# Social networks explained

"Social media", as a concept, has degrees of complexity:

1. The most basic website simply conveys information by a single user or group (e.g., this site).
2. The data may become more complex than text and allow [images](engineering-camera.md), [videos](engineering-camera.md), and [audio recordings](computers-speakersmic.md).
3. When the site provides any public forum for discussion, it becomes "user-driven" (e.g., a comments thread). This is when people technically consider it "social media".
4. Some sites are almost entirely user-made content, and are often called "wikis".
5. If each user gets the freedom to make their own custom content, it's a "profile page" system.
6. The user may also have a "feed" that allows that user to present constantly updated, date-sorted data.
7. Each element of data might give the user freedom to constrain [permissions](computers-cysec-authentication.md) for which users (or unidentified computer users) can access the information.
8. Users may have the freedom to make comments on other users' information.
9. The comments system may be enhanced so heavily that the users can centralize it on a topic, which is often called a "forum".
10. The users may grant shared permissions with one another, with some demarcated relationship (e.g, friend, connection, buddy, etc.).
11. Finally, "recommender systems" can recommend portions of relevant users' data to other users.

## Social network design

In practice, the core of social media has distilled to several website categories:

- Blog - mostly static content by a single user or group, sometimes allowing comments (e.g., [WordPress](https://wordpress.com/), [Medium](https://medium.com/)).
- Wiki - mostly static content by many users, but only allowing edits and not comments (e.g., [Wikipedia](https://www.wikipedia.org/), [Fandom](https://www.fandom.com/)).
- Content showcase - a media-based network that showcases specific, topic-based content (e.g., [DeviantArt](https://www.deviantart.com/), [Pinterest](https://www.pinterest.com/), [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/)).
- Forum - constantly updating content by many users, organized by topic (e.g, [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com), [Lemmy](https://join-lemmy.org/)).
- Feed - constantly updating content by many users, typically algorithmically sorted (e.g., [Twitter/X](https://twitter.com/), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/), [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/)).
  - In particular, the path of the [Bad Information Age](https://gainedin.site/information/) leads everything to video-based feeds.
- Online Store - content that users can update for the purpose of selling merchandise (e.g., [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/), [Etsy](https://www.etsy.com/)).