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I had to use the Wayback Machine to dig this up:
> 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features
> Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinato...
Even Hacker News acknowledged 15 years ago that it was a social site and that social news sites could be "dangerously addictive". The goalposts for defining social media keep moving as people try to avoid any definition that captures their own internet usage, but I think it's important to be honest about what we're all doing here.
Also the noprocrast feature is still there right in your profile, though I don't know if it's documented anywhere.
I feel that this is one of the consequences of spending so much time on Social Media sites, that my brain hast just started to look forward to "distractions" when I don't have anything else to do. If I don't have Instagram, I'll open X. If I don't have X, I'll open Reddit, or LinkedIn, or Hacker News. It's hard to get away from this constant need for distractions all the time, and I've found myself to procrastinate on simple things whereas I wouldn't have done that a few years ago.
I'm glad that features like Noprocrast exist. It's unfortunate that other media sites would never implement these features because their business model is entirely driven on people spending more and more time on their sites.
A couple weeks ago, I had a power outage, and instead of being upset I felt RELIEVED. Like, everything in life just felt calmer for a moment. It was kind of nice to just grab a book because it was the only option. (well, I mean, there was still the cell phone but at least it was the only distraction)
As for social media, I am using the decentralized alternatives, fediverse and atmosphere. It is all parasocial. People talk about friends networks and how cozy it all is, but you only exist as long as you produce content and engage. And content that fits the in-group at that. Produce what they want to hear. It is superficial, shallow, but you can easily be deluded it is more than that. It is not that your peers online want it to be that way, it is just that the tools we use are insufficient to forge richer and more intricate social relationships. Even while the fediverse has no algorithmic feeds, it is Twitter-like and you must stand on your soapboax, sell your warez, to get heard. It is far from social, as we understand it offline.
Note that there is value to it all. It just serves one well to be aware of the social dynamics and adjust expectations accordingly.
I don't know every social media site, but many of them do have built-in time limit functionality. It's even better documented than what's on Hacker News.
First two random ones I searched for (Instagram and TikTok)
https://help.instagram.com/2049425491975359/?cms_platform=ip...
https://www.tiktok.com/support/faq_detail?id=754359745915568...
As with all discussions of whether something does or does not fall into a specific category, the devil is in the demarcation. How you define a social site, or how I define it, or how the vague general consensus vaguely defines it, or how Hacker News defined it 15 years ago, or how Hacker News defines it now; changes the answer to whether it belongs in the category or not.
The same applies to whether AIs are conscious/sentient, whether a certain governing body is fascist/totalitarian, or even something as simple as whether something is good or bad, comes entirely from how those categories are defined in the context of the conversation. Without the same, agreed upon definitions, we're all just talking past each other.
We pretend we're the victims, but none of these platforms would have been built without an army of willing, enthusiastic, highly-paid engineers who made small "ethical compromises" every day.
And now that there's money made in something else, many of us would accept a seven-digit offer from OpenAI in a heartbeat, leaving the task of figuring out the downstream effects to other people.
Only a subset. HN is not a monolith.
Don't fool yourself into thinking you could have avoided this. If you didn't, any one of the other ten million people would. You didn't choose for it to happen, you chose to be the one who got the money from it happening.
That really is a strong statement of the ethics here - they're happy to let "those" kids get addicted to it, have it help ruin their mental health and generally create an unhappy generation of narcissists. All sold under the tagline of "Connecting the world". But when it comes to their kids? No way.
I wonder if we'll treat the folks that worked on these things the way we treat the folks that worked at Phillip Morris?
But the same people decrying corporate social media declare mastodon a "failure" because it hasn't captured literally 100% of Facebook users and doesn't male thirty billion dollars. Shrug.
Meanwhile on Facebook people get angry every day on something they see on the feed yet come back in hour "just in case the are is something interesting this time"
This is a good start for brainstorming:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
We need a national conversation (which we seem to be having) about the corrosive nature of these algos.
I personally think they should be liable for much more than they are under section 230.
You are asking all the later gen engineers at major tech firms to blow their salaries up.
There used to be an ethos to do the right thing, however the people who came to tech later aren’t driven by the same values. They (understandably) would like to get paid rather than go on a crusade.
Incentives make the world go round.
We also, thankfully, don’t need a clique of very smart people to save us. We’re all in this together. (Except the psychopaths wanting to enslave us.)
I think the only reason I remain staunchly independent is because I've never found anything that has had enough common ground with enough people to allow me to profit (to any degree whatsoever) in such a way as to corrupt the core of "me". Oddly I find that the less my venn diagram overlaps with others, the more I like my venn diagram and the more committed I am to it. If other people start agreeing with me, I tend to question where I might be wrong.
It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this. It can be full days with the same post at the top. And the worst part is that I hadn't noticed how empty it was until I did the change.
The problem with filtering out all the junk as a solution is that it doesn’t fix the actual problem of those sites with perverse incentives having control. It seems like the real goal should be to get people off these platforms. That’s the only way to really stop it.
I wonder how long companies would keep paying for ads when a site is 100% bot traffic? They could keep the ruse up for a while, but likely not forever.
I understand that this sort of algorithmic feed likely matches the metrics to keep people scrolling. This would also track with every app moving away from "friend" verbiage to something like followers, subscribers, or members. Users are encouraged to post _to_ their audience rather than sharing _with_ their friends.
Sad as it was, at least the incentives were somewhat aligned with a healthy social life. Seek out cool things in life, preferably with friends, share.
This has its own downsides of course too, but is a world away from going on Facebook today, full of people definitely shutting down thekr life businesses, turning wood into MacBook cases and incoherent AI generated videos of 300m waves. I seriously can't remember the last time I put something on Facebook, certainly not in this decade. Never mind any of the other ones...
what if your friends used it too?
would there be more content (as they seek to connect to real peopl), or less (as they leave)?
Let's not kid ourselves. They won't.
If the "you might like" "why not follow" "reels" and other crap was gone, I guess there could be some sort of revival. But it might be too late.
Because instead we've splintered into various discords, and those sorta-aquaintanceships that old fb was quite good at keeping alive have basically fallen away.
