Hacker News Reader

Comment by thfuran | Hacker News Reader

>I'm a little worried that not having a social media presence /at all/ is going to turn or has turned from mildly admirable (such restraint!) to...weird.

Well, I have some good news: here you are, on social media, having a presence. Admittedly, it's a bit more niche than Instagram.

View on HN

Before the abused and tired notion of "social media" was coined, this was called... a forum. Nothing "media" about it.

I think it still is. A discussion forum like this lacks a number of features we'd commonly associate with social media.

No personalized feed or “watch next”? Not “social media”.

These are not necessary for social media, you can be in social media without these (it sometimes requires browser extensions but not necessarily).

The term doesn’t have to mean what the literal words on their own do, or apply to everything that the individual words might, taken in their own.

[edit] and in this case the term is far more useful if it is not as expansive as you suggest. We’d just need another term, then, to describe the kind of thing people usually mean by “social media”.

I think the disctintion should be:

Is the person (their face, their personality) more important, or the content of what they say is more important?

HN falls much closer to the "content" end of the spectrum.

Yeah, there are lots of other little aspects that push something closer to or farther from being the kind of thing we usual mean by “social media” (“so it’s a fuzzy category?” yes, like approximately all other categories and labels). Downplaying personal or account identity (which HN does to a more extreme degree than even most forums et c) definitely counts as moving something toward the “not social media” side.

It has the most important (and most addictive) feature though: an endless feed

Link aggregators was what site like this, digg, and reddit were called when they started. They introduced a social aspect for upvoting content into a dynamic feed. It’s something more than a forum, and something less than what later became social media.

But before that, forums existed that let you subscribe to threads in your forum account. It's just that the mundane masses used them a little less than the geeky folk. All Reddit added was stealing the upvote/downvote thing from Slashdot and Digg.

And combining all topics under a single umbrella, so you interact with them all as the same persona.

Hypermedia?

I don't agree. I made friends and noticed other cliques of friends on forums like GBATemp over a decade ago.

Regular visitors knew each other after seeing the other users' posts, there are in-jokes, and it's not so different. I would say HN is less self-centered (we don't have unique avatars or signatures) than many old-school forums were. Friendships are less likely to be formed here.

> I don't agree. I made friends and noticed other cliques of friends on forums like GBATemp over a decade ago.

And I ran a forum, over a decade ago, in which people from all locations/walks of life participated, and I met more than a handful of them in real life. I don't understand what point you're trying to make.

I should have specified that, to me personally (but apparently not for you), those old forums were very much like social media. I don’t see a categorical difference between them because the same behaviour is displayed on both of them.

I’ve been to both a bar and a church with the same people. They act the same both in a bar and in church. Are bars and churches equivalent?

Bars and churches have different purposes and people's behaviour in each of them should change because of that. The person acting the same and doing the same things in both would be considered to be behaving very strangely otherwise.

I don't know of any ills with social media that weren't present on forums for me. The difference seems to be one of scale.

I know my intention for joining both was the same (human connection over common interests).

While both have been coined "social media", I think there's a huge difference between content aggregation/discussion sites, and content creation sites. I think, deep down, everyone knows HN and its ilk are not "social media". It's a merely discussion forum at most.

This is media (web) that we are social on (discussion). It’s these folks own definition of social media that needs fixing so they don’t feel isolated. I don’t use instagram not bc I’m weird but because it’s a shit experience.

The social in "social media" doesn't mean discussion. It means sharing personal media and creating bonds with people. i.e. socialising. Hacker news has no means to do so.

We have pseudo anonymity which allows for reputation. I am not sure how much more of a bond you are looking for, but conversation and rapport is about all you need for socializing — both are here.

this is just a cope. sites like this are still social and still addictive, if you don’t believe me then try to stop coming here for a while.

in fact try to stop going to all “slot machine” sites where you can constantly refresh and get new interesting things

It’s really not the same by matter of extremity. Hacker news has maybe a small fraction of the addictive mechanics at play in instagram or twitter. Personally, I only come back to this site because I don’t have other, far more addictive social media to scroll when bored.

