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.

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/

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.

Interesting, I thought Revanced was just for YouTube, I didn't realize it worked with other social media sites too.

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...

> 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)?

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.

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

I am going to push back without entirely disagreeing. Most of the people online are definitely caught in this social media as cable tv thing. But the number of people using the internet back in the early days is probably similar or even smaller than the number of people today that use niche areas of the internet, niches that still have that 'playground' experience and much less corporate overwatch control. Maybe?

this made me think of humdog’s pandora’s vox https://gist.github.com/kolber/2131643

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.)

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

I honestly liked the Google+ circles thing too, felt like a similar idea.

Time box it. I play video games for 1 hour on Fridays. More than that and it makes me depressed.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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

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

Not in the sense that's disucssed in the article. Social media like a forum (which is "old school" social media IMO) instead of like Instagram (short video clips, reactions, designed for max engagement and dopamine hits).

Yes, HN is a front for YC. However, HN is still very much about longform submissions and nuanced discussion. There aren't very many places like that anymore, and those that still exist are dying, with some exceptions (mostly car forums, for some reason).

(Instagram wasn't always this way! It was originally an alternative to Flickr, but focusing on sharing images and discussion instead of photography. It gradually became the psychological gateway drug that it is now, though even that was a response to threats like Vine and Quibi that unlocked short-form video at scale.)

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.

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?

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.

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.

Books are a thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

HN is literally an ad.

I could very quickly sus out what was on FOX news last night by the conversations my coworkers have.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Far too much money in tech traces its roots to ad tech.

You are asking all the later gen engineers at major tech firms to blow their salaries up.

There used to be an ethos to do the right thing, however the people who came to tech later aren’t driven by the same values. They (understandably) would like to get paid rather than go on a crusade.

Incentives make the world go round.

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.

I’d krabbel your HN profile if it let me. Respect!

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.

> 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

I know this works on YouTube Premium, but I have my watch history turned off and use the desktop app with UnTrap for YouTube so that it turns off all of the distracting nonsense I don't use (Shorts and recommendations)

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.

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 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.

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.

It's been downhill since FB removed pokes.

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 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.

HN is public forum (one of the last), it's a bit different thing

> 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.

Forums came before social media. It's a forum.

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", ...

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.

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.

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

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.

Or, buy a bluray player, then find a library.

In a way, I'd argue Twitter was the thing that motivated social media to take the path it's currently on.

Facebook was originally about people you were acquainted with in real life. You had a pre-existing reason to engage with them. That engagement wasn't as lucrative as SV investors wanted, but it was there.

Twitter never had that premise, or lost it very early on. You screamed into the ether, and people either responded or they didn't. One way to increase the chance of receiving a response is to say outrageous things. Once people figured that out and how to put ads adjacent to the outrageous thing, there was at least some pressure on Facebook (later Meta) to do the same thing, because we're here to make money, not friends.

And really, there are elements of that in old media, too. Their business model was to have captivating programming on TV and radio that would keep you tuned in to see what was happening in the next part of the show after the ad break. Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Springer, every 24-hour news channel, etc. were all very good at this, coarsening of the discourse be damned.

Regardless of who owns it, if you introduce a motive to constantly and eternally increase the value of a media company, you will see a move towards slop content at some point if you have a long enough timeline. It's inevitable.

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).

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?

> Why is nobody here defining social media, put down the clear criteria?

A preference for unfalsifiable babbling. As worthless as arguing what exact colors the word "pink" refers to. Just define a range.

It's worse than bikeshedding because then at least you get a bikeshed. At the end of this discussion, at best you get a synonym.

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...

Yes, just because it is uncomfortable for them to realize, doesn't make it not true. Words have meanings.

> 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...

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 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.

> sus out

Intentional typo as a good pun?

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.

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.

How does being text only make it not social media?

Good explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445343

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.

Because the people who say this like HN and dislike Facebook and their post-hoc rationalizations are transparent.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

"one of them always has a 24 hour news going "

Why didn't you say which one? I bet it is Fox.

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

billions; 30%. (His approval rating is finally starting to drop below the historic floor).

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.

This is uncomfortably true.

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.