You can imagine HN like a documentary channel compared to Facebook’s reality TV, but even “documentaries” can be dopamine sinks that aren’t actually informative (or accurate).
(But personally, I see lots of short and pure opinion posts here, documentaries are long and at least pretend to contain facts; so I’d hesitate to compare it to a documentary channel even with the caveat.)
Many other Internet forums are similar--they might technically have the capability, but the prevailing culture might be that people rarely do it.
Adding to this is that HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't get attention. That makes it fundamentally different from other social media platforms today.
For anyone that was an adult in the "web 2.0" days it's hard not to see HN as "social media". The first wave of social media sites where defined by community news aggregators that allowed commenting and, most important, up voting of comments and submissions. Digg, Reddit, HN, del.icio.us (though it lacked formal 'up voting') were all part of this first wave of social media.
The absolute key differentiator between HN and an old school internet forums, that absolutely makes it "social media", is that the community votes on your opinion and users have some way to score against each other. This is precisely the mechanism that is at the root of all problems in social media: you get a measurable reward for your content that pressures you towards saying things and sharing content that increases that reward.
Perhaps one of the best decisions HN ever made, which fights this somewhat, is removing the upvote count from being visible to other members of the community (this was not the case in the early days of HN). But for anyone that saw the rise of "social media" it's hard to imagine HN not fitting that description.
"Social media" as a term comes even later, to capture Twitter and the social features of YouTube and other stuff like that. But it's all sites where most users are people using real names and real faces, and users generally produce content themselves and follow each other's content.
There's clearly a cluster there and HN/Slashdot/Reddit/Digg are clearly outside it. An umbrella that covers both HN and Facebook is almost meaningless; it's "all websites with user-generated OR user-supplemented content."
FWIW this site has an older demographic and I doubt that's the reason. More likely most people weren't aware of HN until recently. It only started populating in Google search results recently. My guess is most people these days stumble upon HN by seeing a search result, or a Reddit or Twitter comment mentioning HN. A lot of people only got exposed through social media with things like Facebook and Twitter and never socialized on the internet before that.
Agree with you on everything else. It was obvious at the time that HN was part of a wave of social media along with Reddit, 4chan, Digg, Kuro5hin, etc. At that time moderation was seen as a crucial bottleneck on scaling a social site and upvotes were meant to be an innovation that helped scale these sites bigger than the forums and Usenet lists of yore. Turns out that the true revolution in scale didn't come until things like Facebook and Twitter.
> HN makes it quite difficult (technically impossible, but you can link out) to embed media such as videos and pictures, which makes it fundamentally different than "social media".
What’s the difference? Submissions usually include at least one picture, sometimes videos or interactive content.
> HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't get attention.
I’m sorry, but this isn’t true. HN has less AI than say Reddit, and many users try to combat, but I still frequently see top-voted (obvious) AI-generated articles and less frequently comments.
When something has lots of em-dashes and other https://tropes.fyi, I recommend checking on Pangram.
how can they participate in the daily "social media bad" two minute hate sessions demanding regulations and bans if they acknowledge that things they like are also "social media"?
hence the mental gymnastics.
But we're a long way from that now.
That is the very definition of social media.
"Social media I like" vs. "Social media I don't like" isn't valid categorization.
Is the linux kernel mailing list social media? was usenet?
I knew someone who described everything he didn't like in politics as "socialism". He literally couldn't define "socialism" when pressed; it was always a circular reference to the current irritant.
Good explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445343
I haven't posted any personal pics, or stories about things that I've done in my life or am currently doing, so how can it be social in the same way that social media is? To me, there's a clear distinction between a news aggregator and discussion forum like HN, and a social media site. Sure, I can post something that I'm working on or a blog post that I've written, but it's still framed as news to be discussed, not a social interaction.
Discussion is of course a kind of social interaction. You've posted this, which discusses a topic that is only tangentially related to the news item if at all. You can talk about framing all you want, but it ultimately is what it is: spontaneous social interaction between users on the kind of winding paths "unsupervised" discussions naturally take.
I'd be surprised if half of people supposedly discussing the "news to be discussed" have RTFA. That doesn't stop interesting discussion on a wide range of topics from happening here.
It's not "social in the same way", but Twitter and Facebook aren't "social in the same way" either.
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.
HN has an algorithm that manipulates what you see, and we do not know at all how it works.
- 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.
You can’t bump a thread to the top of HN so everyone sees it
Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses were the OG forum post that went viral, and required a printing press.
People's opinions are groomed and programmed. It's pretty hilarious how small minded people are.
I feel like I keep seeing this claim, month after month, but then I look it up and he's still got around the same ~38% approval. I keep getting my hopes up that people are finally realizing how awful he is, only to be disappointed again. It's depressing.
It might partially come from the fact that writing essays isn't deemed important anymore, when you hear people talk about how X or Y is good/bad they can hardly write down why. I've seen articles how we're going from a written culture to an oral culture and the sort of cranks you get with social media certainly fit with the latter.
People who read a lot or get deep into history podcasts and have a hot take on the French Revolution know that this is some whacky shit and if they bring it up explain it first.
TikTok people say the crazy thing and they're surprised when everyone gives them the look. Also the thing they bring up is usually provocative, factually ridiculous, and a little unhinged.
Intentional typo as a good pun?
We’re not lacking for opportunities to believe the worst of each other. It’s not something TikTok invented.
The opposite is stated in the comment: “People are groomed and programmed”.
You’re revealing yourself. No one said they were at fault but you.
Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation. It's long past time to leave it permanently.
And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
Social media is totally that today too. I quit facebook in 2016 and reddit in 2023 over similar fears. Back then I said facebook was bad for my mental health, and I quit reddit when they made it harder for me to prevent what I called amygdala-bait. But it's totally the same thing.
These days I love to watch nuanced explanations on youtube of complex issues, but youtube's algorithm desperately wants to feed me stuff like How Money Works and other channels where it's dressed up as nuanced explanations of the world, but every single episode is how X is screwing you over or how the Y is going to blow up the economy any second now.
YouTube is all over the place. You really can get great stuff but are you always a few clicks from blackpill hell: "men suck", "women suck", "famous consumer brands that have lost their way", "it all sucks", ...
