Isn't it a forum? It doesn't have friends, following, asking for your contacts, etc. I guess the line is subjective, this is just a plain old forum, managed very well, imo.
I absolutely consider HN to be social media.
Thus it ticks up the social-ness score a bit for sites like HN as opposed to some old forums like one would find on Yahoo or used to find on Compuserv.
Karma and the wisdom of crowds gives way to herd mentality and vanity. It is what drives the form of discussion on these sites.
We are no longer strangers. Social-ness has been engaged ;)
When I think back 20 years to forums, HN feels most like those to me. It feels nothing like what most people call "social media"
To me, HN is just a well-maintained subreddit (pseudonymous, karma-based voting system, recency bias, etc.)
13 year club here, the Reddit I think of is probably not aligned with what Reddit thinks of itself anymore.
tied to specific accounts, where users have one-to-one public conversations and those conversations are foregrounded as the site's content.
I do feel that message forums/ usenet/ bbs/ etc meet those criteria in various ways and I do consider them forms of social media.
I know that this seems overly broad to some people (and they have good reasons even if I don't agree with them in the end). I don't think "social media" is a pejorative in the way a lot of folks use the term... I mean, sure, HN deals with a lot of the horrible parts of what can be done with that media in healthier ways than, say, myspace did.
But just because HN makes it harder to track specific users doesn't mean that it can't be done... people very much do have specific accounts here, and I have often looked up past commentary these users have generated to get more context about their points.
> I absolutely consider HN to be social media.
I've been online for the same period of time, and I absolutely do not consider HN to be social media.
Sure, there are some commonalities like upvotes, but I consider (my opinion only) these to be important criteria of something "being" social media:
a) Most importantly, a friends/connections list, or "followers"
b) Being able to see who liked/disliked posts
c) The "feed" being personalized/targeted
I feel that the sine qua non of "social media" is user generated content conducted between specific users:
tied to specific accounts, where users have one-to-one public conversations and those conversations are foregrounded as the site's content.
I don't agree that knowing who has up/down voted a comment is as fundamental as the fact that the sites' content -is- the comment.
And while the system doesn't foreground user accounts, I have often found it helpful to look at a user's contributions to better understand their commentary.
Finally, the fact that it's entirely possible to implement a "friends" list or a "feed" based on search results (and that this would apply to the foregrounded content of the site) seems to me to indicate that there's not just a social aspect to the content here, but that this is, in fact a social media site.
I mean, I could search user reviews on IMBD, amazon, or the wiki, but I've never found that to be in line with how I use those sites... here the conversations are the entire reason I use the site. That user generated content is the whole thing for me.
Let me put it another way, to me, one critical defining feature of a "social media" site: when you register, one of the first tasks you do is to identify people you know (or want to know) so they can be somehow linked to you as a friend or someone you're following.
and consider other feathers that you could remove, such as "likes" (or karma) and posting (ie, user submitted content and comment threads). I feel like if you removed those two features, neither HN/Reddit nor Facebook would be the "same" service.
Consider that we have commenters in here saying they don't use social media... So... Kinda, but certainly not in everyone's mind apparently. I feel some je ne sais quoi about the terminology. There is something different, I dunno