As an administrator of an online message board, I concur. Web content is being so efficiently aggregated that some forums turn into the awkward conversation between two redditors: "Check this out!" "Heh, yeah. I saw that."
Communities before were usually separated by platforms, because the platforms were not yet sophisticated enough to support vast communities of varying opinions. Now we have a few big players that can do this and more. Social media has turned into a war over who can blow the most filter bubbles, and with services like OpenID and "connect with facebook", everything has slowly become part of the same identity.
I'm hoping that a new platform will eventually come along to pry this apart, but it's going to take a completely different paradigm to cause it. Unless something like Google+ proves otherwise, websites like Facebook and Twitter et al have the potential to monopolize social networking.
Communities before were usually separated by platforms, because the platforms were not yet sophisticated enough to support vast communities of varying opinions. Now we have a few big players that can do this and more. Social media has turned into a war over who can blow the most filter bubbles, and with services like OpenID and "connect with facebook", everything has slowly become part of the same identity.
I'm hoping that a new platform will eventually come along to pry this apart, but it's going to take a completely different paradigm to cause it. Unless something like Google+ proves otherwise, websites like Facebook and Twitter et al have the potential to monopolize social networking.