"They should follow the rules, like I did"
Never mind the rules were a hell of a lot easier to follow back then. I've seen the paperwork, it wasn't much; if you were from an acceptable country, it was pretty close to show up, get a job and be stable for a year or so, then you can naturalize. Nearly impossible if you came from the wrong country though.
Even 'chain migration' for most relationships takes a lot longer than that, and you have to wait for your visa priority date to come up. If you're from an impacted country, some of the waits are quite long. If you don't have qualified family, and you don't have qualified employment, there's a very small visa allocation for lucky people.
To quote Mon Mothma in Andor:
I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This Chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza. What took place yesterday… what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide! Yes! Genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest? The monster we’ve helped create? The monster who will come for us all soon enough is Emperor Palpatine!
Where is the contradiction here?
His most famous videos are on the topic of bullshit jobs, the movie Wolf of wallstreet, various X is collapsing and a Money Laundering Explanations
Don Henley wrote a song about that kind of news:
"We got the bubble headed bleached blonde
Comes on at five
She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye
It's interesting when people die
Give us dirty laundry"
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/donhenley/dirtylaundry.html
And long before that, Yellow Journalism:
Journalism historian Frank Luther Mott used five characteristics to identify yellow journalism:
1. scare headlines in huge print, often sensationalizing minor news
2. lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings
3. use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts
4. emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually with superficial articles and comics
5. dramatic sympathy with the "underdog" against the system.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism>.
The same or highly similar tactics apply equally in the 2020s as they did in the 1880s (and before).
What many people don't realise: the "prestigious" journalistic prize, the Pulizter, is named for one of the most infamous low-quality yellow journalism publishers, Joseph Pulitzer. This is an early example of successful greenwashing of a reputation.
Today's news is not plane crashes, it's how immigrants are burning down Seattle. Obviously total nonsense but a certain kind of person eats it right up.
For another example of a structural problem, California has been trying to add housing for the past few years but it has been one piecemeal solution after another. People who own homes don’t want their lives to change, cities like how they are laid out already, parking requirements exist to prevent developers from skimping at the time, environmental reviews are meant to protect the environment… at no point was anyone thinking “I want a housing problem that leads to job flight and homelessness” — everyone is just solving their own problem at the time but together it creates a major structural obstacle.
The people at YouTube don’t actually care about controlling the narrative. They just want to make money while removing problematic content, but they’re not exactly sure what problematic content is and Google tends to invest in algorithms more than support, but the end result is channels get randomly removed sometimes.
The world’s problems are hard because not because people are generally malicious, but because everyone is just doing their own thing. That’s why the only fixes are structural, but structural solutions are really hard.
But the point of this is that in a relatively short period of time, the world is going to look far different than the overwhelming majority might ever expect. This is because most expect the status quo, in some form, to indefinitely persist, yet of course it never does. And it seems we're on the cusp of major shifts across many different domains, all at once.
So all is well in that aspect. That's how news have always been, since the first pyres were constructed to light fires to alert neighbouring communities of enemies arriving.
But the sickening aspect of cable news is the way the presenters talk. The voice they use to speak to the watcher is pure venom. It's an extremely angry and condescending voice, and the TV watcher is made to feel inferior to the broadcasters and therefore give attention to the "very important" things they are talking about. Weak minds are conditioned to feel respect and reverence to those who treat them with despise, and unfortunately also to feel the opposite to people who they believe themselves superior to.
It's completely deliberate, to make people addicted to it.
Consider if a well dressed person came to your house and started talking in the same voice as the TV anchors do. You would instantly think it was a dangerous psychopath on the loose, and try to find a weapon swiftly to ward them off. If somebody at a barbecue started talking like the TV anchors, you'd think they were on drugs and tell them to leave. People would call the police.
The next time you catch a TV news anchor, picture them being with you in your living room instead of in the TV studio. You will instantly conclude that the person is mentally and spiritually unwell to talk and act like that. You can practically smell the reptilian from them. Do the same thing with politicians and other leaders too. Many of them say things that on paper seem nice, but with a demeanour that you wonder when they're going to break out into "Who is the boss of you!? I am the boss of you!?"[1]
And I don't think they can see it in themselves or smell it on themselves, like everybody else with a mind can.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QM_AcLBSQM
They're two different scenarios so it's not exactly a surprise they sound different. Same goes for anyone giving a public speech, their cadence and tone would sound bizarre if they were just say in a room with you.
> The voice they use to speak to the watcher is pure venom. It's an extremely angry and condescending voice, and the TV watcher is made to feel inferior to the broadcasters and therefore give attention to the "very important" things they are talking about.
I can't say I identify with that at all. I do not hear "pure venom" when I listen to a newscaster. They're usually either trying too hard to be serious or trying too hard to be lighthearted and chummy. But neither is venomous.
IMO the biggest problem with cable news is that it runs constantly. News doesn't. So they have to fill endless dead time with hyperbole. One newscast in the evening ought to be enough for anyone, really.
I can say circa 1990 people in my pod noticed this phenomenon that "ruling class" people who get interviewed on TV as well as many TV performers (new anchors!) seem to show a kind of asymmetry of facial expression that you don't see so much in ordinary people.
Today we might blame the botox but it's widely thought that this is a sign of emotional suppression
https://www.jnforensics.com/post/chirality-a-look-at-emotion...
Though as much as we wish we could be observant and understand people like Cal Lightman in Lie to Me signs of deception are never completely reliable.
"Só para as pessoas perceberem lá em casa" is the standard phrase TV pundits use back in $home_country. Translates to something like "just so that you there sitting at home can understand". It's incredibly condescending, truly the gall of these mfs with zero credentials and maximal confidence, speaking assertively about every single topic always with the tone that implies everybody else is a moron.
I haven't watched actual TV for many years so this passes me by except on occasion, but when I see that there are people that watch hours of this garbage every day, part in the TV and part regurgitated on social media... By god it explains many things rotten with the world.
Why didn't you say which one? I bet it is Fox.
Fox and CNN are both bad, but different flavors of bad.
I am thrilled you pointed this out. I also get tired of seeing that.
