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user-centric and content-centric platforms reflect different citation styles used in scientific literature (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/bathtubthoughts@discuss.tchncs.de
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In scientific literature there's generally two ways to cite someone:

  • If you're writing a technical paper about something related to technology, you typically cite the paper in square brackets.[The Art of Citation; Johnson et al.; doi: 10.4208/jcm.1512-m2015-0242]
  • If you're writing in sociology, you typically cite the author in round brackets. (Clarke 2013)

Nevermind the square/round brackets, my point is that in technology-related fields, typically the name of the paper is considered more important than the author. A paper can have many authors, and not always all are listed. Meanwhile in sociology, the author is considered more important than the name of the paper.

This reflects the main difference between Mastodon and Lemmy:

  • Lemmy is content-centric, where you have communities (focused on a topic) as the central element of organization, and they can have posts.
  • Mastodon is people-centric, where you have person/user as the central element of organization, and they can have posts.

This is why lemmy mostly appeals to people working in IT and tech, and that's why there's mostly nerds here.

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[–] 7 points 10 months ago

Honestly thats fascinating and cool as fuck, thanks for sharing!

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    [–] 7 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I think you're right that nerds are more interested in topics and non-nerds might be more interested in people. Maybe it's just an introvert/extrovert thing?

    Also happy cake day!

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    • [–] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

    Oh this is interesting! And it would be really cool to see if there's a correlation between someone's level and field of education and their preferred social media platform. Interestingly, biological and medical articles also use the (Name, year) style of citations. This makes me think there could be some confounding factors:

    1. If you're in school (presumably post-secondary), your college or faculty might mandate a specific citation style for all student papers submitted for grading.

    2. Similarly, the scientific journals themselves might mandate a specific citation style within the articles they publish.

    3. And there might be a root cause to points 1 and 2. The way in which you included a doi for the tech citation but not the socio one makes me think the age of the scientific field also matters. Older fields perpetuate the name-centric style because that's what was in use before the 70s(ish). When research was still seen as an "individual" (white male-centric) pursuit and contributors were purposefully left out (cf. Watson & Crick omitting Franklin). Whereas more recent fields incorporated the more modern content-centric approach from the start.

    And beyond the link with citation styles, I wonder if your preferred type of social media reflects if you experienced the Internet prior to the rise of people-centric platforms. Back when interactions between people occurred through content-centric platforms like forums, mailing lists, comment sections, or social bookmarking.

    Edit: Reorganized some paragraphs for clarity, because it's 4 AM and I'm sleep-deprived.

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