of what I dislike about Instagram in particular. Everything’s an ad. An ad for a channel, an ad for a self-started project, or just a straight up ad. I think I prefer forums because here Dressel is just Patrick, OD is Shawn and David, CLYW is Steve… you get the point. I think it sort of levels the playing field because people come to have conversations instead of showing up to be wowed by whatever 10 second mishmash of visually appealing nonsense a company or individual manages to put together. I get the advertising potential and don’t blame companies for using it, but I think I have a personal problem with platforms like it and TikTok because they’ve collectively trained an ADHD mindset into heavy users… e.g. children with unrestricted access to the internet - which is validly blamed on parents in many cases, but to be fair it is getting harder and harder to effectively police internet access. This is probably outside the scope of the discussion here, though.

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