It’s really not though. There is no personalized algorithm, which is 98% of the issue with social media. It may seem pedantic, but it’s like saying a horse and a car are essentially the same thing, the car just has an engine.
Whatever you want to call it, HN has followed a similar trend. It's rare to see the authors of small, but interesting/innovative, projects show up in the comments, surprised to see their work on the front page. That used to be common, even the default, if you look far enough back.
Now the front page is current events and marketing campaigns. I don't think I've seen a single software project here in the last year that wasn't already extremely popular, or being pushed by a company with a marketing budget.
In theory AI should have helped. I know people are still making cool stuff, faster now with AI, but it's harder and harder to find it.
Why would generative AI help stop enshittification? If anything AI has made low-effort slop far more common on the front page and sometimes it gets voted up because of a snappy headline and few people attempting to read it, particularly if long-form and initially convincing.
I came here after reading the comment section for the "Dopamine Fracking" story right below this one. In that comment section there are arguments that Hacker News isn't social media because it doesn't have social features like friending people you know. The argument is that it's a place to discover cool content and comment on it.
Which is precisely the argument being made in this BBC article: That traditional social media is becoming less about communicating with friends and more about discovering content and commenting on it. Which is the exact purpose of sites like Hacker News and Reddit.
> "I spend a lot of time scrolling through videos made by content-creators," says Lucie, also 16. "They're more interesting than the posts of people I know."
> "What we're seeing is social media splitting in two," says social media consultant Matt Navarra, author of the Geekout Newsletter. "Big platforms like Instagram and TikTok are becoming more about entertainment and discovery. WhatsApp is becoming the place people go to actually be social.
EDIT: I had to use Wayback Machine to find this:
> 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features
> Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.
That's from https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinato...
That has been erased from the internet, but it was widely understood that sites like Reddit and HN could were social and had addictive properties for people without strong self control.
https://dontapscott.com/books/growing-digital/
It will never stop because the parasitic ads are the only thing holding up the edifice anymore. It's crazy to me because ultimately what holds up the economy is money changing hands for services, and ads aren't that. So ads are fundamentally driving people to spend money elsewhere. I just don't understand how the system holds up a multi-hundred billion dollar advertising parasite...everything would be cheaper if there were no ads.
If more companies realise this, what happens?
The article's main claim is that traditional social media is not social media any more. That Facebook et al are now junk entertainment. So IMO HN hews much closer to the traditional role of social media than Facebook et al do.
What baffles me is that they call this manipulation "influencing" and they consider this a positive word.
Not filmmakers or artists or writers... "content creators".
Like they exist just to produce a continual stream of this amorphous "content" for consumption.
Now, perhaps that's all that art/writing, etc ever was. But to just abandon even the pretense is another in a long line of surrenders we've made to commoditization.
Is this history repeating itself?
The idea that content creators could be considered artists is one I may have considered before, but only tangentially.
What I'm also curious about...is how this commoditization and consumption via "influencers" has altered any individuals attitudes towards blatant manipulation. Free will seemed to be a much more guarded value. Now, the willing surrender of our free will seems to be the norm...
Think a better version is: HN is not an advertising-controlled social media website. That specific version makes most sense to me.
Where I think the argument that it's not social falls down is aligned with some of your comments. The feeds, upvotes, downvotes, etc. Let's not forget the spam.
Those mechanisms are pervasive across many social platforms, so why are they so different here? Don't think they are.
This is claimed by users of Reddit regularly as well and I think most people here would consider Reddit to be a typical example of social media.
"if you're not paying for it, you're the product" and that is just as true here as anywhere.
Yes, HN is a front for YC. However, HN is still very much about longform submissions and nuanced discussion. There aren't very many places like that anymore, and those that still exist are dying, with some exceptions (mostly car forums, for some reason).
(Instagram wasn't always this way! It was originally an alternative to Flickr, but focusing on sharing images and discussion instead of photography. It gradually became the psychological gateway drug that it is now, though even that was a response to threats like Vine and Quibi that unlocked short-form video at scale.)
I wish we had something like that where there was no reposting/resharing, and links & photos were allowed but deemphasized in the UI. Also, no like button, that just encourages empty engagement.
The commercialization of the engines of culture continues.
I have an account on facebook, on which I am pretty active. If I attend some infrequent event (Which I do fairly often) I will take a picture of it and post it there, with a description of what it's about. That's pretty much the extent of what I put on facebook. Sometimes I see similar posts from people in my friends list, or videos about whatever facebook thinks I am interested in this month (Right now it's showing me lots of people taking apart pumps and motors). What sites are you using, and what exactly are they showing you ?
Thats right in that sense - but in a sense of doom scrolling, it is for me: Very often Im clicking through dozends auf pages, fortunately I have to activly do a click to get to the next site, so this dampens a little bit :-D
I think the folks you’re talking about are influencers. Which I wholeheartedly agree with your take in that case.
It’s not “just” advertising. Again this is nuanced.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
Before that, you could pay for placement on all the major search engines except early Google, which basically just broke search. (Google does similar stuff now, in the same way they "don't" sell personal information or read your gmail, but somehow make lots of money off it anyway, and target things only mentioned in private correspondence).
LLMs will be next. The only solution is to refuse to pay for access with your attention. That means no copilot, gemini, alexa or siri, since those are all ad supported or adjacent now. ChatGPT and Claude are on borrowed time. I suspect the open weight models will be the last ones to fall.
AFAIK, Russia’s Internet Research Agency was the first organization to weaponize social media and the internet.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FQbW31Fa4SM
That it's less destructive than Meta doesn't make it less "social media" - and I'd argue that it's style (links fall off the page quickly and discussion becomes impossible after a relatively short period of time, solely to foster a sense of "missing out") is part of what defines current "social media".
It's a noisy attention sink, whatever high-mindedness people want to pretend it has.
It's so stupid you almost can't help watching, but I'll be dammed if they didn't get me to. Wild times.
Plenty of variants of "people who don't use AI will be left behind" are sprinkled around various threads about AI. It's an attempt to both manipulate via fear as well as sell.
Hard disagree. The upvote/downvote system and the algorithmic front page makes it a social media to me.
