Is browsing and commenting on Hacker News not considered social media use though?
So that leaves me with HN. I like HN because topics I encounter here are not nonsensical or political. There are no memes, gifs or cheap jokes here. I find myself in awe of the knowledge people have here. I am forced to read stuff here rather than fast paced casual browsing. As a meme reads, "On Internet, typing is fun and reading is hard" but HN is exact opposite of that for me.
But deep inside my heart, I know HN is also a social media in many ways and I need to cut down the time I spend on this. I am addicted to this. I realized browsing HN is essentially a coping mechanism for my depression and lifelong failures. HN gives me a false sense of "look I am not wasting my time in frivolous stuff". HH helps me escape from harsh realities of my life in much the same ways drinking helps people cope with their life. In subtle ways, HN has polluted my mind and corrupted my ability to think in realistic ways.
If you want to cut down on time spent on HN, on F-Droid there is an app called Glider. Its a typical HN client. It has a feature/button called Catch Up, where it gives you top posts by week/month, similar to how you can filter things on reddit and typically reddit clients.
I highly recommend experimenting with batching time spent on certain sites to once a week and once a month, that is, 5 or 6 visits a month, and get a high level overview of what happened (instead of multiple visits daily, which interrupts your flow). Then limit yourself to only look at the top 5 top-level comments (and not go into comment rabbit holes). Same for reddit, or skip reddit if you can, its mostly noise. Skip other social media sites too.
On the flip side, without HN, my life would be totally different. I likely would not have pursued the much higher paying job I have now. My enthusiasm for technology and software would not be as high, seeing the many ways tech is used here. I would not be aware of meditation, notion, chatgpt, ml, postgres, cloud, rust go, wait but why, the inner platform effect, and so much else. For better or worse, HN shapes my outlook on the world. Is knowing all this worth the time spent, or is seeking knowledge simply addictive? I don't know.
HN has no friending or a way to link yourself to any other user, no actual customizable profiles (a tiny "about me" textbox aside), no images anywhere, no way to DM users, and most people don't use their real names either.
There are only two "social" parts of HN. First is that the links to the articles are posted (and voted on) by users. And the second part is just the fancy comment section around those posts. Most big news websites have a comment section on their articles too, and those might even be more full-featured than HN (e.g., I am pretty sure quite a few of those allow setting a profile picture).
To put it simply, I believe social network and social media are two different things. You can have them both together (e.g., twitter), or separately. I would consider the initial Snapchat app to be a social network, but they added a dash of social media later on (with the "around me" feature, stories, etc). And HN would fall under the opposite of the original Snapchat app - social media, but without much social netowork.
Sidenote: I am not an expert on this and didn't spend time researching it. What I wrote above is a purely subjective take on how I personally understand those terms, and how they apply to the topic at hand.
Somewhat and it is quite addictive too but the quality is way better and there is even an option to turn limit your time spent on HN (no procastination flag/option). HN is not employing dirty techniques to keep user enganged with dumbed down content, people are just commenting out on articles, it’s more like a community