the ux of social media platforms

A piece on Usenet's the September That Never Ended mentioned Google Groups will be dropping Usenet support, which makes me sad. I haven't really used Usenet for twenty years, but for the ten years before it was really important to me, and I liked seeing it was still going on and to be able to look up the odd half remembered post.

Usenet really had a good vibe; the idea of bring your own client and use it across a variety of topic rooms, each forming their own community was great - my favorites were rec.games.video.classic, alt.folklore.computer, alt.fan.cecil-adams, and comp.sys.palmtops.pilot. (A friend of mine has a conspiracy theory that Usenet was too distributed and uncontrollable and so was repressed by the Powers That Be in favor of more centralized forms of social media...)

It made me think about social media forums I've lived in over the years. Each tends to encourage a certain style / length of post, has different types of message continuity (threads, etc), makes it easier or harder to recognizing recurring authors, and has different styles of if you rely more on following people or sipping from the main firehose.

I had a weirdly geeky urge to categorize what I've most used over the years... (my current favorite in blue) These are all based on my judgements of how I or most people use it:

Forum	Post Lengths	Crowd Size	Author Identity	Follow or Commons	text vs image
Usenet	Long	Many Medium Groups	.Sig	Commons (per Group)	Text
Livejournal	Very Long	Friends List	Avatar	Follow	Text
Blog Comments	Short	Private-ish	Name	Commons	Text
Slashdot	Short	Large (Geeks)	.Sig	Commons	Text
Atari Age Forums	Medium	Medium-Small (Gamers)	Avatar + .Sig	Commons (in Topics)	Text
Facebook	Medium-Short	Real Life (+Algorithmy)	Name + Avatar	Follow (+ Algo)	Mixed
Twitter	Very Short	Very Algorithmy	Avatar	Follow (+ Algo)	Mixed
Reddit	Short	Many Medium Channels	Username	Commons (per Channel)	Text
Tumblr	Medium	Medium ("Mutuals")	Avatar	Follow	Images
WhatsApp	Short	Private	Avatar	Commons	Text
Slack	Medium-Short	Private	Avatar	Commons (in Topics)	Text
Discord	Short	Private	Avatar	Commons (in Topics)	Text

Facebook connects me with a wider range of people from all parts of my life, and despite the privacy concerns and what not, I appreciate how easy its been to share as many photos as I'd ever want, and get them in front of folks, abeit in a haphazard way.

I love the community of tumblr and it's my favorite source of stuff to repost on my blog - but I haven't figured out how to get "followed", so it's mostly a read-only medium for me so far.

Slack closed-garden is my favorite community types now - if you find the right bunch of people (that balance of people who post a lot, and maybe some people who mostly lurk but chime in) it's fantastic. (On paper Discord has the same potential, and is a bit more hip, but somehow the UI for threading and private messaging is horribly confusing, and the whole things gives me Reddit-ish "I can't follow things" vibes.