Had the same thought. Growing up in a small town (couple of hundred inhabitants), internet access early 2000's was a gift for teenage me. I joined web forums and discovered new interests (=web development which lead to my career), chatted with friends on msn, later played runescape and wow and met friends I later traveled countries to meet.

Of course, these things were different than the beasts today. Everything was more personal, smaller. No algorithms.

So not sure what I feel. Social media as we know it today is obviously bad (not just for teenagers). But maybe I'm just nostalgic for how it was.

But what about hn?

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criddell 3 days ago | parent [-]

Are you describing the difference between a social network and social media?

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matsemann 3 days ago | parent [-]

I don't know, what would be what?

Hn and reddit are kinda the same concept, it's just the scale of them making it different, or?

	▲	criddell 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		HN and Reddit are both social media. Both sites are largely populated by lurkers. I'm not sure there's a good example of a social network site left. Even sites and services that can be used for social networking are designed to make that difficult. For example, on Instagram you can choose to follow and interact with only people you actually know and keep your profile private. That would be social networking IMHO because it's mostly one-to-one or at least one-to-not very many. But Instagram insists on showing suggested posts. You can turn that off, but after 30 days they turn it back on.
	▲	2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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