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 think they're still there, but deeply hidden in their menus

Yes the social aspect does definitely still exist, it's just half buried by all the other nonsense.

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.

Shit, the jokes about "monitoring the situation" are actually true.

Is it not also possible that you should be, at least figuratively speaking? I think it's fairly obvious that not only are we at an inflection point in society, but we're at numerous inflection points happening all simultaneously - geopolitics, economics, tech/social media/"AI", fertility/sustainability, and much more. We're even at presumably happy inflection points like with progress into space.

But the point of this is that in a relatively short period of time, the world is going to look far different than the overwhelming majority might ever expect. This is because most expect the status quo, in some form, to indefinitely persist, yet of course it never does. And it seems we're on the cusp of major shifts across many different domains, all at once.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

25 years ago, my italian grandmother was the same way. No command center, but still wildly anti-immigration; probably stoked by the news. 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.

Reddit is a forum, is it not social media?

> they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration" which is exactly what his family did to great success

Where is the contradiction here?

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

Reddit is fun for a while but there is a strong “lowest common denominator” problem that plagues almost every subreddit.

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 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)

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.

People called social graph platforms social media before social graph platforms became engagement platforms.

You wrote a paragraph to say you don't "think" the others are right. What is the definition that made you think this?

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 was always going to be the case, no genie situation at all.

Information sharing networks with humans in it can only track so many things, or spend limited time on consumption. The more stuff on the network, the harder it is for things to be seen. The stuff that gets seen is content that is evolved to gain attention, or is resourced to gain attention.

This is as inevitable as sunrise.

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 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

For me it was when Facebook sent the C&D order about the Whopper Sacrifice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whopper_Sacrifice

> 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.

It’s bizarre to me that you can’t find enough people locally to be inundated in events (unless you live somewhere remote, which is an aspect of social media I hadn’t considered).

I don’t even consider myself particularly social and I’m inundated with events and people I need to text because it’s been a while. I had to cut back because it was too much. Magic on 3 separate work nights with different groups, an event every Sunday with the locals from the bar, a family event most Saturday’s and friends if not.

And then trying to weave in the new acquaintances into existing stuff, because I’m a lush and 3 beers in I’m everybody’s friend and am setting up a grill out with a stranger to see if his jackfruit tacos actually taste like chicken so I can tell if he’s just a vegetarian or a vegetarian _and_ a liar!

There are something like a couple million people within a half hour drive of me, I really don’t have to use Instagram to find someone doing cool stuff around me.

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 historic reason attitudes towards immigration changes is because of scale. This [1] page has a nice graph of the foreign born US population. Towards the end of the 19th century it hit 14.8% which led to significant pushback that culminated in various laws and acts against immigration. That's precisely where the paperwork started to form.

Following those acts and laws, immigration declined to a valley of 4.7% foreign born in 1970. Then it began rising again with more permissive/enabling acts playing a significant role in driving such, like IRCA under Reagan. In any case we're now up to 15.8% with no end in sight, and history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself.

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...

I think people are pretty ignorant of what the rules are and what the situation on the ground is (just try shipping homeless people from LA to pick fruit on farms in the central valley and see what happens)

On the other hand the "follow the rules" thing is pretty strong and you cannot fight it and win.

I got pretty mad riding the subway in NYC paying the toll and seeing turnstile jumpers hold the emergency door open to let people in.

There are all these rules you have to follow big and small that you don't agree with that you either follow resentfully or you disobey while taking some real or imagined risk.

To take one stupid example I've been through multiple toilets in one bathroom and haven't found one that flushes reliably. It's easy to blame the regulation in New York State that a toilet has a maximum flush volume and you'd better believe I am thinking about going down to PA to get a toilet and see if I have better luck. We all have these things that we could be resentful about and one thing that keeps it in check is knowing that other people are subject to this too: when we see people who seem to be "cutting the line" it makes our blood boil.

Now you can say it is not what people think, like really the chicken houses that hire 600 illegal immigrants wouldn't want to hire legal workers because then they'd have some protections, and that's all true. But the iron law of political psychology applies and if you want to change attitudes it would be a big help to move immigrant workers out of the shadows or to cut back on rules that make people resentful with little benefit.

