Social media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel insecure, you leverage your emotions for someone else's aims.
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.
Your theory about cable television is fascinating. I never really watched TV growing up, but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time.
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.
> but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time.
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
One of my in-laws who immigrated from Italy with a big family has a "command center" with a computer he trades stocks on and a few TVs and it drives me nuts when he watches Fox News and they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration" which is exactly what his family did to great success.
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", ...
25 years ago, my italian grandmother was the same way. No command center, but still wildly anti-immigration; probably stoked by the news though. She immigrated as a child, technically naturalized twice (she was naturalized through her fathers naturalization, but married an italian citizen in Italy and renaturalized through his naturalization... because the citizenship of a married woman was determined by her husband's citizenship back then), but definitely in favor of pulling the ladder up.
"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.
Absolutely. It's a very thin line to go from "just pointing out a problem" to "everything is a problem" to "everything is broken" to "nothing I can do will change anything" and then people disengage in the process and politics and everything else becomes the domain of whoever can shout the loudest with volume, rhetoric, or money.
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!
I think the "nothing I can do will change anything" is actually a predominant theme that's emerged over the past decade. I don't know if you've watched any of Adam Curtis' documentaries, but his documentary HyperNormalisation explores this in great detail (most of this documentaries have a similar theme I've found).
Edit: Apologies, I think I mean his documentary: Can't Get You Out of My Head. Essentially it asserts that all revolutions fail, because the people who attempt to overthrow simply become the new guard.
> People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
Adam Curtis docs are wonderful. I've grown so accustomed to when people suggest a doc, its some youtuber that posts a doc once a week and utilizes the youtube documentary style to disguise how poorly executed it is. Adam Curtis is certainly not that, for anyone considering this suggestion.
In defense of 'How money works' I don't think there's much in the way of positive anything to cover for his format/field, not for current times in particular
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
There's lots of positive things to cover. He made a video 2 weeks ago about tourism, his first ever as far as I can tell, and there's plenty of interesting things a general Youtube audience could learn about how money flows around in the context of tourism. But he chose to instead talk about "The End Of Budget Tourism", believing (perhaps accurately!) that a negative framing would help get people to click on his video.
YouTube is ruthless in promoting clickbait headlines and thumbnails where it's someone's face with a shocked expression and an attention grabbing byline. You don't play by their rules the algorithm will bury you.
Content creators are a slave to the algorithm. It's so easy for Google to just not show put your video on the feed, even your subscribers. That's why every video looks the same now, if you refuse to play you don't get views.
I'm probably a heavier user of reddit than most but I recently deleted the reddit app on my phone because it's just too much. I still use the site though, but now I use an iPad with old.reddit to make using it as difficult as possible.
There's a very strong hive mind there. It takes very little to grassroots a subreddit. Just like at the biking subreddits and tire recommendations. It's almost always the GP 5000 that is recommended. Which, don't get me wrong, it's a great tire. But it isn't always the best, and there are tires out there that beat it. The community has just latched on to the one true tire and that's all you'll ever see recommended.
Most subreddits that do any sort of product recommendation have the same problem. For a while, the pilot metro was the fountain pen de jure, or Stronglifts the default recommendation for weightlifting (and now it's never recommended).
If they hive mind rallies around products like this, it also rallys around other ideas, policies and whatnot. Just look at the politics subreddit and see nonstop "Israel bad" "Chuck Schumer is feckless" or "jews control the funding of the democrats" everywhere. Even where it doesn't make sense. You can have one of those muckraking websites that run an article like "Schumer didn't vote against [insert house bill]" and it gets to the top and the narrative is relentless against schumer, even though he literally can't vote against a house measure since he's in the senate. Is he feckless? Absolutely. Does that mean everything he does or doesn't do is a sign of his fecklessness? Absolutely not.
In the hivemind, there's no room for nuance, it's all "look at that bitch eating crackers"
Reddit is a pretty extreme example, though, where mods are basically subreddit dictators. For whatever reason, Reddit gave enormous amount of censorship and conversation-shaping power to mods, to the point where a handful of like-minded mods can enforce in great detail what is allowed to be discussed and what isn't.
Pretty sure if you unmasked the subreddit mods, the reason for the "circling around a particular brand recommendation" observation would become clear.
I follow dozens of subs through RSS and that’s pretty good. You just need a reader which has features to filter out certain users and words (like Newsblur what I use)
Yep, if you haven't lost the will to put a bit of curation work upfront, RSS never stopped being the right answer.
Substack has been a pretty good addition to the landscape, bringing lots of people into blogging (without calling it that). But for the skimming/reading interface, RSS beats the app.
I do find it amusing how on the internet the X and Y can be governments or corporations, or the hosted platform itself. Seems like something a competent "we control everything" organization should be able to prevent. But as long as you do nothing but come back for another helping of rage, I guess they're fine with it.
Cuz the actual nuanced reality is that it’s structural. (Most) corporations don’t want to control the world but they do have their own self-interests, but because there are so many corporations there’s always some corporation controlling some facet.
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.
News are for news worthy things - which are things that deviate from everyday life. Wars, disasters, crime, in short things of concern. As well as political struggles, economic struggles, and any kind of conflict.
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.
> 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.
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.
Some are absolutely better than others when it comes to this. But I was shocked and instantly repulsed when hearing and seeing CNN at an airport after having been away from televisions for a few months.
> 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.
Then imagine these newscasters giving a public speech in that same way. You'd think you had stepped into the quarterly meeting of psychotics planning a spree.
EDIT:
And most importantly in my living room example: That's where the TV is. If you wouldn't invite a person in the flesh and blood to your living room to behave like this, why would you invite them through your TV?
What about true crime and murder series on Netflix? Who would want to spend their evenings with a flesh and blood person in their bedroom who would go on into gory details for hours about murders and abductions? But still people invite these reptilians to their bedrooms through the TV.
The basic problem of CNN is that a person who tunes in at 5:30 pm has to get basically the same story as someone who tunes in at 7:30 pm so they have to repeat the same "news" over and over again. You could have a magazine format with lots of little documentaries about little different things that happen all over the world and you would be better "informed" in the sense of learning something but you wouldn't have as much shared experience with other viewers.
is most famous for his book The Media Monopoly but his obscure 1971 book The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media was highly predictive of what news on the web was going to look like because he had worked for the RAND corporation and tried to sell a very unprogressive (in terms of business) media interest on the idea of online personalized news and they didn't want to make the investment.
That book has some of the most damning indictments of the concept of "news" from a McLuhanite perspective that ever been put to writing, most of all a description of how the editor of a small-town newspaper has about 6 seconds to look at a newswire story and decide if he wants to run it. It's a fundamental act of violence against the framework of reality to throw out 99.999% of it and the kind of "bias" that people get stuck on where people think we need an equal balance of stories that infuriate right-wingers and infuriate left-wingers.
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
> But the sickening aspect of cable news is the way the presenters talk.
"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.
It doesn't matter which one. My mother mainlines BBC News which is state-owned, establishment-centrist, has no adverts or profits, but has the same effect of dialing up the viewer's fear of the outside world.
FWIW there's a new Director-general: Matt Brittin, whose CV includes Cambridge rowing team, MBA from LBS, McKinsey, Trinity Mirror (owner of The Daily Mirror) and 18 years at Google.
He was the Google boss who said in 2016 that he doesn't know his own salary.
sadly forces in the BBC also value "engagement". Idk how we got here, it never used to be like this.
This is why cultural stories now are higher than before on the main site. It used to be the case that news was _just_ news. Politics, crime, economics, health, environment, etc. Now culture stories, like puff pieces about the royals or entertainment end up on the front page.
Because the BBC now has to justify its licence fee to the government, so they need engagement metrics and all the rest like what proportion of X demographic they're reaching.
Back in the day, both the BBC and universities were funded by the government without the stereotype of a fresh MBA graduate in charge. Back in the day before MOOCs, the BBC produced programmes for the Open University because that was the way to get video content out to the nation.
> puff pieces about the royals
have been on the front page of the tabloids since way before the internet.
I had a relative for which it was CNN. We even share the same political views, but watching that stuff or having it on in the background literally from 8 am until midnight is tiring.
when in a hotel on vacations we sometimes have a television and hence bbc or cnn... i used to nickname cnn "the fire squad": whatever the topic they're just shouting and hyperventilating... it is tiring indeed
It's actually CNN, but they flip to local news often too to hear about all the car wrecks and local murders and robberies and other things to make them afraid.
Fox and CNN are both bad, but different flavors of bad.
HN is absolutely social media in all senses of the word and meets your definition of cable TV pretty well -- it's a news blog run by a startup incubator as a way to increase discussion and submarine in their concept and products.
"if you're not paying for it, you're the product" and that is just as true here as anywhere.
I agree half way. While recent years HN seems to have imported much of Reddit, it still has an anti-establishment undertone and decent moderation to keep it from sprawling
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.)
You don't see pictures and videos directly on the site. It's text links and text comments and discussions. In the minimal sense of the word, even printed text is media, so it's technically true that HN is social media, but I think it's more like a news aggregator and discussion forum.
I've never appreciated the low-effort handwaves of claiming that HN, old-school Internet forums, USENET, etc. are "social media", simply because they aren't. HN's primary medium is text, often headlined by a link to some other site. That isn't social media. 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".
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.
HN has comments which are social media. I don’t get why people care, because social media isn’t intrinsically bad; I always say “mainstream social media” or “toxic social media” to clarify what I’m referring to.
> 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.
Comment threads are not “social media”, no matter how badly anyone wants to redefine that they are. They date back to the 1970s on USENET and mailing lists.
>HN has comments which are social media. I don’t get why people care
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"?
see IMO it isn't. HN is an online community. Same as forums, and BBSs were. I don't think they were social media really - they're online spaces that form around a shared interest, where Facebook etc were originally online spaces that augmented a real world community.
Not that user but I don't think this is as difficult as you're making it out to be?
On Reddit, Instagram, Tiktok et al I can create a community on that platform. I can get find other people into Booktok, I can join the Rowing subreddit, I can get into Knittinggram or whatever. Posters expect roughly their micro-community to see their posts, users expect to see their micro-community's posts.
On hacker news I see the same community everyone else does. If HN was a vBulletin forum with threads posted for links it would function almost 1:1 the same, I guess all you'd need to change is a modification for making threads bump on vote behaviour instead of latest-post.
TL;DR. If you ask me, the essence of social media today is the algorithm and the "social curation". Is what I see dictated by some behind the scenes algorithm and by the mob (votes, views, engagement, flags, clicks)? It's social media.
