>China can (and has) manipulate the hearts and minds of the American public—skewing their biases in a way that creates internal chaos and dissent, disrupting institutional order, and sewing distrust of thy neighbor

Nothing a tin-foil hat can't prevent

As if the public needed any manipulation. You can just read what actual public figures, journalists, and such have been openly saying for the last 15-20 years...

When a long-time political player, wife of a President, and presidential candidate calls a big chunk of the population "deplorables", when opposing candidates call for the jailing or even shooting of their opponent, or when the current President is saying what he says and doing what he does, you need more to get "chaos" and "distrust of the neighbor"?

Damn, imagine if an Australian or a South African billionaire did that with big media companies, oh well, that's just a weird thought, nothing to take from that.

> skewing their biases in a way that creates internal chaos and dissent, disrupting institutional order, and sewing distrust of thy neighbor.

I don't really have respect for this idea; we do this to ourselves far more effectively than people who frankly have a pretty hamfisted cultural understanding- just as we have of china or russia.

IMO influence over real concrete choices is much more alarming. Someone with household-level information has an insane amount of advantage in an election. You can target politcal messaging street by street to play up the worst aspects of your opposed candidate and the least repulsive aspects of your own candidate.

But if you're in china, the most you can do is try to push towards whatever of the two candidates is least bad for you. And spoiler, zero american politicians are pro-china.

What conflict? If there is a conflict the whole world is fucked. I've only ever heard about conflicts from the Americans

LOL!

But that has nothing to do with the reality that the best response is to stop doing heroin. Someone refusing to help themselves does not change that.

Could you be any more patronizing? Maybe there's a few people you haven't alienated yet.

I don't like or use Tiktok, but clearly it provides some value to the people who do. Telling people to stop using it without even attempting to address what benefit (perceived or actual) it provides is self-defeating advice.

We can’t say these apps are addicting/weaponized against us and also say “just stop using it” like it’s some easy choice one simply has to make.

Just this morning I tagged along to an activity a friend of mine has been doing a few weeks, and had some nice conversations with people I've never met before.

Humanity, in person, in the context of common interests, is fulfilling for the soul.

Convenience of what? What goal is achieved most efficiently by using social media?

Fully agree. And more than that, I think you're objectively correct.

Think about the evolution of the term "social media". It evolved from social networks, which themselves evolved from forums.

The "media" in "social media" refers to third-party content that is algorithmically boosted through social signals, with signals from your own network weighting higher, and in the end creating a personalized algorithm of media content.

There is no personalized media on HN. It's the same feed for everyone. There is no network on HN. No friends, follows, private messages.

So there's no social to HN, and no (personalized) media, and no network.

Fully agree. Forums predate social media and are some of the oldest parts of the internet. And it's not quite socializing... it's more like, are you broadcasting and consuming content? Or discussing it?

HN and Reddit aren’t traditional forums because of the way downvotes and upvotes work. I would consider a forum to be defined by the most recent activity bringing the thread to the top of the list, not a popularity contest via upvote and downvote.

I also think HN has become too general purpose to be similar in spirit to most forums. Being seen on HN has major dollar value just like trending on Reddit does.

Also, have you used Reddit recently?

Open up Reddit on the app. No using old.reddit.com, doesn’t count. That’s not the experience most users are using.

Go to the watch section. I think you swipe left or right or something? I forget, I deleted the app.

Bam, it’s TikTok.