Hacker News Reader

Comment by gary_0 | Hacker News Reader

The social media race to the bottom is in full swing, and nobody is going to finish it feeling happy. In the end it's going to be a sad story for users and shareholders alike. The fruit is rotting on the vine.

View on HN

Reddit got terrible years ago, around the time of the redesign. This is just a market correction.

It was when they hired Ellen Pao for me

I'd be happy if most social media went the way of MySpace and Digg.

Digg was pretty nice before the redesign killed it

Users will end up being happier. They won't know it for a while but they will be. I don't know many people who have regretted leaving social media websites.

Sounds like quite something with a high risk of selection bias. You wouldn't expect to hear from them either way.

Personally I don't consider Reddit to be social media any more than I consider Hacker News to be.

It’s definitely a lot more social media now than it was when it started or DiggV4 era.

Indeed. I would have had a much different opinion in 2013 (and to be fair, old.reddit plus uBlock gives you mostly the same experience), but Reddit as it exists now is definitely social media. (Note that most subreddit mods report that their traffic is ~80% New Reddit users.)

Does that statistic mean "new Reddit UI" users or "new accounts"?

Reddit has roughly the same business model as Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. Each of those sites are structured differently and come with different bells and whistles, but essentially they all just ingest user content, inject ads and tracking, and shove it in your face. Isn't that social media?

HN, on the other hand, doesn't even have a business model of its own. It's a text-only discussion board running on a couple servers.

For me "social" suggests that people use it to "socialize". Keep contact with old friends, find new ones etc. Reddit or Hacker News don't fit into that category for me.

If we say that any website with user generated content is "social media", then half of the web is that and the term kind of loses meaning.

I always thought the term "social news" covered it pretty well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com