Anything that attempts to maximize engagement will inevitably optimize for outrage, anger, and disgust. You will end up handing the platform over to trolls and propagandists. Platforms need to optimize instead of quality and sanity, but unfortunately that is expensive will never get as many views and advertiser dollars as cheap outrage content. It's a big reason why our current media landscape is so hellish, the other main reason being the continual takeover of more and more media outlets by billionaire aligned interests.
The amount of times I've read a very thoughtful article only for the comments to be political drivel (the worst was peak-COVID SF discourse) weakens your argument quite a bit.
It's even more foolish to think outside forces aren't using bots/tech to sway the discourse.
Just because it's not engineered for the mainstream's dopamine addiction doesn't mean it doesn't do the same thing.
What's probably tiresome is trying to come up with a proof that it is not. Your frustration and the insult "pedantry" will not suffice.
If you had a real proof, you would simply include it, instead of performing emotion about being so lowered to even have to discuss HN being social media. The idea that people shouldn't argue with you because it might injure or tire you to be argued with is so 2022.
If you have something specific to say about the actual actions that are taken in what you call social media (but does not include HN), there's plenty to discuss - in fact the difference which you insult as pedantic is the most important thing to talk about. Why is one mediated talking to people good, and the other mediated talking to people bad? And if we try to make it an argument about something other than vocabulary, or even worse the vague-assed "changes in technology," it might accomplish something.
It's insane how this is enough to begin a thread on HN. Vague negative handwaving and insults (nerd-sniping, I guess?). That's not going to hurt whoever you think is doing evil, that's going to help them.
"Social Media" isn't a thing. It's a bag of techniques for mediating communication between people who are usually not asking for a mediator. Talking about those specific techniques and their applications is always going to be more useful than arguing about the referent of some term that you have no obligation to sign onto unless you find it useful.
But god if you're so tired could you just not participate?
For an arbitrary definition of "normal"? The last remark is unwarranted and can only have a chilling effect on the conversation. Or outrage bait, a typical sign on social media.
Why is it not social media? It exhibits the same signs as seen on any social media platform. Can you define social media so we can all follow the same play sheet?
I see the same opinions here as I see on Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, or X even from the same people here as there. The topics that reach the front page are the most popular, or divisive, or "addictive". A lot of people post for the karma, there's a lot of pandering to popular opinion. There's an opaque algorithm that decides which topic stays on the front page and for how long, which comment stays on top and for how long, when a post or comment gets flagged or reappears, etc. that dictates how the conversation can be carried and on which topics. There are a lot of political topics where some voices or opinions are buried while others are pinned to the top. Some people spend hours and days posting here. There's a lot of astroturfing. The parallels can go on. The main difference is scale and at this small scale it can maintain a higher level of quality... most times. But quality isn't what defines social media, is it?
Many on HN see themselves as better than the "simpletons" who fall for "normal" social media, and any view that challenges that is tiresome. But your dismissal of whether HN is social media holds water like a sieve.
At this point it's a vague term meaning "a place where you talk to another person online" and nothing more than that.
I'm solidly of the opinion especially after seeing so many arguments of this form on HN that the whole world has accidentally forgotten the term "social network" at some point, because "social media" means nothing.
Except “mainstream social media”, because everyone knows what you’re talking about, including some who’d be confused by “mainstream parasocial network” because they don’t know what parasocial means.
It's very clear. Empirically a common sign across all social media is basing very strong opinions on very vague personal interpretation of something that that will forever stay unwritten so it can't be challenged. Anyone can just cement their claim to eternal correctness by ending a personal opinion with some outrage bait like "anyone who doesn't agree with me is tiresome".
So you're not wrong at all, but I think there's also a significant difference when the personalized algorithms come into play, which can segregate people into their own epistemological echo chambers
I suppose I'd summarize as
1. I don't think we have a precise term for the actual thing, and "social media" is one loose term people use for it
2. There's a spectrum for this, maybe multidimensional:
* Does it display the same reality for everyone? For example obviously true social media will be different depending on your friends, but chronological vs engagement are different. Even new reddit and old reddit I think differ here too
* Infinite scrolling? Or specific page advancement?
* Text? Pictures? Video? (Video duration?) Each one is different
So in that respect, sure, they're all social media, but they're very different, and I think there's probably combinations of those features that result in very different effects/harms
HN is also highly resistant to jokes and memes dominating the conversation. On other social media sites, the top comments are generally jokes or jabs.
HN also lacks pictures or video or ads or infinite scrolling, and makes self-promotion quite difficult.
Is HN social media? Yes. So were BBS’s back in the day. But is it the omnipresent toxic social media that’s currently rotting society’s collective brain on a generational level? At the very least, it’s not that.
On one side my interest level has adjusted so that normal activities make sense again - like sitting in the garden or playing a game with my kid. I've also completed dozens of projects like replacing old silicon in the entire kitchen or updating the garden playground.
On the other side I'm feeling more isolated and lacking information / stimulation for creative output because I no longer have any idea what other people are doing. However given that massive amounts of time have been freed I'm more productive both at work and at home, more effort on health too.
It's definitely something to try but it's not all roses.
the mobile options are terrible.
happy to be done w/ it tbh.
YouTube recommendation is never that good to me. I frequently just scroll desperately and ended up not watching anything, and when I'm peak bored I resort to rewatching my list of liked videos. That's why I feel weird whenever I see projects that want to make YouTube less engaging, it's already not engaging enough for me.
I've felt quite disconnected from folks I knew, and I presume they feel like I've pulled away. Sounds like this is kind of similar, you end up feeling a bit disconnected? Doesn't sound all that bad, but I get what you mean - you feel isolated.
I've learned incredible amounts of things with YouTube - I curate it like a madman, but overall I'm still not sure it's a good thing. Corporations just tend to end up eating their customers eventually.
I do have to resist watching all the product review videos which are essentially just ads.
Remember when they were going to be a games platform, where Farmville was their big hit? They eventually abandoned that and then wanted to be a video and streaming platform. Then Metaverse VR was going to replace everything. Now they're some sort of AI company.
People long ago started migrating to Whatsapp, Discord, and similar groups for actual socializing. They did seemingly panic a bit at that trend and bought Whatsapp.