But fair enough. Don't forums have subforums for different interests, topics and specific discussions and sub-communities? They have the option to follow other members or topics in a customized consumption experience. In my personal experience on large and small forums, including those I administered or moderated, most users lived their entire life in specific subforums. The user that only posted in the CPU subforum, or the Nikon subforum. The user who created the "photos of flowers" or "case modding" topic and only hung around there with kindred souls in their micro-community. Forums were really reddit at a smaller scale.
> I guess all you'd need to change is a modification for making threads bump on vote behaviour instead of latest-post.
This is downplaying the weight the hidden algorithm has on what you see on HN. Much like every other social media site and very much unlike classic forums, submissions and comments here live and die at the hand of an algorithm that decides whether today you get to read about the Israel/Gaza conflict, about Democrats/Republicans. This algorithm is driven on one hand by the social aspect (people deciding what's media and what isn't, hence the "social"), on the other hand by some obscure engagement rules that none of us can see or define.
I don't make it "seem" more complicated, it "is" more complicated because experts don't fully agree on exactly what social media is. Everyone tries to use their experience, preference, and common sense and these all vary.
P.S. The current top comment isn’t there because it’s the most recent, the only objectively correct one, or a mod pinned it. It’s there because the algorithm driven by social engagement decided it’s the media I should see first.
I said so above. I think originally they were "online spaces that augmented a real world community". Even twitter, you mostly started by following people you knew or had heard of.
I get that this isn't at all where we are any more. And y'know, everyone's gonna use terms to mean whatever they want. I'm fine with that. I guess I just think its pointless if "social media" means "anything online where people can write messages"
>What are the clear criteria that make something social media
I have no idea why people are making some mysterious deep question out of this, wikipedia quite literally offers a definition[1]. Web 2.0 based platforms, user generated content, social networking including social mechanisms such as followers, groups and lists.
This doesn't apply to HN. You could randomly assign everyone a new name tomorrow and it wouldn't matter. Identity is virtually irrelevant here, there are no mechanisms to connect users to each other, there are no networks of people, users do not generate their own content and there is a criterion that what is discussed is of of public, not merely social or personal interest.
If some crash wiped out all HN users tomorrow and we'd all start over at zero almost nothing would change. If that happend on social media, like Instagram, the site would be dead. That's the social part.
Well, it's A definition, which is more than the opposing side has yet to offer.
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.
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.
Calling this out as the primary reason HN is not social media. Forums existed for years before social media was ever a thing. HN is indistinguishable from a forum in the early 2000s.
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.
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
Having some sort of recommendation algorithm seems to also be a defining feature of modern social media, which is something old school forums didn’t have.
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.
Reddit absolutely has algorithmic feeds since it ipo'ed (maybe earlier but I used third party apps so I wasn't subjected to them). 90% of my home page is bullshit I didn't ask for.
I agree but there’s definitely room for nuance. I follow a lot of artists because I genuinely
like seeing their work. I follow a lot of miniature painters for their tips and tricks. I follow my close friends to see what they’re up to.
I think the folks you’re talking about are influencers. Which I wholeheartedly agree with your take in that case.
That’s just advertising. Yes, mom and pop stores can advertise “just like” the multinational corporations can. Guess who gets the lion’s share of airtime and guess who has armies of men+machines crafting the most convincing messaging.
Why is nobody here defining social media, put down the clear criteria? "I say this, I am tired of people saying that" isn't productive if everyone has their own interpretation of what's being discussed.
Social media grew out of social networking sites, as far as I remember. The distinct feature of social networking sites is that they are focused on… well, social networks, comprised of nodes of users and links of friendships. Your content feed is naturally “personalized” in the sense that you see the posts of your friends.
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.
Social media is any website whose purpose is socialization i.e. “small-talk” style discussion, with many (50+) members.
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).
In my case, I don't think most people who claim HN is social media are making a serious argument. They are taking two different things which have a few points of inter-comparison and using that as a basis to claim those two things are actually equivalent. This is done as a retort (eg, "you say you hate social media, but you're on social media _right now_") rather than in service of a larger argument.
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.
I agree that HN is "social media", but I'm starting to wonder if Facebook/Twitter/TikTok/Reddit/YouTube aren't "social media", but instead a new category of media tangentially related as OP posted to cable news. Something like "attention media" where your attention is the point of it.
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.
I don't have the data to quantify it, but M-F, 6a-4p, maybe once an hour or so just to check the headlines. If I have comments, I might check my threads to see if I need to respond. On the Weekends, though, I might check it in the morning and again before bed just to see if anything interesting happened.
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.
By strict definition it obviously is social media. “Interactive forms of media that allow users to interact with and publish to each other, generally by means of the Internet.”
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.
Sure, but deconstructing the platform to look at the engagement points is also useful. Some things that I think set HN apart in a good way:
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.
Given all the arguments above this post, I don't think there's a lot of value in trying to categorise any particular website as a yes/no to "is this social media". All that achieves is people trying to litigate whether a site fits a definition nobody can agree on.
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?
HN and Facebook are entirely different beasts. I have no idea who you are, stickfigure. I can't remember usernames from HN, I can't follow people, I can't curate my feed
not every user submitted feed with upvotes is the same
You can always find some slight difference. HN is orange, FB is blue!
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.
My personal criteria to specifically identify social media apart from other online interaction:
* 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.
What about Mastodon or other federated platforms? If someone created a new Facebook, but it didn't have these corporate terms, it would still be social media.
We keep saying it, because it's what it is. There's some black box (that can _sometimes_ be reached via dang) that determines what you see on HN's front page, and this place is just as susceptible to trends and rabbit holes as any short form video app, it just doesn't have the funny sound effects.
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.
The personalized algorithm is not the root issue though. The root issue is that social media sites live by increasing engagement of its viewers. Because of this, they all get away from the original stated purpose of bringing people together, and go all in on maximizing engagement by increasingly shady ways. Of course, the personalized algorithm is a huge one, but there are also things like "Show HN" controlling what is on the front page, selectively taking down flagged material. Remember, HN has advertisements as well, and will regularly post job ads for positions in startups. They know that outright going in the direction of 'personalized algorithm' would alienate their viewerbase, so they avoid it, but still do all of the other practices that social media sites do.
This is so different from my personal experience that I feel like one of those kids being told chickens used to be dinosaurs.
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 ?
Not just television. Also the supermarket checkout aisle magazines. Not just tabloids, although that, too. Also the "glossy" magazines. Vogue, People, Us, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, McCall's, Seventeen, etc.
The commercialization of the engines of culture continues.
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
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 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.
The content here is very different. I can kill maybe an hour a day reading HN, which is a lot, but the feed does end. Most days, I don't want to spend an hour here, because the feed is designed to push popular content to the top, and a lot of it is content I don't care about. Other sites have infinite feeds designed to keep me personally hooked as long as possible.
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
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 agree with everything you said. Most open source projects are limited by contributor labor. Generative AI does help with that problem, but it introduces a sea of vibe coded slop as a side effect. Truly a Genie/Jinn.
Similar is when people refer to themselves or others as "content creators"
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.
Was there ever a time when any of the classical/fine arts were used as propaganda or promotional material, prior to the medium elevating to loftier aims?
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...
> HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word.
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.
That's what I took away from it, too. Facebook circa 2008 was great: your friends talked what were up to; everyone posted their pictures from that party last night; you didn't see anything from anyone who wasn't at most a second-degree connection. There were problems - people were jerks, and worse, and some people got pulled into chasing clout, and promoted bullshit - but they were human-scale problems, and you could largely scrub your feed from things / people like that. Unfortunately for the entire world, that sort of use wasn't profitable enough.
I don't think of Show HN as quite the same. Nor Ask HN. I know that otherwise there is plenty of "advertising" within posts/comments/etc.
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.
When a professor at Rice walked us through Don Tapscott's book Growing up Digital in 2001, we had such an optimistic view of the future. Don highlighted how with broadcast media in the 20th century, the viewer had little choice on what to watch. Now that the internet was available to the masses, he explained how much new generations would benefit from what he called interactive media which enabled someone to explore and learn anything of interest instead of being forced to consume whatever was being fed through the television. When we'd say there was "nothing on" we felt bored, and maybe we did endure some manipulation by commercials, but I agree that contemporary social media is far worse. In the 20th century, boredom from channel surfing at least encouraged some to get off the couch and go read a book or shoot some hoops or play a board game with friends. Allow me the stereotype (exaggeration?) for a moment to note that we had the ultimate nerdy kid who wanted to be cool, and all he could think of with gazillions of dollars at his disposal was to make a thing that turned everyone into anti-social nerds by staying glued to their screens instead of interacting IRL with fellow humans. Who would have accepted that fictional plot as believable?
HN has its own share of enticement/manipulation - most recently with regards to AI.
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.
Ads became the default business model of the web. When people started to get sick of blaring in-your-face blinking banners, it mutated into search ads and placement. The same thing happened to mobile apps and games, YouTube, Facebook, instagram, even Tik Tok. When it becomes too blatant then it embeds itself one level deeper as placements and endorsements.
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.
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And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word.
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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
There’s also an end to the feed. I forget the limit, but at one point I think I hit the maximum number of pages at like 50 (quality drops pretty dramatically, by like page 10 there was almost nothing interesting or notable).
Social media was first (that I know of) weaponized in 2016 by Cambridge Analytica to manipulate Facebook users to vote for Brexit & Trump. I'm surprised that the article left those totally out.
That incident was definitely ahead of its time, but before that, targeted ads for scams were propping the industry up. For instance, Experian used to spend $$$ to funnel people into credit card scams -- one year, they stole our CC#, and I called our top 5 US bank to dispute the charges. The bank fraud department rep said Experian drove most of their case load, to the point where they had a special flow to block just Experian affiliates because physically reissuing stolen cards was too expensive. You can back estimate how many predatory ad dollars that involved. Of course, there was also a long tail of smaller companies that wanted to sell supplements, useless other useless services, etc.
Before that, you could pay for placement on all the major search engines except early Google, which basically just broke search. (Google does similar stuff now, in the same way they "don't" sell personal information or read your gmail, but somehow make lots of money off it anyway, and target things only mentioned in private correspondence).
LLMs will be next. The only solution is to refuse to pay for access with your attention. That means no copilot, gemini, alexa or siri, since those are all ad supported or adjacent now. ChatGPT and Claude are on borrowed time. I suspect the open weight models will be the last ones to fall.
