In my case, I don't think most people who claim HN is social media are making a serious argument. They are taking two different things which have a few points of inter-comparison and using that as a basis to claim those two things are actually equivalent. This is done as a retort (eg, "you say you hate social media, but you're on social media _right now_") rather than in service of a larger argument.

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stickfigure 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm making it as a very serious argument.

HN is social, it has an algorithmic feed, people upvote and downvote your content, hell it has a social credit score. The idea that HN somehow isn't "social media" is hard to take serious. This is Reddit for a niche audience.

The main difference is that HN has a small and relatively high quality community, plus the traffic is low enough that it gets a fair amount of manual moderation. It's still social media and if there were enough people here, we'd eventually read stories of kids who offed themselves over downvotes. But we're thousands, not billions, so the law of large numbers doesn't apply.

If your FB feed or Youtube feed is garbage, spend some time curating it. HN is mostly curated for you, which appears to be creating unrealistic expectations of the broader world.

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jermaustin1 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree that HN is "social media", but I'm starting to wonder if Facebook/Twitter/TikTok/Reddit/YouTube aren't "social media", but instead a new category of media tangentially related as OP posted to cable news. Something like "attention media" where your attention is the point of it.

HN, on the other hand, your attention matters less. They aren't paying for this platform using our "attention" necessarily. I'm sure it is a way to curate an audience of tech-enthusiasts where they can exploit our knowledge and push their investments in front of our eyes.

I like HN for that reason, I don't feel like I'm the product as much as with other attention-seeking platforms.

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stickfigure an hour ago | parent [-]

I suspect a big part of the reason you feel this way is that you don't see advertising on HN. Because HN itself is one gigantic advertisement.

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jermaustin1 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

That isn't true, because I don't see ads on YouTube either, but I know their algorithms keep leading me to staying on it as much as possible.

HN doesn't feel the need to keep my attention 24/7.

	▲	stickfigure 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Genuine question - how many times a day do you load HN? Is it already getting enormous amounts of your attention?

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pennomi 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

By strict definition it obviously is social media. “Interactive forms of media that allow users to interact with and publish to each other, generally by means of the Internet.”

People don’t want to admit it’s social media because that delegitimizes their argument “all social media bad!” and instead of refining their argument they just double down. It’s a very human behavior.

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an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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rpdillon an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, but deconstructing the platform to look at the engagement points is also useful. Some things that I think set HN apart in a good way:

The lack of any kind of personalization whatsoever on Hacker News is a huge differentiator. There are no notifications, so if you want to find out if somebody replied to you, you've got to go check. Everybody's front page is exactly the same. There are no direct messages. There are no in-line images or videos or even emoji. The feed is not endless. There is no targeted advertising. There are no reactions to posts other than upvote/downvote.

I guess you can lump HN in with Instagram and TikTok, but it just feels like a very different product, in ways that are relevant to the analysis of whether its existence is a net positive for society.

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close04 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You wrote a paragraph to say you don't "think" the others are right. What is the definition that made you think this?