Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation. It's long past time to leave it permanently.
And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
I am thrilled you pointed this out. I also get tired of seeing that.
Maybe that is unfair to Jerry Springer. He at least heard both sides of a story.
I don't understand why this article has to play dumb. This is how most of the internet always was until commercial interest invaded social media. They yelled their billions of dollars worth of messaging so loudly for over a decade that it drowned out anything authentic.
Now that there's a political break away from all the tone deaf pseudoprogressive messaging and the money for it has dried up, what did they expect to see there? Most people never posted sincere "life updates" unless they had something to sell or were a naive part of the bandwagon.
The only thing keeping it afloat is the lie that it's social.
After all, the advertising powering the media is all about creating a fantasy around a future you will be living once you have bought the product.
This has virtually always been the case and it is only "social media" is an Orwellian sense. It is an antisocial consumerist machine.
In consumerism, everything is for sale.
There's not a lot of money in hosting a website where people share in-jokes and comment on each others' graduations, engagements, and baby announcements. Well, maybe there is, but there's a lot more money in farming engagement through ragebait and division.
Meta in particular is a great example of why you cannot judge companies purely by profitability and why you shouldn't ever let the CEO also be the primary shareholder and chairman of the board that's meant to govern the company's behavior.
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.
I read this site. But lately it’s been more difficult since the AI “content” stresses me out. Maybe social media always did that. But it’s come to the point where I cannot kid myself. Many times it just makes me more wound-up than it winds me down. So then what’s the point? Then I intentionally search for specific topics. When I’m out of those I can stare out the window. Which is a nice change.
Strangely these rooms are quite different to being silent at home or somewhere else private. For me it seems to be that these spaces are public, you are being silent in public spaces - a different setting and experience than in places that are private. Being silent together can be disconcerting!
It's also different to using noise cancellation or listening to music or other forms of "silence", truly unique in many aspects.
I open the app to keep up with what my friends are doing, and also check the dating portion of the app for new matches. I purposely always avoid reels on any app, because I hate them and what they do to people. So when I open the app and it immediately starts playing reels with sound on and no way to disable it, it feels like a slap in the face
People's opinions are groomed and programmed. It's pretty hilarious how small minded people are.
Not that I would expect anything intelligent coming from BBC but they could at least look up a word before they use it
It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this. It can be full days with the same post at the top. And the worst part is that I hadn't noticed how empty it was until I did the change.
But that was 20 years ago.
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 land relatively high quality community, plus the traffic is low enough that it gets some 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.
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.)
Good explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445343
But we're a long way from that now.
That is the very definition of social media.
"Social media I like" vs. "Social media I don't like" isn't valid categorization.
Is the linux kernel mailing list social media? was usenet?
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.
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"
- 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.
Many other Internet forums are similar--they might technically have the capability, but the prevailing culture might be that people rarely do it.
Adding to this is that HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't get attention. That makes it fundamentally different from other social media platforms today.
> HN makes it quite difficult (technically impossible, but you can link out) to embed media such as videos and pictures, which makes it fundamentally different than "social media".
What’s the difference? Submissions usually include at least one picture, sometimes videos or interactive content.
> HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't get attention.
I’m sorry, but this isn’t true. HN has less AI than say Reddit, and many users try to combat, but I still frequently see top-voted (obvious) AI-generated articles and less frequently comments.
When something has lots of em-dashes and other https://tropes.fyi, I recommend checking on Pangram.
how can they participate in the daily "social media bad" two minute hate sessions demanding regulations and bans if they acknowledge that things they like are also "social media"?
hence the mental gymnastics.
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.
Why didn't you say which one? I bet it is Fox.
It will never stop because the parasitic ads are the only thing holding up the edifice anymore. It's crazy to me because ultimately what holds up the economy is money changing hands for services, and ads aren't that. So ads are fundamentally driving people to spend money elsewhere. I just don't understand how the system holds up a multi-hundred billion dollar advertising parasite...everything would be cheaper if there were no ads.
For an arbitrary definition of "normal"? The last remark is unwarranted and can only have a chilling effect on the conversation. Or outrage bait, a typical sign on social media.
Why is it not social media? It exhibits the same signs as seen on any social media platform. Can you define social media so we can all follow the same play sheet?
I see the same opinions here as I see on Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, or X even from the same people here as there. The topics that reach the front page are the most popular, or divisive, or "addictive". A lot of people post for the karma, there's a lot of pandering to popular opinion. There's an opaque algorithm that decides which topic stays on the front page and for how long, which comment stays on top and for how long, when a post or comment gets flagged or reappears, etc. that dictates how the conversation can be carried and on which topics. There are a lot of political topics where some voices or opinions are buried while others are pinned to the top. Some people spend hours and days posting here. There's a lot of astroturfing. The parallels can go on.
Many on HN see themselves as better than the "simpletons" who fall for "normal" social media, and any view that challenges that is tiresome. But your dismissal of whether HN is social media holds water like a sieve.
At this point it's a vague term meaning "a place where you talk to another person online" and nothing more than that.
I'm solidly of the opinion especially after seeing so many arguments of this form on HN that the whole world has accidentally forgotten the term "social network" at some point, because "social media" means nothing.
It's so stupid you almost can't help watching, but I'll be dammed if they didn't get me to. Wild times.
That it's less destructive than Meta doesn't make it less "social media" - and I'd argue that it's style (links fall off the page quickly and discussion becomes impossible after a relatively short period of time, solely to foster a sense of "missing out") is part of what defines current "social media".
It's a noisy attention sink, whatever high-mindedness people want to pretend it has.
What baffles me is that they call this manipulation "influencing" and they consider this a positive word.
Not filmmakers or artists or writers... "content creators".
Like they exist just to produce a continual stream of this amorphous "content" for consumption.
Now, perhaps that's all that art/writing, etc ever was. But to just abandon even the pretense is another in a long line of surrenders we've made to commoditization.
its extremely tiresome to preempt discussion with something like this, making it difficult to bring up any point that doesn't agree with you.
Think a better version is: HN is not an advertising-controlled social media website. That specific version makes most sense to me.
Insanity•1h ago
blitzar•1h ago
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.
LtWorf•1h ago
Now the feeds are just pure algorithm and very seldom I see someone I know.
skydhash•1h ago
bluGill•52m ago
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.
skydhash•39m ago
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.
emodendroket•32m ago
dbspin•46m ago
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.
piva00•1h ago
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.
pryelluw•1h ago
estearum•59m ago
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.
Insanity•51m ago
Might also say more about me and my social behaviour than the social media platforms themselves, I never cared about it too much.
austin-cheney•42m ago
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.
cjrp•32m ago
jezzamon•15m ago
tantalor•59m ago
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.
mbesto•58m ago
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.
PaulHoule•48m ago
pwndByDeath•46m ago
mbesto•15m ago
IshKebab•55m ago
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.
microtonal•46m ago
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)
emodendroket•35m ago