You absolutely nailed it. It's not 'social' anymore. That's a mask of what it used to be - it's the coercion and manipulation by big tech and by advertisers (AND by 'influencers' who don't have the $$$ to advertise).
I really forgot how stupid cable tv was 20 years ago. In my area, that old stuff is now getting broadcast over the air, which is the only kind of tv I get. It's not the history channel's Ancient Aliens exactly, but it is all the 2nd tier offshoot stuff that didn't air on the big cable channels. About half of them are "about" Hitler, and the topics are treated so unseriously you get things like "Dude, look! This door has an H on it! This must have been where he went!"
It's so stupid you almost can't help watching, but I'll be dammed if they didn't get me to. Wild times.
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word.
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.
I always delineated the two as one being corporate social media, I do wonder if there is a better word/phrase for it but IME if you use the phrase two describe it as such to those that were online pre-2008 they immediately grasp the difference; but these people are likely a minority.
IMHO both of these problems stem from the same source: Engagement.
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.
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
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.
Is it not clear at this point that the real issue is how lacking the term "social media" even is? We have people here arguing that BBSs were social media, it will not be long until email is considered social media.
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.
“Social network” is a better term. I think “parasocial network” is better; the former implies small group chats while the latter doesn’t.
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.
> Is it not clear at this point that the real issue is how lacking the term "social media" even is?
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".
I think it can become diluted to a meaningless term, or co-opted to mean different things to different audiences (not to sidetrack from the point but the first two examples I can think of what I mean are "fake news" or "woke")
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
Well said. But I think when people say “HN isn’t social media” what they’re really saying is “HN is nutritious social media, not junk food social media”. Not sure I agree with that, but there’s some arguments to be made at least. HN generally doesn’t let itself get too political. Anyone who posts too much political or polemic stuff will get put on a “cooldown list” that rate limits their posting (ask me how I know).
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.
>And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
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.
If you're on Android, you can use revanced to patch social network apps, to, among other things, remove content from non-friends (and ads).
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 article made me reminisce. I was a young adult when Facebook crept in. I felt the constant pressure to do cool stuff so I could put it on Facebook and get likes. I used to browse through friends walls, look at their carefully manicured photo albums, no doubt driven by similar anxieties.
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...
As people’s default shifts to consumption, they stop posting content themselves. They also stop living a life worth posting about… especially when they start comparing themselves with “influencers”, who have made a full time job out of pretending to live an interesting life.
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.
Look into Morphe as a revanced alternative, it's by the peeps who make the Youtube patches and I find it better to use and it can draw on the same patches.
This article has struck a nerve in the comment section. It's describing how traditional social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are not used for social features anymore, but for content discovery. The descriptions of how people are using Facebook to find new content anonymously are not that different from how we use Hacker News, which has reignited the debate about whether Hacker News is social media.
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.
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.
Hacker News is certainly addictive. As I've started to limit my interactions on other sites like Instagram and X by removing the apps from my phone, I've seen I spend more time on this site than I did before. The content is a lot more interesting and relevant to me, so I don't see it as a problem (Yet) but I don't think that'll always be the case.
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.
> 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.
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)
Yes, the game is over, the corps have won. Where the Internet used to be a forum for creativity, it's now a weapon of influence. Where we used to have an anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) playground, we are now monitored more than anywhere else. Where we used to be able to genuinely connect, everything is now artificial and manufactured. And where we once had control, we are now the product.
We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.
The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.
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.
Mastodon seems to solve the problems for those that use it. It's a genuine social network that people use to talk to each other and form real communites. Not owned or manipulated by any one person or organization, no algorithms or gaming. It's a constant meme that "going viral" on mastodon is when your shitpost gets 50 boosts and likes.
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.
I miss when social media was mostly about my friends’ lives. It actually helped us stay in touch.
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.
The attention economy is real, your eyes have value that is surprisingly high, and buying out that attention so you can have a pure you-centered experience would just be too expensive for most people.
Instagram gets ~$27/mo/user from advertisers. Would you spend $27/mo for Instagram? Probably not. Hence the financial void is filled with ads.
Social media was never really “social” in my opinion. Reading updates from hundreds of people you have shallow interactions with offers the illusion of having a social life. So I’m not sure if this change to “fads” makes it meaningfully less social than it already was.
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.
This was my experience - when I was in high school was right around the time that Facebook started to replace Myspace. Who you were friends with online and who/how many people liked your photos was a big deal, and it very much mirrored the actual IRL dynamics/relationships we had in school - what happened online was directly related to what happened in real life. Around 2013 it felt like that started to change as the social media sites shifted more towards algorithmically recommended content, like joke sites and videos, with some ads. At that time it was still fun to watch it and share it with friends, because it was so new.
I was in college at that time and I did not get this feeling in any possible way.
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.
Yeah - MySpace accurately mirrored high school circa 2004, and Facebook accurately mirrored college circa 2007 (complete with it being elitist where it was hard to get into when it first launched, just like real colleges).
I worked at the IT help desk at my college when Facebook was first rolling out. We’d constantly get high school seniors calling up to try and get their college email address early, just so they could register with Facebook.
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.
I was in high school when Facebook took off in my country (2008). And fair enough, first few years were maybe more “social-ish”. I left the platform by 2012 though.
Might also say more about me and my social behaviour than the social media platforms themselves, I never cared about it too much.
I am very critical of social media but this is far too of a myopic take. There is a ton of real life social benefit to these platforms.
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.
This is bizarre to me, because anyone I know well enough to link up with on a trip also knows where I live and vice versa.
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.
Yeah this is my feeling as well. I have a handful of friends in different countries, when we are near each other we just send a quick text.
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.
I fell out of touch with my relatives in New England and got back in touch because I got back on Facebook so something social does come out of it once in a while.
Sounds like adict talk to me ;)
Seriously though, the legit claims of benefits are from people who need outreach and don't want to pay for advertising. But your favorite taco truck gets attention while you get to slip into depressive oblivion.
There are legitimate benefits. I just think its very easy to argue (which I agree) that the benefits don't necessarily outweigh the harm for most people.
For a window, it was really social, early to late 2000s (anyone in NL remember Hyves?). It was a great way for keeping up with friends as you went to different schools, when they were traveling, etc.
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.
You're confusing social networks and social media.
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.
I 'member when facebook was campus only. For about 5 minutes my friends were friends.
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.
For a brief period it was social. Even if you had hundreds of people you had barely interacted with there were still people you continued to interact in real life from that lot.
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.
When I was in college it served as a useful directory of everyone I met (like, "oh, who was that guy again?" type of questions) and also essentially every offline event was organized through Facebook. It served a clear social function that posting in meme groups does not.
Facebook definitely was social before about 2010. Especially if you were at uni in the golden era before they left everyone in.
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.
As someone that was raised in a small town, the feed was very shallow compared to my actual interactions with friends. It was great for status updates (especially for friends in foreign countries), but messenger was way more popular than the feed.
Close friends are better. However I want to know how my now very distant old friends (ie from high school) and relatives are doing. I want to know when they have babies, see a couple pictures of their kids dance reticle - it gives me something to talk about when our next reunion comes around.
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.
> I want to know how my now very distant old friends (ie from high school) and relatives are doing
YMMV, but I got all of these through words of mouth (and WhatsApp status updates). I think it’s ok to be estranged from a friend or a relative. The next time, we meet, I can ask them how everything is going and what has happened. And if they want they can show me pictures then.
For some context, messenger (originally FB chat) didn't launch until 2008. A year later in 2009 FB started sorting posts by popularity, by 2011 they'd switched the newsfeed to a blogspam / advertising feed, burying your friends posts. Depending on your age, you may never have used 'golden age' Facebook. As someone who was in college 2003 - 2008, there was a period in which Facebook was an insanely useful tool for organising your social life. You could literally make a facebook post about an event or even stating where you were on a given night, and know that people were likely to see it.
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.
You’re just learning how small minded people are? In the US there was an attempted insurrection filmed live. We elected the guy who led it who then pardoned 1600 jailed criminals. Now he is trying to creat a slush fund to give them millions as reparations. 33% of the country is delighted by this. These are Plank sized brains.
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.
yep, even people I thought educated voted for this fool. seriously, they have college degrees, but apparently get their news from random social media accounts
What are the tells? Since COVID I’ve noticed that every new person I meet seems to harbor at least 1 or 2 oddball opinions. Conversation tends to veer into weirder places than it used to, creating a surreal sort of feeling of being in the world. I’ve felt that this is just a result of everyone being tuned by whatever personalized feed is amplifying or directing their base instincts.
I think what's more interesting is that the odd opinions don't mean anything anymore. Before someone with odd opinions tended to be either really crazy or they were intelligent and thought a long time about something. Nowadays they seem shallow, they saw something on tiktok but don't really know what they're talking about, just totally rehashing whatever they heard.
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.
Anti-social take. People are being exploited by some of the smartest people in the world who use natural human desires against people but somehow they are at fault for being small minded?
Yes, we've moved from town squares to private parties - whatsapp chats, discord servers, even IRC still exists. (Bluesky is a bit of an exception but they'll need to get enough stable revenue at some point.)
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 used to browse through my instagram feed a few times per month. Just to keep updated about those friends who often posted there. Now it's mostly crappy shorts and I can't even find the "friend feed" anymore. No idea if it's just well hidden or completely gone. Now I don't use it anymore at all.
It is so well-hidden, in fact, that there is no visual indicator that it exists at all, so you cannot be blamed for thinking it is gone. On the homepage (house icon) tap the Instagram logo and select "Following." It will present you with a chronological feed of posts from only those you follow.
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.
Wow, I've been using instagram for 5 years and I just learned that there's a following-only feed. I had always just assumed that Instagram was designed in bad faith to always interleave posts from people you didn't follow to try to capture your attention. It's incredibly annoying that I can't set this as my default.
This is why I don’t understand why my family/friends keep wanting me on Facebook or Instagram. It’s not about keeping up with each other. They just want it to be slightly easier to send me memes. But if I wanted to browse memes, I could just go do that. I don’t need them sending me their feed with a bunch of jokes that are funny to them, but not me.
I think I'm on an A/B test on the Facebook app, now whenever I open the app it goes straight to reels and starts playing videos with sound enabled. I looked through all settings to try to disable this but couldn't, so I finally just gave up and uninstalled it
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
Maybe I'm in the minority here (early 30s, married + kids), but my social media feed is primarily my friends. Though, if we go into the Reels tab, my friends and I share videos back and forth through DMs.
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.
I (mostly) stopped looking at Facebook around 2016. It just wasn't fun anymore; and at least for me, my feed was all political nonsense trying to manipulate me.