Many 1st gen immigrants have the pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you attitude. My grandparents (also Italian) certainly did. Everyone wants to imagine they did it the "right way" and that their struggle is the most unique and deserving one.

Which made it even funnier when I discovered that they never actually legally naturalized.

Many such cases.

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.

Well they did it and got prosperous by successfully contributing to the economy and improving it for all of us.

In Binghamton there are Turkish immigrants who run Middle Eastern restaurants which our extended family love to go which are so much like the Italian restaurants that Italians still run and I'll see a teenager hanging out there who seems so much like an Italian teenager.

A person seeing that similarity could (and should) have a sense of "these people are going to come here and contribute and pay taxes and grow the economy to help support me" which is what the outcome is most of the time.

One is people's lived experience: "Hard-working families immigrate to a land of better opportunity and build a life for themselves, integrating as upstanding members of the community."

The other is nativist propaganda: "Hordes of scary 'aliens' are coming to take your jobs and destroy your way of life, bringing their drugs and crime and turning your neighborhood into a trash heap. They might even eat your pets!"

People have difficulty noticing that the second story is supposed to be a description of what they or their ancestors personally lived as the first story; people compartmentalize and sometimes believe the propaganda version even though it directly contradicts their lived experience.

I don't think that quite makes it social media though.

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.

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.

The fact that they intentionally include a rightthing/wrongthink button and keep score is a fundamental difference between modern "social media" and legacy BBSes and forums where there was no score keeping. Perhaps keeping score of rightthink is not enough to make HN social media, but it's certainly enough to not put it in the same bucket as forums and BBSes

This comes up often, particularly on Reddit, and I don't think we're doing us any favors by counting it as social media. It has a few substantial differences to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, et al:

- The focus isn't on connecting. It has a "friends" feature (I believe?), but the social graph is extremely weak.

- You are not expected to use your real name. On the contrary, it comes off as weird unless you're a celebrity.

- There is no algorithm maximizing engagement, or at least not a hyper personalized algorithm that analyzes your scrolling speed and every sensor under the sun feeding into a machine learning system designed by professional psychologists to keep you hooked.

- Individuality isn't as encouraged. The user name is small, and there are no avatars, or at least used to be (I don't use the new interface very much). The focus is on the content instead.

I suppose you can find a definition of "social media" that includes Reddit, and surely the differences are fluid, especially since we can recognize some efforts by Reddit to become more like the real social media sites, but I vote for putting it in a different category for the sake of discussion.

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"

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 generally do not consider IRC social media, but its much more engaging and active than something like Facebook or Twitter.

> OP: The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

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.

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.

That might imply USENET and mailing lists to be forms or primitive forms of social media.

That is not what they said. Strawman fallacy, and you still refuse to define the term.

Fox is bad in a way far more fundamental than CNN. It was created specifically to lie to people.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

It matters very very much. Fox News is much much worse than most news channels. It was created specifically as GOP propaganda.

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.

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.

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 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'm actually pretty thankful that the GP 5000 is a solid consensus recommendation for general road racing. I see some others being mentioned though, I think Pirelli Zeros?

Contrast that with gravel tires, where there is zero consensus. The conditions vary and the sport is evolving quite a bit over time as well, so it's understandable. But it's a huge time suck to try and puzzle out a near-optimal decision. I wish there was a "good-enough" consensus.

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.

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.

Additional context: The city is being (mis-)ruled by a paranoid dictator, whose brutal secret police don't care too much about if you're innocent. The cynical protagonist is frustrated that some of the resistance is also extremist or at least overly-optimistic about what's going to happen next.

God that guy pushes conspiracy theories I haven't heard anywhere else!

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 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.

What you are describing is not hivemind, but rather paid participants. Companies pay for these "grassroots" recommendations, and Iran pays for those Jews posts.

It used to be more subtle with real people paid to post, but AI has made the quantity of it skyrocket, to the point where you can start to notice it, if you pay attention.

For example you'll see some comment about Jews, and very rapidly a bunch of upvotes. And you'll see a very similar comment elsewhere, with the same upvote pattern.

I've cut back quite a bit my participation in these types of sites once I realized just how many of the "people" I'm talking to are actually bots.

This talks about a company doing it: https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/bots-targeting-the-r-ga...

