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Comment by MezzoDelCammin | Hacker News Reader

Is HN considered "social media"? Because in many ways (at least for me), there's a resemblance - the never disappearing timeline, the comments that sometimes show the trenches of the good old culture wars...

It's definitely no Facebook. I guess HN (or HN admins, to be precise) is doing a better job at limiting the disagreements from "Petersburg troll-farm vitriol" to "occasionally sarcastic". But the social media effect is definitely there...

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Despite what so many others are going to say, yes, it's social media.

It aggregates great things that others are doing along with other posts designed to elicit extreme emotions and feeds them to you with an algorithm designed to encourage engagement. (I had originally written "maximize", but HN's algorithm does at least try to prevent flamewars.)

> I guess HN (or HN admins, to be precise) is doing a better job at limiting the disagreements

I think users of this site disparage low effort/meme comments to the point that people typically stay on topic. Points of view are fairly nuanced and it seems effort is taken to understand and discuss.

I don't think HN fits to the "Social Media" of today. It's more of a slow churning RSS feed with comments underpinned by a strong social contract.

Another difference is, while we disagree, we don't fight bona fide flame wars. A more civilized and skilled discussion is favored here, and this is a very good thing (TM).

Feeling a lot of completed projects or new things kindle the impostor syndrome sometimes, but it's not creating the same insecurity of image based social platforms or "free for all" comment platforms.

I've first deleted reddit back then, then removed Instagram from my phone. I can say that I'm much happier. However, HN is not creating same type of tension for me. I learn a lot of things, for a start.

I agree about the discussion being (mostly) civilized. But I'm really asking myself to what degree is this because of the admins dedication to their job and to what degree is this by design / users selection.

I'm in a few FB groups that are not too far of the mark either when it comes to the debate rules, but moderating one of them, I see that keeping things civilized is not really something one can automatize or put into an algorithm / ML magic.

Hence the parallel with HN. We tend to imagine social networks as apps / startups, but I don't think that's a full picture.

Of course, a social media is not limited to the "brands" everyone uses, but I wanted to separate them because most people think of these "brands" when anyone says social media.

The quality of a place goes hand in hand with community and dedication of moderation. HN's moderation is mostly invisible and there's a well evolved structure. This is only half of the picture. We as the community support this structure, because we like it too.

Humans are humans and language has many nuances to be automatically moderated by AI/ML. The only useful help we can get from AI/ML can be flagging some stuff for taking a look. Last decision shall be done by humans at the end of the day.

However, at the end of the day, quality of a community is part moderation and part community. Everything else is a byproduct of that.

If you partake in comments then yes it's social media. If you manage to just use it as a curated list of blog posts/ articles to read, then not really

HN mostly reminds me of the Usenet of the late 1980s - which was in a way the social media of its time.

I haven't been on Usenet in the 80's (coming from the other side of the Iron Curtain, my own IT history basically starts in the 90's, first internet access around 1995-98).

Did Usenet not require any moderation? Or was it simply the barrier for entry that made people behave like the access was a scarce resource? Or what do You think made the period so unique?

> Did Usenet not require any moderation? Or was it simply the barrier for entry that made people behave like the access was a scarce resource? Or what do You think made the period so unique?

Usenet didn't (in general, IIRC) have centralised moderation. Usenet had the famous killfiles, which you maintained and which elided the posts of people you found to be a nuisance.

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

There also were specific moderated usenet groups. People were behaving more I think people at the time were socialized to being polite and civil and for access to usenet you had to specifically configure your usenet client (I used netscape navigator back then), so that was a barrier for entry.

> HN mostly reminds me of the Usenet of the late 1980s - which was in a way the social media of its time.

In terms of signal-to-noise ratio and the content focus, you're right. HN is the closest thing to the 80s Usenet community that I've found on the Internet of the current day.

However, Usenet was never social media. You didn't connect with people like you do on social media and 'follow' them. On Usenet you joined discussion fora, which sometimes included the same people across multiple fora, so you would get a sense of the poster and their calibre and quality.

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