While I partly agree, I also disagree. I still use Instagram a lot to keep in touch with friends I've made in different places. Generally as long as they are making posts then my feeds have those posts. It's only when they do not and supposedly IG "runs out" that I don't.
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.
I'm bored when I see how inactive platforms like Discord and forums have become
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 :/
This is usually why I collapse the 2-3 top-most ranked comment threads. They’re very often gamed and calibrated for engagement. Every so often anecdotes/stories that completely ignore the subject matter (sometimes dangerous if medical). I wish there were other ways to organize comments (rip slashdot) but this usually helps to make HN less social media-y.
I remember trying bluesky and realizing it isn't just the services I don't like. I don't like ... what all the social media users like. The heavy memeification / gamification for attention. Trite posts, posts that seem like the middle of a conversation ... really all negative bits about internet discourse.
I've deleted all my social media and haven't looked back. It's safe to assume Meta tracks every little detail about you: what kind of content you like, how long you look at each post, your political stance, etc. Every single metric you can possibly think of... they're collecting.
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.
We used to call them social networking sites, now they're social media sites.
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
The pendulum has finally swung the other way. There is no longer the need for people to shamelessly air their life on live feeds, and when something serious happens, people prefer to share it in a messaging group.
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.
The only social media I really use is linkedin and X. I find linkedin useful for following companies and colleagues, and im pretty picky about who I accept or request as a friend. I also find X to be insightful, but I only use it to follow people for stock research.
X is excellent for following niche research interests but they’ve been pushing quite hard to force political news/opinions into the feeds which is really annoying.
It's run by a guy who literally did a nazi salute. One of their most prolific users is named "catturd". I'm astonished that anybody in research or science still remains there.
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.
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.
Given that even reaction videos from modern Jerry Springer figures with 20 million subscribers can attract 20,000 comments that all parrot their guru and demand doxxing of the target or worse, it is no longer a mystery how totalitarian states form.
Maybe that is unfair to Jerry Springer. He at least heard both sides of a story.
Social media does not only spread bad ideas, but degrades the symbolic machinery people use to form ideas in the first place. It trains reflexes where thought should be. There is no symbolic lattice for things to land and it turns people into reactive zombies.
I have never been interested in the “normal” social media apps like Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, and the like. The content never appealed to me as a consumer enough to get started. Occasionally something would go viral enough that a friend would eventually link it to me and that was the whole experience.
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 have cut off social media related to my actual career, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Because people laughed at me for becoming a programmer. So I created my own homepage, and for communication, I mainly read posts on large Chinese tech communities, Hacker News, or dev.to.
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.
My bar for "is it social media?" is "is the sole benefit network effects?"
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.
Social media feeds have been completely broken for many years. What social media used to be, has now moved to group chats and channels.
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.
I use the firefox extension "Unhook" to completely hide suggested content on Youtube. Really effective, I kindof can't believe how much time I spent getting suckered into watching video essays that absolutely did not deliver.
Yes, Tiktok staff made this point when they emerged in 2020 - "Tiktok isn't a social media platform, they're an entertainment platform". Meta's catching up.
That makes talking about the issues a lot simpler. Calling HN a social media makes much more sense if we talk about Instagram, or Facebook as entertainment or advertising platforms.
I built a safari extension called Scrolless [1] to try and solve this issue (Disclaimer: it's a $4.99 one time unlock). If you use social media in the web instead of the native apps, and use Scrolless, you'll only see posts from your friends, no recommendation algorithms anywhere.
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.
Friends haven't been a focus of social media feeds for almost 20 years now.
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.
What I find unsettling is the monoculture that is being created by platforms like Instagram. You will see a 30 year old man from Alabama engaging in the same trends as a 19 year old girl from Japan. Suddenly everyone likes matcha and is posting photos of themselves in photo booths. On dating apps, tons of women from all ethnicities suddenly love sushi or have a photo at the exact same location with the exact same pose.
Same people who run these platforms will preach about diversity while destroying it.
It’s always been this way - people just don’t realize it.
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.
A publicly-traded company which must increase shareholder value each year is incompatible with Social Networks. You cannot build an infinite growth machine on photos of people's dogs. So they stopped being social networks, and became a generic entertainment channel. Neither Facebook nor Instagram nor X nor Bluesky nor <fill in the blank> are Social Networks in 2026. The only true Social Network platforms are obscure things like SpaceHey.
As soon as devices inserted themselves as a barrier between people and called it social, when it was really the media in waiting, they could hide and direct the nature of interactions, and ultimately, attention.
hot take maybe: but alot of these shifts have come with the sheer explosion in number of people on these platforms and online in general - the arrival of many/most of the mainstream/normies as it were. Perhaps the reality is that alot of these people's lives on and offline actually are dominated by 'fads' and so this is just naturally following that.
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.
I deleted my FB when they gave us the Your Data Or Your Subscription ultimatum. I don’t scroll TikTok, Instagram, or any other video “content”. I do watch some YouTube shorts but only while sitting at a personal computer type laptop or the ones which are connected to external monitors.
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.
I've started visiting quiet rooms[1], just to hear myself think again. The world and the internet has become so loud that some quietness is refreshing. Luckily for me there are several where I live so I've even got a choice.
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.
> What we're seeing is social media splitting in two [...] young people publish a lot of content but it's more funny parodies and remixes of existing material. The goal is to make people laugh, not to tell people about their lives. [...] Whether it's TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram, we are a long way from the "digital town square" of personal interaction that social media was even just a few years ago.
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.
This thread is doomed by a common HN* affliction: People are bandying around key terms without defining them, assuming and pretending that the definitions are universally accepted.
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.
I don't think the quality of discussion about social media suffers from lack of specification. Whether or not you consider HN to be social media, or wherever your decision boundary is, doesn't change that most of the conversation does apply to the general class of apps/websites that have become de-facto short form video platforms. Which lots of people use, so the effects of use are consequential and worth discussing.
The conversations on consciousness though...oh man. I have to steel myself before diving into that mess.
traditionally anti-social behavior meant fighting, keying cars, spraying graffitis etc. A kid with antisocial personality disorder can be a danger to other kids due to their reckless behavior.
social alienation caused by the internet and the social media usually manifests in asocial behavior like withdrawing from the society. in the recent years people have started calling this anti-social behavior, and they often get corrected by pedantic people such as myself.
what BBC meant by "anti-social" in this article is unclear.
They clearly mean the first definition. Ever since the Trump admin got editorial influence at the BBC, the remaining reporters have to be very careful to fly under the radar, or they will lose their jobs like their former colleagues did.
Re-read the reasons it enumerates for moving genuine social interactions to E2EE platforms, or at least 24 hour self-deleting posts.
Social media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel insecure, you leverage your emotions for someone else's aims.
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.
Your theory about cable television is fascinating. I never really watched TV growing up, but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time.
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.
> but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time.
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
One of my in-laws who immigrated from Italy with a big family has a "command center" with a computer he trades stocks on and a few TVs and it drives me nuts when he watches Fox News and they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration" which is exactly what his family did to great success.
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", ...
25 years ago, my italian grandmother was the same way. No command center, but still wildly anti-immigration; probably stoked by the news though. She immigrated as a child, technically naturalized twice (she was naturalized through her fathers naturalization, but married an italian citizen in Italy and renaturalized through his naturalization... because the citizenship of a married woman was determined by her husband's citizenship back then), but definitely in favor of pulling the ladder up.
"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.
Absolutely. It's a very thin line to go from "just pointing out a problem" to "everything is a problem" to "everything is broken" to "nothing I can do will change anything" and then people disengage in the process and politics and everything else becomes the domain of whoever can shout the loudest with volume, rhetoric, or money.
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!
I think the "nothing I can do will change anything" is actually a predominant theme that's emerged over the past decade. I don't know if you've watched any of Adam Curtis' documentaries, but his documentary HyperNormalisation explores this in great detail (most of this documentaries have a similar theme I've found).
Edit: Apologies, I think I mean his documentary: Can't Get You Out of My Head. Essentially it asserts that all revolutions fail, because the people who attempt to overthrow simply become the new guard.
Night Watch (2002), by Terry Pratchett:
> People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
Adam Curtis docs are wonderful. I've grown so accustomed to when people suggest a doc, its some youtuber that posts a doc once a week and utilizes the youtube documentary style to disguise how poorly executed it is. Adam Curtis is certainly not that, for anyone considering this suggestion.
Shit, the jokes about "monitoring the situation" are actually true.
In defense of 'How money works' I don't think there's much in the way of positive anything to cover for his format/field, not for current times in particular
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
There's lots of positive things to cover. He made a video 2 weeks ago about tourism, his first ever as far as I can tell, and there's plenty of interesting things a general Youtube audience could learn about how money flows around in the context of tourism. But he chose to instead talk about "The End Of Budget Tourism", believing (perhaps accurately!) that a negative framing would help get people to click on his video.
YouTube is ruthless in promoting clickbait headlines and thumbnails where it's someone's face with a shocked expression and an attention grabbing byline. You don't play by their rules the algorithm will bury you.
Content creators are a slave to the algorithm. It's so easy for Google to just not show put your video on the feed, even your subscribers. That's why every video looks the same now, if you refuse to play you don't get views.
I'm probably a heavier user of reddit than most but I recently deleted the reddit app on my phone because it's just too much. I still use the site though, but now I use an iPad with old.reddit to make using it as difficult as possible.
Reddit is fun for a while but there is a strong “lowest common denominator” problem that plagues almost every subreddit.
There's a very strong hive mind there. It takes very little to grassroots a subreddit. Just like at the biking subreddits and tire recommendations. It's almost always the GP 5000 that is recommended. Which, don't get me wrong, it's a great tire. But it isn't always the best, and there are tires out there that beat it. The community has just latched on to the one true tire and that's all you'll ever see recommended.
Most subreddits that do any sort of product recommendation have the same problem. For a while, the pilot metro was the fountain pen de jure, or Stronglifts the default recommendation for weightlifting (and now it's never recommended).
If they hive mind rallies around products like this, it also rallys around other ideas, policies and whatnot. Just look at the politics subreddit and see nonstop "Israel bad" "Chuck Schumer is feckless" or "jews control the funding of the democrats" everywhere. Even where it doesn't make sense. You can have one of those muckraking websites that run an article like "Schumer didn't vote against [insert house bill]" and it gets to the top and the narrative is relentless against schumer, even though he literally can't vote against a house measure since he's in the senate. Is he feckless? Absolutely. Does that mean everything he does or doesn't do is a sign of his fecklessness? Absolutely not.