Short form video media is massively profitable and those same people are eating it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
IMO even better than Chomsky's Necessary Illusions (1989) or Bernay's Propaganda (1928) at giving you that backstage at Disney world feeling.
Its a breezy novella you can finish over a lunch break
Again, there is NO ARROW or any UI to indicate this is possible. You used to be able to set it as the default view, but that has been eradicated it seems.
But the sad reality: nobody is posting anything anymore. I follow around 500 real people I know in person, and in the last 30 days they published only a few posts. Very short feed.
So instagram became something completely different over time, and I still opened it occasionally, because I associate it with old memories. To feel closer to people I lost touch with, or didn't see for a while. But instead I get bombarded with BS and ads (and the occasional "real" social media post), without me consciously noticing the change for years.
Oh well, there's always GoComics :) It is missing a lot of the new ones that are on Instagram, though.
Interestingly, in-person "nerd" events seem to be going just fine - LARP, D&D, board games, historical reenactment, trading card games and tournaments like M:tG, and a lot more.
I open the app to keep up with what my friends are doing, and also check the dating portion of the app for new matches. I purposely always avoid reels on any app, because I hate them and what they do to people. So when I open the app and it immediately starts playing reels with sound on and no way to disable it, it feels like a slap in the face
I think we will see in the future algorithmic feeds addiction rehab, algorithmic feeds self-exclusion lists (like for casinos) and even algorithmic feeds ban, which would probably be a net positive for humanity.
There was definitely a sweet spot if you were in highschool or college in like 2004 - 2010 (so born something like 1986 - 1994?) where online social media was almost painstakingly manicured to mirror real-life social dynamics.
Many people remember the drama of deciding who your "top friends" were on MySpace.
But that was 20 years ago.
None of my friends at the time used it (or even MySpace) and I didn’t even have an account, so I found this very odd. The first time I realized it may have actually been popular was when a couple sorority girls came in and wanted me to make an account to friend me… not to actually be my friend, but because they had a contest on who could get the most friends. I did not make an account that day, and it told me everything I needed to know about how shallow the connections were. Those were in the glory days, 2004-2005, and it was already pretty shallow in certain circles. It only went downhill from there.
Instead I can remember online topic focused forum boards, of which some I had numerous daily interactions with the same people over years. These online forums made no pretense about replacing real life social dynamics and yet they were still so much better for real social experiences than the social media that replaced them at that time.
To me social media has always felt artificial for people who shout into a vortex hoping for attention.
At least I got to experience irc, forum boards and other early group chat apps - that was some of the best internet experience. Early Reddit was incredible as well.
It's sad that today's youth will likely never get anything remotely similar to this.
Might also say more about me and my social behaviour than the social media platforms themselves, I never cared about it too much.
a bunch of ppl turned to Facebook as it was just what the mob did, but it still required to be active in groups indeed
There were a bunch of things that destroyed it: Ajax [1], async tech made it possible to continuously push new dopamine shots when viewing a page; the rise of smartphones, since before smartphones you could only check social media when you were behind a computer, which was not true for most people most of the day; and the realization that dopamine shots + ads can bring in a lot of money.
Even though we had cell phones in the early 2000s, in most countries it was just for calling and some SMS (which was expensive outside the US). You would only go to Hyves, Myspace, or whatever when you had some time in the evening. I am sure some people got addicted, but it was much harder than having a device that tries to entice you all day to look.
That said, I still find social networks like Mastodon very useful. Not so much as a replacement for keeping up with friends/family, but it makes it very easy to discover what people who are in niches I'm interested in are up to. And since it does not have an algorithmic feed or ads, the addiction factor is much lower.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)
Simplest example - someone posts a picture/video of them in a city that I also am in and now I know they live there / traveling there and I can meet up with them.
That’s just a really odd relationship to me. Maybe it’s a social media thing.
FWIW, I hear things like this but have never heard of any of my friends that use social media actually doing it. In the same way that you could use an Emmy as hammer, but nobody does.
Do those people also have access to your travel schedule? Mine don't.
Maybe you're just not as globally social as me? I've lived in 5 different countries and have friends all over the world and in probably 20 different US states that I can name off the top of my head.
Do I have close friends that I regularly contact? Do I send them a message when I'm in town to see if they are there? Absolutely. But it's not mutually exclusive with a cohort of people I will link up with when I'm traveling.
> well enough to link up
It seems bizarre to me that you only limit yourself to these people. I regularly try to meet up with people I don't know super well but want to get them or their city better. Social media has absolutely helped facilitate this.
I don’t need Facebook to tell me someone I vaguely remember from high school is in my area to then meet up with them. If I vaguely remember with them I hardly care.
And if I am actually close with someone, I don’t need Facebook either as we’d be in contact over text or discord.
That said, social behaviours do differ so YMMV. For me personally, I’m glad I’m not on social media as it seems like a huge waste of time with more downsides than upsides.
Social media was never meant to be a virtual extension of social life. It's what it says on the tin: media created by users, and shared from user to user. Old-school BBS were social media.
Of course you can have actual social experiences, make friends, etc. on social media. But that almost never happens.
Online social networks on the other hand basically do not exist any more.
10 minutes later it was just a frenzy of (trying to) poke people that I thought I might have seen at some point that year, and conversations about how many "friends" people had.
Getting updates helped me even to form friendships long after the first interaction where we had added each other, I'd see someone I had connected with visiting a place nearby, and could go grab a beer with them while they are around. Or the other way around, I'd be visiting their city and would try to catch up, more often than not it helped to keep in touch, develop a deeper friendship, etc.
That is absolutely dead nowadays, it's drowned in noise on any "social" feature (feeds, Instagram stories [and similar features in other "social" apps], etc.), just a barrage of ads, influencer bullshit, and the odd friend update that isn't just a meme...
The worst part for me is that it was a deliberate choice from these companies to disappear with most social aspects of these apps in favour of the money printing scheme that created the whole influencer culture.
I still have hopes for the rebound, when people get extremely fed up with how these apps work, and something different appears to retake what "social" means, not this doublespeak-esque meaning it came to be.
You pretty much only had people you actually knew as friends. People posted photos and messages about real life. No sharing of posts, memes, few stupid people. It was great.
