Hacker News Reader

Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

I don't include HN in the same "social media" as twitter/facebook/Instagram. Over there most people use their real identities and it seems they take everything very personal as a result. Here people are just nicknames in a comment section. Points aren't even shown next to the nickname so people are more or less equal in comments. Personally I don't have "friends/followers" on this site nor I seek them (which seems the main drive on sites like facebook/Instagram/twitter).

Does HN meet the definition of "social media"? Yes it does, but is it the same kind of social media as these others? I don't think so. I don't see many negatives of sites like HN. Even Reddit could be a nice experience if certain things were tweaked there (atrocious user interface, showing up/down votes next to posts, showing account age, probably a better algorithm etc)

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>I don't include HN in the same "social media" as twitter/facebook/Instagram

I don't either -- HN is the same category as Reddit which is much worse to me.

>Over there most people use their real identities and it seems they take everything very personal as a result. Here people are just nicknames in a comment section

There are plenty of people taking things personally here, all the time, and if you stick around you'll notice that a good number of them either use their real names as a handle or have it in their profile. And there are "celebrities" here just like there are on Reddit, except here it's usually tied to some high-ranking position at a company. For instance, the CEO of Matrix has many comments under the username Arathorn in almost every single post about Matrix.

>I don't see many negatives of sites like HN

Tree-style nearly-endless commentary combined with an algorithmic ranking of "top" stories that may have a big payoff if I just press refresh one more time turns out to be way, way more addictive than "traditional" social media, at least for me. Twitter never hooked me, and I kicked Facebook a decade ago, but even after forcing myself to use a privacy frontend for Reddit and never, ever logging in, I'm still addicted. I spend hours a day scrolling, and resolve to quit, and then go back.

I do the same thing here. It's so bad that I consider HN and Reddit to be as addictive as video poker.

I don't include HN as 'social media' either mostly because it doesn't constantly ping me when I get a reply. I have to check manually. It also don't change much so checking it once or twice a day for ten minutes isn't a big deal.

I feel if we include things like HN as social media then we need to include Newsgroups/BBS, Forums of the late 90s, etc. and literally every site online where a person can post a comment.

Perhaps technically they are all social media but to me when someone says 'social media' I think of the never ending feed of content that is manipulated to keep you coming back like a drug along with notifications about every "like" or comment or retweet (or whatever we call them now), etc.

There isn't any clear definition out there of what "social media" is I'm aware of, but I'd say the basic criteria include some combination of:

- User-submitted content

- Individualized experience based on algorithmic curation, follows/subscriptions, or both

- Ability to directly interact with other users, whether publishing to some kind of profile or "wall" of theirs or sending direct messages

- Users have some kind of durable persona (at minimum a human-readable, memorable account name, but usually a multimedia profile of some sort)

Hacker News mostly has none of these things. A very small proportion of top-level content is user-created and there is algorithmic curation, but not individualized. This is really more of a newspaper without writers or editors. The stories come from other platforms instead and every reader's letter gets published automatically.

Reddit isn't social media, either. It's a discussion board. There has to be something that made MySpace and Facebook different from phpBB and Usenet or why'd we come up with a new word at all? People seem to be using "social media" as a general derogatory name for any potentially addictive, high-noise, low-signal time sink that encourages mindless consumption of undifferentiated "content" and creates bad incentives to creators of such content to abandon truth and artistic integrity in favor of flashy gimmicks and trend surfing.

But that describes virtually all of pop culture.

Nothing gives me more anxiety than HN so I personally think it's much worse.

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