In the hivemind, there's no room for nuance, it's all "look at that bitch eating crackers"
Reddit is a pretty extreme example, though, where mods are basically subreddit dictators. For whatever reason, Reddit gave enormous amount of censorship and conversation-shaping power to mods, to the point where a handful of like-minded mods can enforce in great detail what is allowed to be discussed and what isn't.
Pretty sure if you unmasked the subreddit mods, the reason for the "circling around a particular brand recommendation" observation would become clear.
I follow dozens of subs through RSS and that’s pretty good. You just need a reader which has features to filter out certain users and words (like Newsblur what I use)
Yep, if you haven't lost the will to put a bit of curation work upfront, RSS never stopped being the right answer. Substack has been a pretty good addition to the landscape, bringing lots of people into blogging (without calling it that). But for the skimming/reading interface, RSS beats the app.
I do find it amusing how on the internet the X and Y can be governments or corporations, or the hosted platform itself. Seems like something a competent "we control everything" organization should be able to prevent. But as long as you do nothing but come back for another helping of rage, I guess they're fine with it.
Cuz the actual nuanced reality is that it’s structural. (Most) corporations don’t want to control the world but they do have their own self-interests, but because there are so many corporations there’s always some corporation controlling some facet.
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.
I've noticed that I watch much less funny shit and much more "you should be afraid" but I really don't know how to change this.
News are for news worthy things - which are things that deviate from everyday life. Wars, disasters, crime, in short things of concern. As well as political struggles, economic struggles, and any kind of conflict.
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
> 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.
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.
Some are absolutely better than others when it comes to this. But I was shocked and instantly repulsed when hearing and seeing CNN at an airport after having been away from televisions for a few months.
> 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.
Then imagine these newscasters giving a public speech in that same way. You'd think you had stepped into the quarterly meeting of psychotics planning a spree.
EDIT:
And most importantly in my living room example: That's where the TV is. If you wouldn't invite a person in the flesh and blood to your living room to behave like this, why would you invite them through your TV?
What about true crime and murder series on Netflix? Who would want to spend their evenings with a flesh and blood person in their bedroom who would go on into gory details for hours about murders and abductions? But still people invite these reptilians to their bedrooms through the TV.
I used to fall asleep to Forensic Files every night. Something about the host's voice on low volume puts me right to sleep.
The basic problem of CNN is that a person who tunes in at 5:30 pm has to get basically the same story as someone who tunes in at 7:30 pm so they have to repeat the same "news" over and over again. You could have a magazine format with lots of little documentaries about little different things that happen all over the world and you would be better "informed" in the sense of learning something but you wouldn't have as much shared experience with other viewers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bagdikian
is most famous for his book The Media Monopoly but his obscure 1971 book The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media was highly predictive of what news on the web was going to look like because he had worked for the RAND corporation and tried to sell a very unprogressive (in terms of business) media interest on the idea of online personalized news and they didn't want to make the investment.
That book has some of the most damning indictments of the concept of "news" from a McLuhanite perspective that ever been put to writing, most of all a description of how the editor of a small-town newspaper has about 6 seconds to look at a newswire story and decide if he wants to run it. It's a fundamental act of violence against the framework of reality to throw out 99.999% of it and the kind of "bias" that people get stuck on where people think we need an equal balance of stories that infuriate right-wingers and infuriate left-wingers.
Try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwgJgTL5JmE
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.
> But the sickening aspect of cable news is the way the presenters talk.
"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.
"one of them always has a 24 hour news going "
Why didn't you say which one? I bet it is Fox.
It doesn't matter which one. My mother mainlines BBC News which is state-owned, establishment-centrist, has no adverts or profits, but has the same effect of dialing up the viewer's fear of the outside world.
While I'm not American, calling bbc centrist in 2026 is just objectively false. It was centrist in 2000s, but it hasn't been in at least a decade.
Whose interests does it serve now? That is the main thing to understand of you are to get anything out of news.
FWIW there's a new Director-general: Matt Brittin, whose CV includes Cambridge rowing team, MBA from LBS, McKinsey, Trinity Mirror (owner of The Daily Mirror) and 18 years at Google.
He was the Google boss who said in 2016 that he doesn't know his own salary.
Presumably he wants what's best for all of us.
Everyone can agree BBC has an agenda. But it usually looks like no one can agree what that agenda actually is.
sadly forces in the BBC also value "engagement". Idk how we got here, it never used to be like this.
This is why cultural stories now are higher than before on the main site. It used to be the case that news was _just_ news. Politics, crime, economics, health, environment, etc. Now culture stories, like puff pieces about the royals or entertainment end up on the front page.
Because the BBC now has to justify its licence fee to the government, so they need engagement metrics and all the rest like what proportion of X demographic they're reaching.
Back in the day, both the BBC and universities were funded by the government without the stereotype of a fresh MBA graduate in charge. Back in the day before MOOCs, the BBC produced programmes for the Open University because that was the way to get video content out to the nation.
> puff pieces about the royals
have been on the front page of the tabloids since way before the internet.
It matters very very much. Fox News is much much worse than most news channels. It was created specifically as GOP propaganda.
I had a relative for which it was CNN. We even share the same political views, but watching that stuff or having it on in the background literally from 8 am until midnight is tiring.
when in a hotel on vacations we sometimes have a television and hence bbc or cnn... i used to nickname cnn "the fire squad": whatever the topic they're just shouting and hyperventilating... it is tiring indeed
It's actually CNN, but they flip to local news often too to hear about all the car wrecks and local murders and robberies and other things to make them afraid.
Fox and CNN are both bad, but different flavors of bad.
Fox is bad in a way far more fundamental than CNN. It was created specifically to lie to people.
HN is absolutely social media in all senses of the word and meets your definition of cable TV pretty well -- it's a news blog run by a startup incubator as a way to increase discussion and submarine in their concept and products.
"if you're not paying for it, you're the product" and that is just as true here as anywhere.
I agree half way. While recent years HN seems to have imported much of Reddit, it still has an anti-establishment undertone and decent moderation to keep it from sprawling
HN is social media. Social media is a spectrum.
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.)
You don't see pictures and videos directly on the site. It's text links and text comments and discussions. In the minimal sense of the word, even printed text is media, so it's technically true that HN is social media, but I think it's more like a news aggregator and discussion forum.
How does being text only make it not social media?
Good explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445343
Because the people who think HN is social media and avoid social media aren't going to see this and respond. It's a selection bias.
> OP: The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
I've never appreciated the low-effort handwaves of claiming that HN, old-school Internet forums, USENET, etc. are "social media", simply because they aren't. HN's primary medium is text, often headlined by a link to some other site. That isn't social media. 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".
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.
HN has comments which are social media. I don’t get why people care, because social media isn’t intrinsically bad; I always say “mainstream social media” or “toxic social media” to clarify what I’m referring to.
> 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.
Comment threads are not “social media”, no matter how badly anyone wants to redefine that they are. They date back to the 1970s on USENET and mailing lists.
That might imply USENET and mailing lists to be forms or primitive forms of social media.
>HN has comments which are social media. I don’t get why people care
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.
see IMO it isn't. HN is an online community. Same as forums, and BBSs were. I don't think they were social media really - they're online spaces that form around a shared interest, where Facebook etc were originally online spaces that augmented a real world community.
But we're a long way from that now.
> HN is an online community. Same as forums, and BBSs were.
That is the very definition of social media.
"Social media I like" vs. "Social media I don't like" isn't valid categorization.
if you think social media just means any space online with multiple people in it, then I guess we just disagree on what social media is.
Is the linux kernel mailing list social media? was usenet?
> if you think
What do you think social media is? What are the clear criteria that make something social media, or make it not social media?
If you know HN is not social media that you have a clear demarcation of what is.
Not that user but I don't think this is as difficult as you're making it out to be?
On Reddit, Instagram, Tiktok et al I can create a community on that platform. I can get find other people into Booktok, I can join the Rowing subreddit, I can get into Knittinggram or whatever. Posters expect roughly their micro-community to see their posts, users expect to see their micro-community's posts.
On hacker news I see the same community everyone else does. If HN was a vBulletin forum with threads posted for links it would function almost 1:1 the same, I guess all you'd need to change is a modification for making threads bump on vote behaviour instead of latest-post.
TL;DR. If you ask me, the essence of social media today is the algorithm and the "social curation". Is what I see dictated by some behind the scenes algorithm and by the mob (votes, views, engagement, flags, clicks)? It's social media.
But fair enough. Don't forums have subforums for different interests, topics and specific discussions and sub-communities? They have the option to follow other members or topics in a customized consumption experience. In my personal experience on large and small forums, including those I administered or moderated, most users lived their entire life in specific subforums. The user that only posted in the CPU subforum, or the Nikon subforum. The user who created the "photos of flowers" or "case modding" topic and only hung around there with kindred souls in their micro-community. Forums were really reddit at a smaller scale.
> I guess all you'd need to change is a modification for making threads bump on vote behaviour instead of latest-post.
This is downplaying the weight the hidden algorithm has on what you see on HN. Much like every other social media site and very much unlike classic forums, submissions and comments here live and die at the hand of an algorithm that decides whether today you get to read about the Israel/Gaza conflict, about Democrats/Republicans. This algorithm is driven on one hand by the social aspect (people deciding what's media and what isn't, hence the "social"), on the other hand by some obscure engagement rules that none of us can see or define.
I don't make it "seem" more complicated, it "is" more complicated because experts don't fully agree on exactly what social media is. Everyone tries to use their experience, preference, and common sense and these all vary.
P.S. The current top comment isn’t there because it’s the most recent, the only objectively correct one, or a mod pinned it. It’s there because the algorithm driven by social engagement decided it’s the media I should see first.
I said so above. I think originally they were "online spaces that augmented a real world community". Even twitter, you mostly started by following people you knew or had heard of.
I get that this isn't at all where we are any more. And y'know, everyone's gonna use terms to mean whatever they want. I'm fine with that. I guess I just think its pointless if "social media" means "anything online where people can write messages"
>What are the clear criteria that make something social media
I have no idea why people are making some mysterious deep question out of this, wikipedia quite literally offers a definition[1]. Web 2.0 based platforms, user generated content, social networking including social mechanisms such as followers, groups and lists.
This doesn't apply to HN. You could randomly assign everyone a new name tomorrow and it wouldn't matter. Identity is virtually irrelevant here, there are no mechanisms to connect users to each other, there are no networks of people, users do not generate their own content and there is a criterion that what is discussed is of of public, not merely social or personal interest.
