| ▲ | armchairhacker 3 hours ago |
| HN is social media. Social media is a spectrum. You can imagine HN like a documentary channel compared to Facebook’s reality TV, but even “documentaries” can be dopamine sinks that aren’t actually informative (or accurate). (But personally, I see lots of short and pure opinion posts here, documentaries are long and at least pretend to contain facts; so I’d hesitate to compare it to a documentary channel even with the caveat.) |
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| ▲ | stronglikedan 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| > HN is social media I haven't posted any personal pics, or stories about things that I've done in my life or am currently doing, so how can it be social in the same way that social media is? To me, there's a clear distinction between a news aggregator and discussion forum like HN, and a social media site. Sure, I can post something that I'm working on or a blog post that I've written, but it's still framed as news to be discussed, not a social interaction. |
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| ▲ | whateveracct 11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Forums came before social media. It's a forum. |
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| ▲ | titzer 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You don't see pictures and videos directly on the site. It's text links and text comments and discussions. In the minimal sense of the word, even printed text is media, so it's technically true that HN is social media, but I think it's more like a news aggregator and discussion forum. |
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| ▲ | dust-jacket 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| see IMO it isn't. HN is an online community. Same as forums, and BBSs were. I don't think they were social media really - they're online spaces that form around a shared interest, where Facebook etc were originally online spaces that augmented a real world community. But we're a long way from that now. |
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| ▲ | liotier 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > HN is an online community. Same as forums, and BBSs were. That is the very definition of social media. "Social media I like" vs. "Social media I don't like" isn't valid categorization. | | |
| ▲ | dust-jacket 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | if you think social media just means any space online with multiple people in it, then I guess we just disagree on what social media is. Is the linux kernel mailing list social media? was usenet? | | |
| ▲ | close04 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > if you think What do you think social media is? What are the clear criteria that make something social media, or make it not social media? If you know HN is not social media that you have a clear demarcation of what is. | | |
| ▲ | chownie 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not that user but I don't think this is as difficult as you're making it out to be? On Reddit, Instagram, Tiktok et al I can create a community on that platform. I can get find other people into Booktok, I can join the Rowing subreddit, I can get into Knittinggram or whatever. Posters expect roughly their micro-community to see their posts, users expect to see their micro-community's posts. On hacker news I see the same community everyone else does. If HN was a vBulletin forum with threads posted for links it would function almost 1:1 the same, I guess all you'd need to change is a modification for making threads bump on vote behaviour instead of latest-post. | |
| ▲ | dust-jacket 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I said so above. I think originally they were "online spaces that augmented a real world community". Even twitter, you mostly started by following people you knew or had heard of. I get that this isn't at all where we are any more. And y'know, everyone's gonna use terms to mean whatever they want. I'm fine with that. I guess I just think its pointless if "social media" means "anything online where people can write messages" |
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| ▲ | IAmBroom 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That is not what they said. Strawman fallacy, and you still refuse to define the term. |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | IAmBroom 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well, it's A definition, which is more than the opposing side has yet to offer. I knew someone who described everything he didn't like in politics as "socialism". He literally couldn't define "socialism" when pressed; it was always a circular reference to the current irritant. |
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| ▲ | trollbridge 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've never appreciated the low-effort handwaves of claiming that HN, old-school Internet forums, USENET, etc. are "social media", simply because they aren't. HN's primary medium is text, often headlined by a link to some other site. That isn't social media. HN makes it quite difficult (technically impossible, but you can link out) to embed media such as videos and pictures, which makes it fundamentally different than "social media". Many other Internet forums are similar--they might technically have the capability, but the prevailing culture might be that people rarely do it. Adding to this is that HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't get attention. That makes it fundamentally different from other social media platforms today. |
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| ▲ | armchairhacker 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | HN has comments which are social media. I don’t get why people care, because social media isn’t intrinsically bad; I always say “mainstream social media” or “toxic social media” to clarify what I’m referring to. > HN makes it quite difficult (technically impossible, but you can link out) to embed media such as videos and pictures, which makes it fundamentally different than "social media". What’s the difference? Submissions usually include at least one picture, sometimes videos or interactive content. > HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't get attention. I’m sorry, but this isn’t true. HN has less AI than say Reddit, and many users try to
combat, but I still frequently see top-voted (obvious) AI-generated articles and less frequently comments. When something has lots of em-dashes and other https://tropes.fyi, I recommend checking on Pangram. | | |
| ▲ | trollbridge 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Comment threads are not “social media”, no matter how badly anyone wants to redefine that they are. They date back to the 1970s on USENET and mailing lists. | |
| ▲ | vitalyan1234 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >HN has comments which are social media. I don’t get why people care how can they participate in the daily "social media bad" two minute hate sessions demanding regulations and bans if they acknowledge that things they like are also "social media"? hence the mental gymnastics. |
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| ▲ | kiicia 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| HN is public forum (one of the last), it's a bit different thing |
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| ▲ | wussboy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Calling this out as the primary reason HN is not social media. Forums existed for years before social media was ever a thing. HN is indistinguishable from a forum in the early 2000s. | | |
| ▲ | zerobees 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Forums of the early 2000s were almost always sorted by recency, not upvote count. They also typically weren't dominated by vendor press releases and news stories, whereas domains such as anthropic.com, blog.google, openai.com, along with outlets such as techcrunch.com and arstechnica.com, are probably among the most popular URLs of the past year. But I don't think it's a meaningful distinction to begin with. Usenet was an endless time sink to get angry at things that didn't matter and argue with strangers who might not even be real people. It wasn't monetized, but it still made it easy to waste years of your life. | |
| ▲ | cucumber3732842 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The fact that they intentionally include a rightthing/wrongthink button and keep score is a fundamental difference between modern "social media" and legacy BBSes and forums where there was no score keeping. Perhaps keeping score of rightthink is not enough to make HN social media, but it's certainly enough to not put it in the same bucket as forums and BBSes | | |
| ▲ | al_borland an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Having some sort of recommendation algorithm seems to also be a defining feature of modern social media, which is something old school forums didn’t have. | |
| ▲ | treebuscartruck an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | armchairhacker 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Reddit is a forum, is it not social media? | | |
| ▲ | mr_mitm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This comes up often, particularly on Reddit, and I don't think we're doing us any favors by counting it as social media. It has a few substantial differences to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, et al: - The focus isn't on connecting. It has a "friends" feature (I believe?), but the social graph is extremely weak. - You are not expected to use your real name. On the contrary, it comes off as weird unless you're a celebrity. - There is no algorithm maximizing engagement, or at least not a hyper personalized algorithm that analyzes your scrolling speed and every sensor under the sun feeding into a machine learning system designed by professional psychologists to keep you hooked. - Individuality isn't as encouraged. The user name is small, and there are no avatars, or at least used to be (I don't use the new interface very much). The focus is on the content instead. I suppose you can find a definition of "social media" that includes Reddit, and surely the differences are fluid, especially since we can recognize some efforts by Reddit to become more like the real social media sites, but I vote for putting it in a different category for the sake of discussion. | | |
| ▲ | Ldorigo 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Reddit absolutely has algorithmic feeds since it ipo'ed (maybe earlier but I used third party apps so I wasn't subjected to them). 90% of my home page is bullshit I didn't ask for. |
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| ▲ | walthamstow 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | IMO, the old reddit UI wasn't, but the new one is, since they started the algo home page and showing stuff outside of your subreddits. |
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| ▲ | everdrive 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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