The differences that I see between Reddit and, for example, traditional forums are:
- The ability to use one login and interface across multiple boards/subject areas.
- The ease of communicating between different boards either via links, cross posts, or some form of aggregation.
- Features that over time allow a post to become one that can be recognized as well regarded by the community. These could include good support for listing important posts in the subreddit information, the ability to tag posts, and the ability to archive posts.
- The natural support for media and links. Although to be fair, the media support is actually provided by sites that grew up around Reddit like Imgur.
Reddit may not be social in the sense that, as another poster points out, it is built around following topics rather than users. However, the degree to which it allows different topics and communities to interconnect allows relationships to form that function as a society. For example, a post on the Male Fashion Advice subreddit on how to be more presentable might link to a series of posts on the Male Hair Advice subreddit that have become well regarded in the community.
By way of comparison, on conventional forums there is often little interaction even between sub-forums in the same forum let alone between different forums. Support for media also tends to be more limited.
I think there's a distinction between systems where users follow people and systems where they follow topics, I think of the former as social media, not the latter.
Twitter, Instagram - social media. Reddit, Stack Overflow, HN - Not social media.
dictionary.com defines social media as "websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking."
So the common use case of wikipedia, reading about things, is not. But digging deeper into the editors\editing section there is definitely social media happening both in forming networks and creating content for others
I don't think email qualifies. While you can share content and network with it, it seems to be more of a delivery mechanism than a destination that users would seek out.
"AOL" is too ambiguous.
I always though of Compuserve as a service provider but maybe they did have some social media features
BBS might be the original social media
Finger is interesting as you could create a "profile". myspace and other social media seem to be a combination of finger and bbs packaged into an endpoint
I've always thought the key characteristics of social media is sharing to a social network. When I post here or on Reddit I have no idea who it's going to.
Facebook and Twitter are social networks because I share stuff and there's a definite social graph that I'm part of.