We'll probably never get that back.
Now the feeds are just pure algorithm and very seldom I see someone I know.
My life is worse because instead of see the above I see only fads. Now that I only check my feed once a month I see less fads are more real life - but I also have reason to believe there is more going on from those distant friends that facebook chooses to hide from me because I don't interact with them enough.
Facebooks business model after around 2011 explicitly became disconnecting people. This isn't stated loudly enough or often enough, but algorithmic feeds and mixing 'news' 'entertainment' with real status updates meant that social networks in general became forces for disconnection and polarisation around this time.
Early FB and Twitter were useful and operated in precisely the opposite way - because they didn't use any algorithmic filtering whatsoever.
Maybe that is unfair to Jerry Springer. He at least heard both sides of a story.
I believe in a way I hold myself to be partially responsible for allowing myself to consume cheap risk free passive interactions online.
I can only do my best in person to person interaction to make it as good individually for others and myself but it is always a hit and miss to have similar risk free or positive interactions in real life.
Personally what I hate more is that there are some content creators I've been happy to support over the years and now instead of doing regular content posts they now do the "collab post" thing as an ad that looks like a regular post. Some of them may do but many do not.
But most everyone there likes it that way...
But it didn't really matter, the medium was just as bad.
I have an alt account for business / lifestyle content that I like consuming. That's the only place I actually follow content creators. And even then, I check the account once or twice a day and rarely view/engage with Instagram stories.
Back to my personal account - I have 2-3 people out of the 198 that I follow that are trying to hop on trends and become influencers. Rest just do photo dumps + daily stories. But the reality is only 20-30% of my friends actually share something (post or story), rest are just silent observers.
Edit to add: The owner of the platform contributed millions of dollars, endorsements, and manipulation of the platform to elect a regime which actively works to dismantle scientific and research funding and institutions. By continuing to use the platform, these people are contributing to the destruction of their work and careers.
Even more-so now that it's impossible to see a feed in chronological order without signing up. It's a site that's supposedly for keeping up with the state of the world, and yet it's got a big wall around it. Talk about mixed messages.
So much of social media now feels built around whatever is trending that week, not the relationships you actually want to keep up with.
That’s why I’m building Dearest (https://dearest.co) : a private, email-based Sunday photo digest for families and friends. Everyone sends a photo and a short update by Saturday night, and contributors get the group’s digest on Sunday morning. Hopefully this keeps us social and in touch.
snobs used to be thought on users who liked popular culture or "jejemons", "kikoolols", "eternal september,... posters who used to be actually active, experimental and creative, but at least newcommers were still posting
nowadays the creative part is gone. Forums are dead. You're encouraged to use your actual identity everywhere on social media and to sign apps. You're indeed not guided to post and be creative. The internet became just passive :/
Humans are predictable (more than we'd like to admit). Now they have AI to crunch all that data and find patterns to predict your next move and find out what content will give you the most dopamine. Escape while you can.
Instagram gets ~$27/mo/user from advertisers. Would you spend $27/mo for Instagram? Probably not. Hence the financial void is filled with ads.
The extreme gossipy porn of the past two decades has finally worn off.
I think it has little to do with privacy concerns as they are hypothesizing.
But I think the problem is that people don't contribute very much too them, so if none of your friends are sharing things that interest you then the media part has to come in as a fallback
Try turning off history in youtube and see how much your time spent on it changes when you cant just mindlessly click on the next video.
Limit circle social network, I think capped at 50 people. Beautiful app, and I remember it was a great place to spend time when you really just wanted to be with true friends.
Time for someone to reboot this
However, when I try to communicate through GitHub or something, I wonder if I'm just using another form of social media. My main daily routine is to gradually add posts to my own homepage that no one will see, and start from there.
Now that GitHub's availability has hit one 9, I consider it just a social network. Any code I put there is just for marketing. Real work stays far away.
There's not a lot of money in hosting a website where people share in-jokes and comment on each others' graduations, engagements, and baby announcements. Well, maybe there is, but there's a lot more money in farming engagement through ragebait and division.
Meta in particular is a great example of why you cannot judge companies purely by profitability and why you shouldn't ever let the CEO also be the primary shareholder and chairman of the board that's meant to govern the company's behavior.
A better heuristic is market share. We should reintroduce media ownership rules that cap audience share to something < 10% per distribution channel. Meta, Disney, Paramount, etc should not exist.
Facebook was originally about people you were acquainted with in real life. You had a pre-existing reason to engage with them. That engagement wasn't as lucrative as SV investors wanted, but it was there.
Twitter never had that premise, or lost it very early on. You screamed into the ether, and people either responded or they didn't. One way to increase the chance of receiving a response is to say outrageous things. Once people figured that out and how to put ads adjacent to the outrageous thing, there was at least some pressure on Facebook (later Meta) to do the same thing, because we're here to make money, not friends.
And really, there are elements of that in old media, too. Their business model was to have captivating programming on TV and radio that would keep you tuned in to see what was happening in the next part of the show after the ad break. Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Springer, every 24-hour news channel, etc. were all very good at this, coarsening of the discourse be damned.
Regardless of who owns it, if you introduce a motive to constantly and eternally increase the value of a media company, you will see a move towards slop content at some point if you have a long enough timeline. It's inevitable.
The only thing keeping it afloat is the lie that it's social.
After all, the advertising powering the media is all about creating a fantasy around a future you will be living once you have bought the product.
Recently, I made a dumb little app for my kids and decided to try marketing it on social media just to see what it is like. It is fascinating in a sense and disheartening as well. I have been very unsuccessful, but the most signal tends to come from the dumbest content I have tried.
In doing this, I have come into contact with the social media feeds I never felt the need to look at and man… they are like a drug. I find myself mesmerized by random IG reels. It is one thing to understand what they are on an intellectual level and a totally different to feel it first hand.
I miss MySpace.
It's absolutely insane how much influence we have given over to social media algorithms as a society. I know so many people who I'd consider to be intelligent just completely believe whatever they see on tiktok/reels. These recommendation algorithms can create such intense polarization, I really hope we can find a way to scale back their use and encourage people to think more for themselves.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scrolless-feed-blocker/id67588...
