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Comment by viksit | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t hacker news social media? Karma points are no different from retweets or likes surely? And then isn’t reading nyt’s comment section social “media” too? At what point is engaging with media that has some collaboration from peers different from the big three social sites? Should there be a case made for quitting these too?

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I think HN is not social media in the same way Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram are. One big difference is that HN is pretty anonymous. I usually don't look at who's posting, so it just looks like an agglomeration of authorless text. There's no feeling of "I wonder what X is up to on HN?" or "damn, person X is doing so well on HN".

This, along with the general hiding of points, reduces the amount of comparison to others that occurs on HN. That's different from conventional social media. There's still some comparison ("People on here know so much!"), but the impersonal aspect makes it reasonable to just shrug off.

Ugh, an annoying trend has been ppl grouping in unrelated services under the moniker of 'social media'. They are putting in so many different types of interactions that the label loses most of it's meaning. Then again I have this vague feeling that for ppl who's main online interactions facebook clones and twitter and they are trying to describe everything in terms of those.

It's an unpopular opinion here, but you are absolutely right.

It's perplexing to me. I view HN as obviously being a social media, and (for me) the most time consuming one of them all.

Edit: Now that I think about it, HN is the only social media that I don't find it delivers enough value compared to my time spent on it (it does deliver value - it's just that it's a big time sink). I'm pretty happy with the time/value ratio of Facebook and (more recently) Twitter. It's probably because the ability to carefully curate what you see on FB and Twitter.

I would call it quasi social media. The relative anonymity of HN (I don’t know any of you IRL) helps me view this more like IRC chat from the late 90s

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