This talks about Iran doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz8whKktkQg

> I believe these are the exact technical advancement the top-level poster was contrasting with cable networks

You would have had to guess, because it went unspecified.

If we're talking about algorithms to surface content, we should talk about them; although I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with cable television. Cable television advertised in the way we are told than advertising is not bad: they created specialized channels, and took advertisements on those channels that people who were interested in those specialty subjects would also be interested in. They didn't track or attempt to manipulate individuals.

I don't know what cable television did that was special or above and beyond what a magazine or a newspaper supplement 100 years ago would have done. The only difference between TV and magazines is that you don't consume TV, it's simply pointed in your direction - and you can't skip around ads. This is notably not true about modern television, though. If anything, it has technically fallen backwards since DVRs (or even videotape in general.)

I think a lot of intellectuals were forced to take Cambridge Analytics' marketing claims as truth because of the political positions they entrenched themselves in shortly after that scandal broke.

It's certainly caused a lot of 50s narratives about Vietnamese and Chinese communist mind control to come back posing as serious science, and a bunch of Key's "Subliminal Seduction"'s grotesque sexiness mixed in to make it nominally anticorporate. Although, predictably, it has generally been expressed politically as giving social media more ability or even responsibility to suppress the speech of average, un-notable citizens when they go against government narratives about controversial subjects.

That is not defeating social media, that is defining and institutionalizing social media as a trust and a means of government control. There is no reason we couldn't have had this same argument about telephones, other than that the average US citizen was less disdainful of their own civil rights back then - civics was drilled in as a religion, and it involved obligations the state had to you. Obligations that you are not allowed to give up if you want to live in a civilized, democratic country.

This was why we don't have government police whose job is to listen to random phone calls and periodically butt in to tell the speakers to change the subject, or arbitrarily cutting the line, collecting lists of people who need more intervention, or banning people from being able to use phones because they were seen at a political protest. If you ever wonder why the mails are so sacred, it's because the mail came about when people were prouder and had more shame than we have now.

If you want to regulate algorithms, regulate algorithms. Don't regulate "social media." If you have to argue about what it is, it is a useless term.

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

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.

Yeah, none of that makes the two comparable.

Both a wheelbarrow and a Ferrari have wheels.

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.

Unfortunately, pointing this out is not fun. In general, everyone assumes that there is little actual difference between CNN and any Murdoch enterprise. The difficulty in disabusing this position in a few short sentences, is one of the reasons there is such a chasm in American politics.

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.

Whose interests does it serve now? That is the main thing to understand of you are to get anything out of news.

I used to fall asleep to Forensic Files every night. Something about the host's voice on low volume puts me right to sleep.

All right, but "I personally don't care for that" wasn't actually the proposition anyone was arguing with.

I don't know. I don't think it takes too many paid participants to sway a large group of non-paid participants who perpetuate the paid position.

Especially for product reviews, at the end of the day, the best product is the one you bought since most of them work well enough. I buy a new tire for my bike and buy the one reddit recommended and the next ride, buoyed by excitement for the new tire, go out and ride 1-2 mph faster than before, now all of a sudden I'm a convert. It's the best tire ever and I recommend it to all my friends.

Nevermind I don't have anything to compare it too.

This is super common in astrophotography community. You ask people what's the best camera or best mount and because they're so expensive most people only have had one, or maybe two and so everyone comes along to recommend their particular item because clearly it's better than the rest, when in fact, it's all about equal but nobody has compared. Part of that makes sense too, right? I buy a mount for my telescope from Software Bisque that's $14k and I decide to add another pier to my backyard observatory, $14k is a lot to gamble on and I know I'm happy with the mount I currently have, I'm just going to buy it again. I never tried iOptron's $7k alternative because if I hated it, I've wasted $7k

> Both a wheelbarrow and a Ferrari have wheels.

What is this supposed to mean? They're also two rolling carts steered by a human, and I'm going to make similar decisions for both when I'm e.g. designing a path that they have to move on, or trying to figure out traffic patterns around a construction site.

The people who know it when they see it are exactly the people I don't want making any important decisions. Just be specific and don't use rhetorical appeals to ignorance.

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.

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.

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.

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.