If it’s a larger site that contains socialization, like blog comments, the blog itself may not be social media but the comments can be. I define TikTok, Twitch, and part of YouTube as social media because the videos themselves are casual and therefore quality as small-talk (if you only visit YouTube for large videos or videos without commentary, you’re not visiting the social media part).
A 1-on-1 or small group chat isn’t social media, but a large group chat, Discord, or other invite-only platform is. Because when these get large enough, they have the parasocialization, shock, and constant activity of open social medias (even some self-promotion, but it’s more authentic and IMO not an issue).
Some people argue text doesn’t count because it’s not “media”, but I don’t think it matters, because in practice people share media on text forums and I don’t think there’s much difference anyways (e.g. name dropping a movie, is that sharing media?).
I define Stack Exchange as not social media, because it actively strongly discourages socialization. Video game lobbies are social media iff users heavily socialize in the chat (the clans in Warcraft, Eve, and Clash of Clans may qualify; large Minecraft server chats may quality).
Ultimately, I define social media based on parasocialization, with tendency to promote and consistently provide high-dopamine text and other media. Someone else can define it as “a parasocial dopamine sink with notifications and ‘friends’” like Twitter, or “a parasocial dopamine sink that encourages your real name” like Facebook”. I include sites like HN because I think, while they’re significantly better, they’re still “social” in a way regular communication isn’t, and can still have most of the negative effects (you can engage positively with HN, but you can engage positively even with TikTok and Facebook, if you use it selectively productively).
Social media is the development that they can also use that personalized feed to show media, and actually, your real friends don’t generate enough content to keep you hooked 24/7. So the site is quickly overwhelmed with professional content creators and other entities that are looking for engagement. The site might pander to them intentionally, or it might just fail to prevent them, but in any case they take over. This turns it from a sharing network to a passive consumption broadcasting one.
Hackernews was never a social networking site really, and so it never had the infrastructure to develop into a social media site. It is more like an evolution of a phpBB board, or something like 4chan (but, thankfully, with just enough moderation to keep out all the unpleasantness).
The important distinction is that the feed isn’t personalized, content is ranked based on what the community finds interesting. This seems to surface better stuff. It could just be the moderation and the type of content (tech stuff has always been easier to find on the internet than, say, politics). But there’s probably something to the fact that content has to be “better” in the sense that it can’t just appeal to a specific quirk (weakness?) of an individual viewer.
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.
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.
HN doesn't feel the need to keep my attention 24/7.
But it isn't like YT (which is running in the background nearly 24/7) or Reddit, that I habbitually check. Those feel way more addictive. Same with Instagram, but I don't really care for short form content, so it doesn't capture me the same way as news and long form videos.
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.
I believe these are the exact technical advancement the top-level poster was contrasting with cable networks, so the distinction matters here.
You would have had to guess, because it went unspecified.
If we're talking about algorithms to surface content, we should talk about them; although I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with cable television. Cable television advertised in the way we are told than advertising is not bad: they created specialized channels, and took advertisements on those channels that people who were interested in those specialty subjects would also be interested in. They didn't track or attempt to manipulate individuals.
I don't know what cable television did that was special or above and beyond what a magazine or a newspaper supplement 100 years ago would have done. The only difference between TV and magazines is that you don't consume TV, it's simply pointed in your direction - and you can't skip around ads. This is notably not true about modern television, though. If anything, it has technically fallen backwards since DVRs (or even videotape in general.)
I think a lot of intellectuals were forced to take Cambridge Analytics' marketing claims as truth because of the political positions they entrenched themselves in shortly after that scandal broke.
It's certainly caused a lot of 50s narratives about Vietnamese and Chinese communist mind control to come back posing as serious science, and a bunch of Key's "Subliminal Seduction"'s grotesque sexiness mixed in to make it nominally anticorporate. Although, predictably, it has generally been expressed politically as giving social media more ability or even responsibility to suppress the speech of average, un-notable citizens when they go against government narratives about controversial subjects.
That is not defeating social media, that is defining and institutionalizing social media as a trust and a means of government control. There is no reason we couldn't have had this same argument about telephones, other than that the average US citizen was less disdainful of their own civil rights back then - civics was drilled in as a religion, and it involved obligations the state had to you. Obligations that you are not allowed to give up if you want to live in a civilized, democratic country.
This was why we don't have government police whose job is to listen to random phone calls and periodically butt in to tell the speakers to change the subject, or arbitrarily cutting the line, collecting lists of people who need more intervention, or banning people from being able to use phones because they were seen at a political protest. If you ever wonder why the mails are so sacred, it's because the mail came about when people were prouder and had more shame than we have now.
If you want to regulate algorithms, regulate algorithms. Don't regulate "social media." If you have to argue about what it is, it is a useless term.
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.
Much more effective is trying to identify the mechanisms by which a communication platform breaks social interactions. Is the feed sorted by engagement or chronologically? Does the platform encourage you to chase metrics? Does the default feed include content you didn't subscribe to? Are comment threads difficult to trace through?
not every user submitted feed with upvotes is the same
You absolutely can follow people here. Accounts have profiles and you can look at all their comments and submissions. If you want to make it convenient, there are browser extensions. But I don't see why that matters. You stick around here long enough you tend to recognize the frequent commenters.
And what do you mean you have no idea who I am? That's a choice. Like you, I have plenty of identifying information in my profile. People who want anonymity create throwaway accounts, just like reddit et al.
Both a wheelbarrow and a Ferrari have wheels.
What is this supposed to mean? They're also two rolling carts steered by a human, and I'm going to make similar decisions for both when I'm e.g. designing a path that they have to move on, or trying to figure out traffic patterns around a construction site.
The people who know it when they see it are exactly the people I don't want making any important decisions. Just be specific and don't use rhetorical appeals to ignorance.
* The platform is a closed garden with a goal to own the content, user submissions, and any personally identifiable data or relationships thereof.
* User interaction is primarily limited by a terms and conditions policy as opposed to a code of conduct. The goal is to impose constraints upon user rights as opposed to user behavior.
* There exists a profit incentive directly tied to engagement frequency. The goal is to quantify content visibility and sell those numbers to third parties.
* Exchange and reselling of user profile data, user submissions, and any analysis or relationship there upon is beyond user control, awareness, or agreement.
A preference for unfalsifiable babbling. As worthless as arguing what exact colors the word "pink" refers to. Just define a range.
It's worse than bikeshedding because then at least you get a bikeshed. At the end of this discussion, at best you get a synonym.