In 2026, expecting articles about social media to contain a definition of the term ‘social media’ is so peculiar as to seem disingenuous. Can you perhaps explain exactly what you think is so ambiguous about how they use the term that we can’t just assume the common meaning?

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rob-lag 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What's missing for me is that they never seem to mention which social media platforms in particular these statements are directed at.

There are many social media platforms, some of them similar, but some are also vastly different from each other (e.g. Hacker News vs. TikTok)

Making statements about all of social media without such clarifications makes them pretty unreliable for me.

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alistairSH 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Even HN has a clout score, and seeing it move up/down, or slapping that up/down arrow, can trigger the same dopamine as social media by MegaCorp.

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close04 4 hours ago | parent [-]

And the content discovery algorithm is tuned to please the masses, the users drive the algorithm which promotes or buries the content for everyone else. I think the moment you use a socially driven algorithm to show/hide content from users is when you're planted firmly in social media territory.

	▲	cryptopian 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's why I prefer not to get bogged down in litigation over what counts as social media. It's far more productive to look at the individual mechanisms that make web platforms bad for socialising.

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bunderbunder 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m not sure how much it makes sense to pick this nit for a public opinion survey of this nature. The survey is being sent to people who mostly won’t think of the term in such precise ways, and even in social sciences it’s considered poor form to try to measure more precisely than your noise floor permits.

That said, I would assume most respondents have a more popular conception of the term. That’s going to be inherently a little fuzzy, but implies implies sites like X, Facebook and TikTok count, that Reddit is marginal, and that more “oldschool” things like webforums, chat services and even Hacker News are out.

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bcjdjsndon 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Exactly

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bcjdjsndon 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Some people fear paedos talking to kids, others fear kids watching bad videos or reading bad comments. They are two vastly different complaints.

One is about communications, the other is a more general concern about content that could extend to and audiovisual form.

Yet another definition is essentially a synonym for tiktok. Or sometimes they mean just twitter.

The UK online safety act leans heavily towards communication (ie comments or DMs, hence Wikipedia being caught up in it)

> assume the common meaning?

Which is? Point me to a defintion