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.

Hell no, the forums of the 2000s were "topic that had the last post gets pushed to the top", and pretty much nothing else.

HN has an algorithm that manipulates what you see, and we do not know at all how it works.

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

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.

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.