> 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.

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.

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"