If some crash wiped out all HN users tomorrow and we'd all start over at zero almost nothing would change. If that happend on social media, like Instagram, the site would be dead. That's the social part.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media#Definition
That is not what they said. Strawman fallacy, and you still refuse to define the term.
Well, it's A definition, which is more than the opposing side has yet to offer.
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.
> HN is social media
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.
HN is public forum (one of the last), it's a bit different thing
Calling this out as the primary reason HN is not social media. Forums existed for years before social media was ever a thing. HN is indistinguishable from a forum in the early 2000s.
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
Having some sort of recommendation algorithm seems to also be a defining feature of modern social media, which is something old school forums didn’t have.
Reddit is a forum, is it not social media?
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.
Reddit absolutely has algorithmic feeds since it ipo'ed (maybe earlier but I used third party apps so I wasn't subjected to them). 90% of my home page is bullshit I didn't ask for.
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.
Forums came before social media. It's a forum.
Forums don’t have algorithmic front page and upvote/downvote system
You can’t bump a thread to the top of HN so everyone sees it
I agree but there’s definitely room for nuance. I follow a lot of artists because I genuinely like seeing their work. I follow a lot of miniature painters for their tips and tricks. I follow my close friends to see what they’re up to.
I think the folks you’re talking about are influencers. Which I wholeheartedly agree with your take in that case.
That’s just advertising. Yes, mom and pop stores can advertise “just like” the multinational corporations can. Guess who gets the lion’s share of airtime and guess who has armies of men+machines crafting the most convincing messaging.
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
I am thrilled you pointed this out. I also get tired of seeing that.
Why is nobody here defining social media, put down the clear criteria? "I say this, I am tired of people saying that" isn't productive if everyone has their own interpretation of what's being discussed.
Social media grew out of social networking sites, as far as I remember. The distinct feature of social networking sites is that they are focused on… well, social networks, comprised of nodes of users and links of friendships. Your content feed is naturally “personalized” in the sense that you see the posts of your friends.
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.
Social media is any website whose purpose is socialization i.e. “small-talk” style discussion, with many (50+) members.
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).
In my case, I don't think most people who claim HN is social media are making a serious argument. They are taking two different things which have a few points of inter-comparison and using that as a basis to claim those two things are actually equivalent. This is done as a retort (eg, "you say you hate social media, but you're on social media _right now_") rather than in service of a larger argument.
I'm making it as a very serious argument.
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.
I agree that HN is "social media", but I'm starting to wonder if Facebook/Twitter/TikTok/Reddit/YouTube aren't "social media", but instead a new category of media tangentially related as OP posted to cable news. Something like "attention media" where your attention is the point of it.
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.
I suspect a big part of the reason you feel this way is that you don't see advertising on HN. Because HN itself is one gigantic advertisement.
That isn't true, because I don't see ads on YouTube either, but I know their algorithms keep leading me to staying on it as much as possible.
HN doesn't feel the need to keep my attention 24/7.
Genuine question - how many times a day do you load HN? Is it already getting enormous amounts of your attention?
I don't have the data to quantify it, but M-F, 6a-4p, maybe once an hour or so just to check the headlines. If I have comments, I might check my threads to see if I need to respond. On the Weekends, though, I might check it in the morning and again before bed just to see if anything interesting happened.
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.
By strict definition it obviously is social media. “Interactive forms of media that allow users to interact with and publish to each other, generally by means of the Internet.”
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.
The feed is algorithmic, but its not personalized, and the algorithm isn't directly optimizing for engagement.
I believe these are the exact technical advancement the top-level poster was contrasting with cable networks, so the distinction matters here.
Sure, but deconstructing the platform to look at the engagement points is also useful. Some things that I think set HN apart in a good way:
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.
You wrote a paragraph to say you don't "think" the others are right. What is the definition that made you think this?
Given all the arguments above this post, I don't think there's a lot of value in trying to categorise any particular website as a yes/no to "is this social media". All that achieves is people trying to litigate whether a site fits a definition nobody can agree on.
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?
Because the people who say this like HN and dislike Facebook and their post-hoc rationalizations are transparent.
HN and Facebook are entirely different beasts. I have no idea who you are, stickfigure. I can't remember usernames from HN, I can't follow people, I can't curate my feed
not every user submitted feed with upvotes is the same
You can always find some slight difference. HN is orange, FB is blue!
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.
Yeah, none of that makes the two comparable.
Both a wheelbarrow and a Ferrari have wheels.
My personal criteria to specifically identify social media apart from other online interaction:
* 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.
What about Mastodon or other federated platforms? If someone created a new Facebook, but it didn't have these corporate terms, it would still be social media.
People generally do not consider IRC social media, but its much more engaging and active than something like Facebook or Twitter.
We keep saying it, because it's what it is. There's some black box (that can _sometimes_ be reached via dang) that determines what you see on HN's front page, and this place is just as susceptible to trends and rabbit holes as any short form video app, it just doesn't have the funny sound effects.
> just as susceptible
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.
The personalized algorithm is not the root issue though. The root issue is that social media sites live by increasing engagement of its viewers. Because of this, they all get away from the original stated purpose of bringing people together, and go all in on maximizing engagement by increasingly shady ways. Of course, the personalized algorithm is a huge one, but there are also things like "Show HN" controlling what is on the front page, selectively taking down flagged material. Remember, HN has advertisements as well, and will regularly post job ads for positions in startups. They know that outright going in the direction of 'personalized algorithm' would alienate their viewerbase, so they avoid it, but still do all of the other practices that social media sites do.
Yes, just because it is uncomfortable for them to realize, doesn't make it not true. Words have meanings.
This is so different from my personal experience that I feel like one of those kids being told chickens used to be dinosaurs.
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 ?
Not just television. Also the supermarket checkout aisle magazines. Not just tabloids, although that, too. Also the "glossy" magazines. Vogue, People, Us, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, McCall's, Seventeen, etc.
The commercialization of the engines of culture continues.
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
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.
The content here is very different. I can kill maybe an hour a day reading HN, which is a lot, but the feed does end. Most days, I don't want to spend an hour here, because the feed is designed to push popular content to the top, and a lot of it is content I don't care about. Other sites have infinite feeds designed to keep me personally hooked as long as possible.
HN is a secret third thing: A forum
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
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.
> In theory AI should have helped.
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 agree with everything you said. Most open source projects are limited by contributor labor. Generative AI does help with that problem, but it introduces a sea of vibe coded slop as a side effect. Truly a Genie/Jinn.
> It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation.
What baffles me is that they call this manipulation "influencing" and they consider this a positive word.
Similar is when people refer to themselves or others as "content creators"
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.
Was there ever a time when any of the classical/fine arts were used as propaganda or promotional material, prior to the medium elevating to loftier aims?
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...
> HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word.
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.
That's what I took away from it, too. Facebook circa 2008 was great: your friends talked what were up to; everyone posted their pictures from that party last night; you didn't see anything from anyone who wasn't at most a second-degree connection. There were problems - people were jerks, and worse, and some people got pulled into chasing clout, and promoted bullshit - but they were human-scale problems, and you could largely scrub your feed from things / people like that. Unfortunately for the entire world, that sort of use wasn't profitable enough.
HN has plenty of social media components.
Think a better version is: HN is not an advertising-controlled social media website. That specific version makes most sense to me.
HN is literally an ad.
I don't think of Show HN as quite the same. Nor Ask HN. I know that otherwise there is plenty of "advertising" within posts/comments/etc.
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.
When a professor at Rice walked us through Don Tapscott's book Growing up Digital in 2001, we had such an optimistic view of the future. Don highlighted how with broadcast media in the 20th century, the viewer had little choice on what to watch. Now that the internet was available to the masses, he explained how much new generations would benefit from what he called interactive media which enabled someone to explore and learn anything of interest instead of being forced to consume whatever was being fed through the television. When we'd say there was "nothing on" we felt bored, and maybe we did endure some manipulation by commercials, but I agree that contemporary social media is far worse. In the 20th century, boredom from channel surfing at least encouraged some to get off the couch and go read a book or shoot some hoops or play a board game with friends. Allow me the stereotype (exaggeration?) for a moment to note that we had the ultimate nerdy kid who wanted to be cool, and all he could think of with gazillions of dollars at his disposal was to make a thing that turned everyone into anti-social nerds by staying glued to their screens instead of interacting IRL with fellow humans. Who would have accepted that fictional plot as believable?
https://dontapscott.com/books/growing-digital/
HN has its own share of enticement/manipulation - most recently with regards to AI.
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.
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
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.
Ads became the default business model of the web. When people started to get sick of blaring in-your-face blinking banners, it mutated into search ads and placement. The same thing happened to mobile apps and games, YouTube, Facebook, instagram, even Tik Tok. When it becomes too blatant then it embeds itself one level deeper as placements and endorsements.
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.
- And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. -
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
There’s also an end to the feed. I forget the limit, but at one point I think I hit the maximum number of pages at like 50 (quality drops pretty dramatically, by like page 10 there was almost nothing interesting or notable).
Social media was first (that I know of) weaponized in 2016 by Cambridge Analytica to manipulate Facebook users to vote for Brexit & Trump. I'm surprised that the article left those totally out.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
That incident was definitely ahead of its time, but before that, targeted ads for scams were propping the industry up. For instance, Experian used to spend $$$ to funnel people into credit card scams -- one year, they stole our CC#, and I called our top 5 US bank to dispute the charges. The bank fraud department rep said Experian drove most of their case load, to the point where they had a special flow to block just Experian affiliates because physically reissuing stolen cards was too expensive. You can back estimate how many predatory ad dollars that involved. Of course, there was also a long tail of smaller companies that wanted to sell supplements, useless other useless services, etc.
Before that, you could pay for placement on all the major search engines except early Google, which basically just broke search. (Google does similar stuff now, in the same way they "don't" sell personal information or read your gmail, but somehow make lots of money off it anyway, and target things only mentioned in private correspondence).
LLMs will be next. The only solution is to refuse to pay for access with your attention. That means no copilot, gemini, alexa or siri, since those are all ad supported or adjacent now. ChatGPT and Claude are on borrowed time. I suspect the open weight models will be the last ones to fall.
HN is not social media. It’s social media with type safety.
I love me some knowledge forums and sites like HN that allow for general discourse. I’m afraid an entire generation doesn’t know what that is like.
You absolutely nailed it. It's not 'social' anymore. That's a mask of what it used to be - it's the coercion and manipulation by big tech and by advertisers (AND by 'influencers' who don't have the $$$ to advertise).
> HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word
Hard disagree. The upvote/downvote system and the algorithmic front page makes it a social media to me.
I really forgot how stupid cable tv was 20 years ago. In my area, that old stuff is now getting broadcast over the air, which is the only kind of tv I get. It's not the history channel's Ancient Aliens exactly, but it is all the 2nd tier offshoot stuff that didn't air on the big cable channels. About half of them are "about" Hitler, and the topics are treated so unseriously you get things like "Dude, look! This door has an H on it! This must have been where he went!"
It's so stupid you almost can't help watching, but I'll be dammed if they didn't get me to. Wild times.
I must be using social media wrong because all I see on my timeline are funny pics and niche porn.
Are you on the correct site/app?? :-P
Rule 34, bro.
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word.
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.
I always delineated the two as one being corporate social media, I do wonder if there is a better word/phrase for it but IME if you use the phrase two describe it as such to those that were online pre-2008 they immediately grasp the difference; but these people are likely a minority.
IMHO both of these problems stem from the same source: Engagement.
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.
It's not tiresome. It's spot on. Nothing is as addictive as HN.
Wikipedia is.
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
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.
Is it not clear at this point that the real issue is how lacking the term "social media" even is? We have people here arguing that BBSs were social media, it will not be long until email is considered social media.
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.
“Social network” is a better term. I think “parasocial network” is better; the former implies small group chats while the latter doesn’t.
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.
> Is it not clear at this point that the real issue is how lacking the term "social media" even is?
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".
I think it can become diluted to a meaningless term, or co-opted to mean different things to different audiences (not to sidetrack from the point but the first two examples I can think of what I mean are "fake news" or "woke")
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
Well said. But I think when people say “HN isn’t social media” what they’re really saying is “HN is nutritious social media, not junk food social media”. Not sure I agree with that, but there’s some arguments to be made at least. HN generally doesn’t let itself get too political. Anyone who posts too much political or polemic stuff will get put on a “cooldown list” that rate limits their posting (ask me how I know).
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.
>And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
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.
(Pedantry erupts below)
HN is not and never has been “social media”. It’s a threaded discussion forum.
If you're on Android, you can use revanced to patch social network apps, to, among other things, remove content from non-friends (and ads).
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 article made me reminisce. I was a young adult when Facebook crept in. I felt the constant pressure to do cool stuff so I could put it on Facebook and get likes. I used to browse through friends walls, look at their carefully manicured photo albums, no doubt driven by similar anxieties.
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...
As people’s default shifts to consumption, they stop posting content themselves. They also stop living a life worth posting about… especially when they start comparing themselves with “influencers”, who have made a full time job out of pretending to live an interesting life.
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.
> It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this.
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)?
Interesting, I thought Revanced was just for YouTube, I didn't realize it worked with other social media sites too.
Look into Morphe as a revanced alternative, it's by the peeps who make the Youtube patches and I find it better to use and it can draw on the same patches.
This article has struck a nerve in the comment section. It's describing how traditional social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are not used for social features anymore, but for content discovery. The descriptions of how people are using Facebook to find new content anonymously are not that different from how we use Hacker News, which has reignited the debate about whether Hacker News is social media.
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.
Hacker News is certainly addictive. As I've started to limit my interactions on other sites like Instagram and X by removing the apps from my phone, I've seen I spend more time on this site than I did before. The content is a lot more interesting and relevant to me, so I don't see it as a problem (Yet) but I don't think that'll always be the case.
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.
> 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.
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...
Yes, the game is over, the corps have won. Where the Internet used to be a forum for creativity, it's now a weapon of influence. Where we used to have an anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) playground, we are now monitored more than anywhere else. Where we used to be able to genuinely connect, everything is now artificial and manufactured. And where we once had control, we are now the product.
this made me think of humdog’s pandora’s vox https://gist.github.com/kolber/2131643
We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.
The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.
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.
This is uncomfortably true.
Mastodon seems to solve the problems for those that use it. It's a genuine social network that people use to talk to each other and form real communites. Not owned or manipulated by any one person or organization, no algorithms or gaming. It's a constant meme that "going viral" on mastodon is when your shitpost gets 50 boosts and likes.
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.
I’d rather ask the Amish how can we fix the internet than a bunch of Bay Area VCs and FAANG employees.
Not all problems have technical solutions.
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.
I miss when social media was mostly about my friends’ lives. It actually helped us stay in touch.
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.
The attention economy is real, your eyes have value that is surprisingly high, and buying out that attention so you can have a pure you-centered experience would just be too expensive for most people.
Instagram gets ~$27/mo/user from advertisers. Would you spend $27/mo for Instagram? Probably not. Hence the financial void is filled with ads.
Social media was never really “social” in my opinion. Reading updates from hundreds of people you have shallow interactions with offers the illusion of having a social life. So I’m not sure if this change to “fads” makes it meaningfully less social than it already was.
Curious how old you are?
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.
This was my experience - when I was in high school was right around the time that Facebook started to replace Myspace. Who you were friends with online and who/how many people liked your photos was a big deal, and it very much mirrored the actual IRL dynamics/relationships we had in school - what happened online was directly related to what happened in real life. Around 2013 it felt like that started to change as the social media sites shifted more towards algorithmically recommended content, like joke sites and videos, with some ads. At that time it was still fun to watch it and share it with friends, because it was so new.
I was in college at that time and I did not get this feeling in any possible way.
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.
It's been downhill since FB removed pokes.
I think they're still there, but deeply hidden in their menus
Yeah - MySpace accurately mirrored high school circa 2004, and Facebook accurately mirrored college circa 2007 (complete with it being elitist where it was hard to get into when it first launched, just like real colleges).
But that was 20 years ago.
I worked at the IT help desk at my college when Facebook was first rolling out. We’d constantly get high school seniors calling up to try and get their college email address early, just so they could register with Facebook.
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.
I was in high school when Facebook took off in my country (2008). And fair enough, first few years were maybe more “social-ish”. I left the platform by 2012 though.
Might also say more about me and my social behaviour than the social media platforms themselves, I never cared about it too much.
personal blogs, tumblr, forums, BBS, some kind of irc and platforms like Discords remained active throughout the 2010s to actually be social
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
I am very critical of social media but this is far too of a myopic take. There is a ton of real life social benefit to these platforms.
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.
This is bizarre to me, because anyone I know well enough to link up with on a trip also knows where I live and vice versa.
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.
> trip also knows where I live and vice versa.
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.
Yeah this is my feeling as well. I have a handful of friends in different countries, when we are near each other we just send a quick text.
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.
I fell out of touch with my relatives in New England and got back in touch because I got back on Facebook so something social does come out of it once in a while.
Yes the social aspect does definitely still exist, it's just half buried by all the other nonsense.
Sounds like adict talk to me ;) Seriously though, the legit claims of benefits are from people who need outreach and don't want to pay for advertising. But your favorite taco truck gets attention while you get to slip into depressive oblivion.
There are legitimate benefits. I just think its very easy to argue (which I agree) that the benefits don't necessarily outweigh the harm for most people.
For a window, it was really social, early to late 2000s (anyone in NL remember Hyves?). It was a great way for keeping up with friends as you went to different schools, when they were traveling, etc.
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)
I’d krabbel your HN profile if it let me. Respect!
You're confusing social networks and social media.
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.
I 'member when facebook was campus only. For about 5 minutes my friends were friends.
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.
For a brief period it was social. Even if you had hundreds of people you had barely interacted with there were still people you continued to interact in real life from that lot.
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.
When I was in college it served as a useful directory of everyone I met (like, "oh, who was that guy again?" type of questions) and also essentially every offline event was organized through Facebook. It served a clear social function that posting in meme groups does not.
I wrote a humor post about it https://open.substack.com/pub/yelluwcomedy/p/old-school?r=7c...
Facebook definitely was social before about 2010. Especially if you were at uni in the golden era before they left everyone in.
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.
It was quite social if you only added your actual friends instead of everyone.
Now the feeds are just pure algorithm and very seldom I see someone I know.
As someone that was raised in a small town, the feed was very shallow compared to my actual interactions with friends. It was great for status updates (especially for friends in foreign countries), but messenger was way more popular than the feed.
Close friends are better. However I want to know how my now very distant old friends (ie from high school) and relatives are doing. I want to know when they have babies, see a couple pictures of their kids dance reticle - it gives me something to talk about when our next reunion comes around.
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.
> I want to know how my now very distant old friends (ie from high school) and relatives are doing
YMMV, but I got all of these through words of mouth (and WhatsApp status updates). I think it’s ok to be estranged from a friend or a relative. The next time, we meet, I can ask them how everything is going and what has happened. And if they want they can show me pictures then.
All right, but "I personally don't care for that" wasn't actually the proposition anyone was arguing with.
For some context, messenger (originally FB chat) didn't launch until 2008. A year later in 2009 FB started sorting posts by popularity, by 2011 they'd switched the newsfeed to a blogspam / advertising feed, burying your friends posts. Depending on your age, you may never have used 'golden age' Facebook. As someone who was in college 2003 - 2008, there was a period in which Facebook was an insanely useful tool for organising your social life. You could literally make a facebook post about an event or even stating where you were on a given night, and know that people were likely to see it.
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.
A new game: determine when you meet someone if they use tik-tok or not without asking them.
People's opinions are groomed and programmed. It's pretty hilarious how small minded people are.
You’re just learning how small minded people are? In the US there was an attempted insurrection filmed live. We elected the guy who led it who then pardoned 1600 jailed criminals. Now he is trying to creat a slush fund to give them millions as reparations. 33% of the country is delighted by this. These are Plank sized brains.
billions; 30%. (His approval rating is finally starting to drop below the historic floor).
Where are you seeing 30%?
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.
yep, even people I thought educated voted for this fool. seriously, they have college degrees, but apparently get their news from random social media accounts
I could very quickly sus out what was on FOX news last night by the conversations my coworkers have.
> sus out
Intentional typo as a good pun?
What are the tells? Since COVID I’ve noticed that every new person I meet seems to harbor at least 1 or 2 oddball opinions. Conversation tends to veer into weirder places than it used to, creating a surreal sort of feeling of being in the world. I’ve felt that this is just a result of everyone being tuned by whatever personalized feed is amplifying or directing their base instincts.
I think what's more interesting is that the odd opinions don't mean anything anymore. Before someone with odd opinions tended to be either really crazy or they were intelligent and thought a long time about something. Nowadays they seem shallow, they saw something on tiktok but don't really know what they're talking about, just totally rehashing whatever they heard.
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.
