It's generational:we are here, and the younger folk are choosing to do something newer, shinier, and to us, annoying and perilous.

It's technical: in the early days, web forums (fori?)were cutting edge social platforms. Then a bunch of innovation happened, and competition developed. Prepping became mainstream to the extent of becoming a media industry and youtube category.

It's organizational: all organizations exhibit a life cycle, even a loose structure like an online forum. The enthusiasm and chaotic interaction of youth segues into the more disciplined behavior of maturity enacted through establishment of norms and enforcers, with corrective actions imposed on norm breakers. This makes the forum less combative, and, arguably, less interesting.

Let's focus more on what social media can do for emergency preparation or in case of an emergency.

Advantages over other forms of communication

-- Notification (via your phone). This is a big advantage. To get notification from TV or radio, you have to be watching TV or listening to the radio. Similarly, you have to go to a website to see an update. The weather radio only alerts you to certain types of things. Sirens go off only in urgent situations. With something like Twitter, as you go about your day, you may hear a beep. You pick up the phone and get the latest update about Dorian.

-- A wider range of notifications.

-- Able to include information like images, links, videos, etc.

Disadvantages

-- If the cell network goes down (and they often do in emergencies), you are out of luck. Radio seems the most robust. On the other hand, many emergencies do not knock out the cell tower.

-- Notification depends on the people doing it, and in some cases there is no pressure to get it done right, unlike TV or radio. I subscribed to this notification service provided by the local government. After a year, I realized no one was actually handling it. It was basically a defunct account.

Surely this is not a complete list. Jump in, guys!

Maybe I'm old school, but I never believed the trade-off of personal information was worth the benefits of social media. (That's another discussion.)

For a source of immediate information in a crisis, I can see social media being very useful. One would have to carefully gauge the quality of that information before acting on it.

My primary grouse is that, unlike forums, content on social media is locked behind a paywall, essentially copyrighted by the platform, and can't be preserved through projects like Wayback Machine (archive.org).

So, when it comes to the accumulation of long-term knowledge and experience, they can forget it for you wholesale.

You don't have to give any personal information. You don't even have to give your name. You can use a fake name, fake location, fake email account, etc. You can just sign up for the emergency notification services, leaving very little "signature."

The problem is that many people don't have the discipline. They find their friends online, or they like some celebrity's profile. They want to share the cat pictures. They want to yell at the news. At some point they start giving out personal information voluntarily, etc. People forget themselves and post their phone number and address in public places, thinking they're giving that information just to friends.

On my FB account, I regularly change past posts to private, keep a very low profile and use all the security features I can. So much so that when one aggravated (Antifa) person checked out my profile she wondered if I was real person or just using a fake account. I like to keep people guessing and don't like to reveal much personal information. I had an incident a few years ago, where some jerk decided that he didn't like my comment and was able to gather enough intel on me that he researched my private information and published it online as some sort of cyber bullying revenge. He even tried to get me fired from my job just because he was "offended".

Sounds smart Roarmeister.

For people who are avoiding social media because they are worried about their privacy, I feel like I should clarify that you can go even more "low profile" than getting into an ugly political argument in public with a stranger who then begins to stalk you. Nobody would force you to make public statements on social media. You are not required to yell at anyone or participate in anything like that. It is completely voluntary.

It's not so much privacy for me as just apathy. Nothing about Facebook interests me.

Perhaps because you haven´t found any interesting groups to join.

I´m member on a couple of educative groups; one that gathers historical photos of my birth village and one war historical group.

I dumped FB when it became apparent that real friends with whom I could have a civilized discussion with in person tended to snipe on FB where the "discussion" process is...well...hampered. And this is where I had a rule that I had to be able to call (phone, have direct contact info) any friend on FB meaning real friends, not cyber ones.