I've recently tried to promote a product on social media (well, I still try, I'm just not successful) and, especially as someone who doesn't really use it otherwise (outside of HN and reddit), I can't even manage to be part of the problem:
- Anything I post on Twitter, personal or corpo account, gets <20 views. Every time I scroll through it (again, on either account), it seems most things barely get any views. I am forcing myself to use it, thinking it would help, but I also find it insufferable.
- Facebook has been actually reasonably useful for local things/news and had a surprisingly personalized feed until I realized half the comments (from seemingly real accounts) were clearly written with (or by) AI. When I was forced to post myself (again, for promotion), I noticed FB actively prompts you to use AI to "improve writing" or whatever it was in its own app. Lovely, so even the few islands of real human comments I found are written by robots.
- Instagram auto-bans me, despite going to their verification/selfie spiel. It is literally impossible to reach a human for support, since Meta laid them all off. Seems to be a common theme and it sounds like I'm not missing much. Also locks me out of Threads (I don't know a single person who uses that).
- BlueSky seemed nicer, until I realized interactions to my posts (personal account only) have largely been OF bots. Also lovely.
- Mastodon etc are all enormous tech bubbles that may be interesting, but not what I am looking for.
> The social platforms continue to be monetised predominantly by ad revenue. That is still the core business model. And ad revenue continues to grow," ... > Might there be a backlash coming? Don't many people go on to social media to see how friends are reacting to their posts or comments before settling down to scroll through professionally made content?
Now, I suspect I can solve all these issues by paying them money - actually, I'm fairly sure that would fix the Twitter thing at least - but I _also_ suspect that all that would do is show my traffic to other bots, since I more and more get the feeling that no sane human being is voluntarily putting up with this. But clearly, that's not the case.
Same people who run these platforms will preach about diversity while destroying it.
But, I guess, there's still room for those channels to be run through the enshittificator. Wouldn't surprise me if we in the not-so-distant future start to see random ads and paid content in group chats.
* Keeping in touch with people / contacts.
* Knowing when random cafes and restaurants I like are open.
Outside of that I just hate it and want it out of my life. I’ve spoke to others and the loss of contacts is a major reason they don’t leave also.
With his insight I came up with my own system around apps and the computer that I still use today.
Here's how I'd encapsulate it in a nutshell, and the blocks ontop work fantastically to combat all forms of social media addiction. Notification Zero.
Notification Zero is when no apps can ever give you notifications, ever. Not the phone call, not the text, or sms, not slack, etc. Even for work. Now, with that as the default, you have to manually set and think through which apps in which cases do give you notifications, and this philosophy would built itself into a fine AI notifications management system some day. So what notifies me? When my phone is not on DND (rarely, when I'm expecting a call) only starred contacts calls. Texts never notify me. People know to call if it's serious. With this path I use my technology more intentionally, and when I open my phone there's nothing nagging me for my attention because it's a blank screen with no apps with no alarms set by other people ("notifications are like alarms other people set for you" - Naval R.)
I don't miss it. and it feels great, minimalist and clean, and allows my attention to stay focused on what I opened my phone or computer int he first place. (My computer is the same: blank screen, matching black, no apps or notifications. On Mac, I set the mission bar at the bottom to only show apps if they are open, and as we speak, only 7 open windows appear at the bottom though the bar is hidden unless mouse overed). The screen becomes a canvas for what I'm actively working on, tactically laid out for my particular use & focus.
Happy to share more if its of help to anyone.
Before, people were reposting memes, articles, chain letters, etc. Most of the content you’d see wasn’t created by the person you are friends with.
This isn’t really new. And as someone who makes original content and posts it regularly - people do enjoy original stuff from their friends. It’s just that it’s hard for people to do. Most people are very insecure, have little original thought, and/or the interest in sharing anything they think to a broader audience than 2-3 close friends. I buck the trend here.
whether something fad or not does not matter to me
Think 'keeping up with the jones', 'the latest fahsion, food, entertainment, music, x, trends' etc. People live by what I dunno, magazines, Oprah, local morning show hosts, entertainment news shows, etc, tell them. They've brought that view of things with them online.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 cannot curate your feed on Facebook. You used to, sure. Now it's just whatever they give you.
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.
* 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.
The central entity of forums, such as HN or Reddit, is topics.
Sometimes there is crossover between the two types of entities, and of course there are exceptions to the rule, but I find it to be a useful way to discern what is social media and what isn't.
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.
I read this site. But lately it’s been more difficult since the AI “content” stresses me out. Maybe social media always did that. But it’s come to the point where I cannot kid myself. Many times it just makes me more wound-up than it winds me down. So then what’s the point? Then I intentionally search for specific topics. When I’m out of those I can stare out the window. Which is a nice change.
Strangely these rooms are quite different to being silent at home or somewhere else private. For me it seems to be that these spaces are public, you are being silent in public spaces - a different setting and experience than in places that are private. Being silent together can be disconcerting!
It's also different to using noise cancellation or listening to music or other forms of "silence", truly unique in many aspects.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_room
This has virtually always been the case and it is only "social media" is an Orwellian sense. It is an antisocial consumerist machine.
In consumerism, everything is for sale.
I don't understand why this article has to play dumb. This is how most of the internet always was until commercial interest invaded social media. They yelled their billions of dollars worth of messaging so loudly for over a decade that it drowned out anything authentic.
Now that there's a political break away from all the tone deaf pseudoprogressive messaging and the money for it has dried up, what did they expect to see there? Most people never posted sincere "life updates" unless they had something to sell or were a naive part of the bandwagon.
Here, the term is "social media", which can also be pronounced "boogeye man". We all seem to agree it is bad, but very few are willing to lay down a solid definition.
It isn't limited to bad terms. It happens anytime we argue over whether X displays consciousness, or X has a mind, or X can think.
* And other forums, obviously.
The conversations on consciousness though...oh man. I have to steel myself before diving into that mess.
However, you go to Mastodon, Pixelfed, or Lemmy and things are dramatically better. Well, no, not just better, but completely refreshing. You friend people and what you get is a cronological feed. No algorithm bullshit, no gamification, no adverts snuck in.