The tell is they don't know it.
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.
Nah, this is the same self-congratulatory dismissive mindset humans have been having about each other for years. “Wake up, sheeple,” “NPC,” etc.
We’re not lacking for opportunities to believe the worst of each other. It’s not something TikTok invented.
Anti-social take. People are being exploited by some of the smartest people in the world who use natural human desires against people but somehow they are at fault for being small minded?
Yes, we've moved from town squares to private parties - whatsapp chats, discord servers, even IRC still exists. (Bluesky is a bit of an exception but they'll need to get enough stable revenue at some point.)
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.
If this subject interests you, and you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
40 years old now and as relevant as ever.
IMO even better than Chomsky's Necessary Illusions (1989) or Bernay's Propaganda (1928) at giving you that backstage at Disney world feeling.
I used to browse through my instagram feed a few times per month. Just to keep updated about those friends who often posted there. Now it's mostly crappy shorts and I can't even find the "friend feed" anymore. No idea if it's just well hidden or completely gone. Now I don't use it anymore at all.
It is so well-hidden, in fact, that there is no visual indicator that it exists at all, so you cannot be blamed for thinking it is gone. On the homepage (house icon) tap the Instagram logo and select "Following." It will present you with a chronological feed of posts from only those you follow.
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.
Wow, I've been using instagram for 5 years and I just learned that there's a following-only feed. I had always just assumed that Instagram was designed in bad faith to always interleave posts from people you didn't follow to try to capture your attention. It's incredibly annoying that I can't set this as my default.
This is why I don’t understand why my family/friends keep wanting me on Facebook or Instagram. It’s not about keeping up with each other. They just want it to be slightly easier to send me memes. But if I wanted to browse memes, I could just go do that. I don’t need them sending me their feed with a bunch of jokes that are funny to them, but not me.
It's so frustrating when this is brought up as if this hasn't been the case for almost 10 years now.
I think I'm on an A/B test on the Facebook app, now whenever I open the app it goes straight to reels and starts playing videos with sound enabled. I looked through all settings to try to disable this but couldn't, so I finally just gave up and uninstalled it
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
Maybe I'm in the minority here (early 30s, married + kids), but my social media feed is primarily my friends. Though, if we go into the Reels tab, my friends and I share videos back and forth through DMs.
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.
I (mostly) stopped looking at Facebook around 2016. It just wasn't fun anymore; and at least for me, my feed was all political nonsense trying to manipulate me.
While I partly agree, I also disagree. I still use Instagram a lot to keep in touch with friends I've made in different places. Generally as long as they are making posts then my feeds have those posts. It's only when they do not and supposedly IG "runs out" that I don't.
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.
I'm bored when I see how inactive platforms like Discord and forums have become
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 :/
This is usually why I collapse the 2-3 top-most ranked comment threads. They’re very often gamed and calibrated for engagement. Every so often anecdotes/stories that completely ignore the subject matter (sometimes dangerous if medical). I wish there were other ways to organize comments (rip slashdot) but this usually helps to make HN less social media-y.
I remember trying bluesky and realizing it isn't just the services I don't like. I don't like ... what all the social media users like. The heavy memeification / gamification for attention. Trite posts, posts that seem like the middle of a conversation ... really all negative bits about internet discourse.
But most everyone there likes it that way...
I've deleted all my social media and haven't looked back. It's safe to assume Meta tracks every little detail about you: what kind of content you like, how long you look at each post, your political stance, etc. Every single metric you can possibly think of... they're collecting.
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.
We used to call them social networking sites, now they're social media sites.
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
The pendulum has finally swung the other way. There is no longer the need for people to shamelessly air their life on live feeds, and when something serious happens, people prefer to share it in a messaging group.
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.
The only social media I really use is linkedin and X. I find linkedin useful for following companies and colleagues, and im pretty picky about who I accept or request as a friend. I also find X to be insightful, but I only use it to follow people for stock research.
X is excellent for following niche research interests but they’ve been pushing quite hard to force political news/opinions into the feeds which is really annoying.
It's run by a guy who literally did a nazi salute. One of their most prolific users is named "catturd". I'm astonished that anybody in research or science still remains there.
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.
Does anyone remember Path?
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
Given that even reaction videos from modern Jerry Springer figures with 20 million subscribers can attract 20,000 comments that all parrot their guru and demand doxxing of the target or worse, it is no longer a mystery how totalitarian states form.
Maybe that is unfair to Jerry Springer. He at least heard both sides of a story.
Social media does not only spread bad ideas, but degrades the symbolic machinery people use to form ideas in the first place. It trains reflexes where thought should be. There is no symbolic lattice for things to land and it turns people into reactive zombies.
I actually used hacker news to get off of social media 2 years ago. I consider it ‘medically assisted treatment’ like suboxone for heroin addicts.
I have never been interested in the “normal” social media apps like Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, and the like. The content never appealed to me as a consumer enough to get started. Occasionally something would go viral enough that a friend would eventually link it to me and that was the whole experience.
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.
"we were promised social networks, what we got was social media" -- Elad Gil
i have cut off social media related to my actual career, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Because people laughed at me for becoming a programmer. So I created my own homepage, and for communication, I mainly read posts on large Chinese tech communities, Hacker News, or dev.to.
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.
My bar for "is it social media?" is "is the sole benefit network effects?"
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.
Facebook stopped being good when they took away the order by most recent option IMO.
Social media feeds have been completely broken for many years. What social media used to be, has now moved to group chats and channels.
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.
I've been able to quit short-form content, but does anyone have any tips on how to quit long-form content like YouTube or Netflix?
I use the firefox extension "Unhook" to completely hide suggested content on Youtube. Really effective, I kindof can't believe how much time I spent getting suckered into watching video essays that absolutely did not deliver.
Time box it. I play video games for 1 hour on Fridays. More than that and it makes me depressed.
Books are a thing.
Or, buy a bluray player, then find a library.
Yes, Tiktok staff made this point when they emerged in 2020 - "Tiktok isn't a social media platform, they're an entertainment platform". Meta's catching up.
That makes talking about the issues a lot simpler. Calling HN a social media makes much more sense if we talk about Instagram, or Facebook as entertainment or advertising platforms.
Social media hasn't been "social" in more than a decade. It stopped being that when algorithmic feeds and infinite scroll were introduced.
I built a safari extension called Scrolless [1] to try and solve this issue (Disclaimer: it's a $4.99 one time unlock). If you use social media in the web instead of the native apps, and use Scrolless, you'll only see posts from your friends, no recommendation algorithms anywhere.
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...
Friends haven't been a focus of social media feeds for almost 20 years now.
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.
Twitter was similarly bad.
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.
What I find unsettling is the monoculture that is being created by platforms like Instagram. You will see a 30 year old man from Alabama engaging in the same trends as a 19 year old girl from Japan. Suddenly everyone likes matcha and is posting photos of themselves in photo booths. On dating apps, tons of women from all ethnicities suddenly love sushi or have a photo at the exact same location with the exact same pose.
Same people who run these platforms will preach about diversity while destroying it.
parasocial media
It’s always been this way - people just don’t realize it.
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.
A publicly-traded company which must increase shareholder value each year is incompatible with Social Networks. You cannot build an infinite growth machine on photos of people's dogs. So they stopped being social networks, and became a generic entertainment channel. Neither Facebook nor Instagram nor X nor Bluesky nor <fill in the blank> are Social Networks in 2026. The only true Social Network platforms are obscure things like SpaceHey.
Imagine if everyone called it "fad media" or something more accurate. It would be dead overnight.
The only thing keeping it afloat is the lie that it's social.
"Fantasy Media" or "Social Fantasy"?
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.
Or just f ad media.
As soon as devices inserted themselves as a barrier between people and called it social, when it was really the media in waiting, they could hide and direct the nature of interactions, and ultimately, attention.
Now? It's been like that for a decade.
hot take maybe: but alot of these shifts have come with the sheer explosion in number of people on these platforms and online in general - the arrival of many/most of the mainstream/normies as it were. Perhaps the reality is that alot of these people's lives on and offline actually are dominated by 'fads' and so this is just naturally following that.
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.
I deleted my FB when they gave us the Your Data Or Your Subscription ultimatum. I don’t scroll TikTok, Instagram, or any other video “content”. I do watch some YouTube shorts but only while sitting at a personal computer type laptop or the ones which are connected to external monitors.
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.
I've started visiting quiet rooms[1], just to hear myself think again. The world and the internet has become so loud that some quietness is refreshing. Luckily for me there are several where I live so I've even got a choice.
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
In other news, water is wet.
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.
> What we're seeing is social media splitting in two [...] young people publish a lot of content but it's more funny parodies and remixes of existing material. The goal is to make people laugh, not to tell people about their lives. [...] Whether it's TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram, we are a long way from the "digital town square" of personal interaction that social media was even just a few years ago.
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.
This thread is doomed by a common HN* affliction: People are bandying around key terms without defining them, assuming and pretending that the definitions are universally accepted.
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.
I don't think the quality of discussion about social media suffers from lack of specification. Whether or not you consider HN to be social media, or wherever your decision boundary is, doesn't change that most of the conversation does apply to the general class of apps/websites that have become de-facto short form video platforms. Which lots of people use, so the effects of use are consequential and worth discussing.
The conversations on consciousness though...oh man. I have to steel myself before diving into that mess.
Anti-social doesn't mean what this ignorant BBC employee think it means.
Not that I would expect anything intelligent coming from BBC but they could at least look up a word before they use it
What do you think it means? One meaning of anti-social is "hostile toward society". Do you think this doesn't describe social media?
traditionally anti-social behavior meant fighting, keying cars, spraying graffitis etc. A kid with antisocial personality disorder can be a danger to other kids due to their reckless behavior.
social alienation caused by the internet and the social media usually manifests in asocial behavior like withdrawing from the society. in the recent years people have started calling this anti-social behavior, and they often get corrected by pedantic people such as myself.
what BBC meant by "anti-social" in this article is unclear.
They clearly mean the first definition. Ever since the Trump admin got editorial influence at the BBC, the remaining reporters have to be very careful to fly under the radar, or they will lose their jobs like their former colleagues did.
Re-read the reasons it enumerates for moving genuine social interactions to E2EE platforms, or at least 24 hour self-deleting posts.
Read the article before you comment
And this is a revelation to the BBC? Who doesn't know this?
The "NPC" insult thrown at leftists exists because of this phenomenon. Recreational outrage fads dominate social media feeds.
Very cool and worthwhile way to spend your one fleeting existence dude: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=throwawaypath