Assignment task:
175 words each
Discussion post 1:
Forum-based social media is a kind of online platform that revolves around discussion, exchange of ideas, and community interaction, instead of personal branding, and it impacts society by influencing the opinions of people, social norms, and group behavior through group discussion. The media type inspires users to find out, prove beliefs, and engage in discussions that can be used to change attitudes towards politics, culture, health, and social issues.
Forum-based social media were established earlier than many current platforms, as early as the 1980s and 1990s, as early internet message boards and bulletin board systems emerged (Walter et al., 2025). In 2005, the format was modernized with the creation of Reddit, which organized discussions into topic-specific communities known as subreddits and a system of ranking content by its user approval (Walter et al., 2025). This architecture pushed the web-based conversation to the concept of community management and crowd-sourced visibility, the impact of which has been enduring on the dynamics of information dissemination on the web.
An example of this type of media is Reddit. Statista Research Department (2025) indicates that in 2024, Reddit was publicly listed and brought in approximately 1.3 billion U.S. dollars of annual earnings, and its valuation is estimated to be 6.5 billion U.S. dollars. Reddit has hundreds of millions of avid users every month, and its large subreddits have tens of millions of participants. Its users interact through questioning, posting news, giving tips, and discussing forums, and the upvote and downvote system brings out the most prominent content.
Reddit has the power to affect the behavior that strengthens communal norms and affects the interpretation of information by the user. Online groups on Reddit can give social support and group belonging, particularly within mental health, hobbies and education discourse. Reddit can cause polarization, misinformation, and echo chambers when the only other users interact with communities of similar individuals (Efstratiou et al., 2023). On the whole, Reddit can illustrate the effect of forum-based social media in terms of its impact on the behavior of society, its knowledge shaping, and collective action. Need Assignment Help?
References:
Walter, D., Lokmanoglu, A. D., Ophir, Y., & Fabregat, E. (2025). Some assembly required: Unpacking the content and spread of the Wayfair conspiracy theory on Reddit and Twitter. New Media & Society, 14614448251341497.
Efstratiou, A., Blackburn, J., Caulfield, T., Stringhini, G., Zannettou, S., & De Cristofaro, E. (2023, June). Non-polar opposites: analyzing the relationship between echo chambers and hostile intergroup interactions on Reddit. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Vol. 17, pp. 197-208).
Statista Research Department. (2025, April 25). Reddit: Statistics & facts. Statista.
Discussion post 2:
One type of social media that pushes beyond the usual "TikTok and Instagram" conversation is community-based chat platforms, where people gather in ongoing groups instead of just scrolling a public feed. A great example of this is Discord. Discord launched in 2015 and was originally built around making it easier for gamers to talk and coordinate in real time, but it has grown into a space used for everything from school clubs and study groups to fandoms, hobby communities, and even workplace collaboration. Today, Discord has over 200 million monthly active users, showing how mainstream this "group-based" form of social media has become (Discord, 2025). What makes Discord especially influential is how it shapes behavior through community norms and identity. Instead of performing for a wide public audience, people often communicate in smaller, more personal spaces where they feel like they "belong." Research on Discord fandom communities shows that features like roles, moderation, and channel organization help create social structure and can influence how people interact, what they share, and even how strongly they identify with the group (Kocik, 2024). This can be positive because people find support, friendship, and connection, but it can also create pressure to conform to group expectations. Overall, Discord influences society by strengthening digital communities and making online relationships feel more real-time and social, which can impact how people communicate, form identities, and participate in shared cultures.
Discord. (2025). Our mission and story.
Kocik, D. (2024). Imagine a place: Power and intimacy in fandoms on Discord. Transformative Works and Cultures.