I thi k one if the damaging things about social media sites like Instagram, Facebook etc is that everyone displays their best life on it. You visit these sites and see these photo that make you feel bad because you ask "Why is my life not exciting? Why don't I have those things?"

Hackernews and other forums don't really hit that nerve with me. Yes, it's easy to just keep scrolling and reading more but at least I don't feel like shit afterwards. It's addictive but only but for me in that I waste time on it when I could be doing other stuff. It doesn't make me depressed though.

A decade or slightly less so ago, maybe because this site was smaller and close-knit and interest rates were lower, you could get a similar effect from seeing Show HN threads about this person launching some amazing technical project or impressive startup. In this uncertain economy not so much. Also, blogs are increasingly less fashionable so you don't see nearly as many "wow what a trenchant and witty thinkpiece" posts from devs playing thought leader.

There is still a similar vein of productivity and hustling. Ask HNs are often about side project, productivity hacks, and income streams. Show HNs and blogs are the same topics, but actualized. It’s the same treadmill, but instead you feel bad about not being hyper productive, elite haxxor skills, or cashing out.

I think a big thing about social media is having people or personalities that you follow. I don't use HN in a way where I notice who is commenting or posting and there's nobody I "follow" on this site. Every story and comment is like a new anonymous person to me.

When I was heavily into Reddit I'd use RES and get to know people so it felt more like social media. Now that I've deleted my account and sporadically read Reddit it doesn't feel like social media or something I'm addicted to.

It's same problem as social media. It's why this site has a noprocrast

People that tend to procrastinate do not need a reason to do so, and the things they get addicted to are not necessarily engineered to be so. Social media is strongly engineered to be addictive, HN is engineered not to be addictive (though it still is, as I should definitely be aware by now).

HN might not have the built-in quality to be addictive, but it certainly has the quantity. Infinite content produces infinite ways to be addictive.

You're confusing addictive websites and social media as one and the same? They're not.

Hacker news isn't social media. Facebook and Twitter are. It's pretty easy to see why.

By this definition then people who read the personal ads in the paper everyday in 1995 were addicted to social media.

Ironically to me, "this is just a cope" is exactly what I can't stand social media.

Just large groups of people puppeting the same dumb language and ideas back at each other, ad nauseam.

I think there's a huge difference between content aggregation/discussion sites, and content creation sites.

Are comments and discussions separate from "content creation"?

A movie you made, a book you wrote, an article you wrote -> content.

A comment you wrote, or a link you posted -> meta-content.

I think hacker news is way better, but Reddit is very much like social media

National borders and most romantic dates won’t ask for your HN profile but they will ask for all the other major social networks. Not everything with an account and a comment system is a Social Network to lay-people and first encounter authorities.

HN isn't technically social media, but it's close. The little vote buttons, the karma, the constant feed of "hot" articles, are designed to fuel the dopamine push that creates addictive engagement.

What it lacks to be true "social media" is engagement around a social network. There are certainly "social networks" at work on HN, but most of the users don't know each other and aren't focused on each other's statuses, pictures, videos, relationship statuses. Instead they're mostly focused on intellectual competition via comments. (when you're not allowed to compete for jokes, like folks do on Reddit, you compete for whatever else defines your identity, which on HN is intelligence).

Ironically, HN's always wanted to be a social network, in that they want to build "a community of users" where the users all recognize each other (they claim that's necessary in order to build a community). Once HN introduces personal blogs or tweet-like status updates, it will 100% be a social network, with all the same health concerns.

Note that there’s an anti-social element right in the algorithm. Stories that have more comments than upvotes are actively pushed off the front page.

Probably has the unintended side effect of always keeping new stuff on the front page like other social media does.

Forum participation is a bit different than social media in that it is first and foremost about the discussion and not so much about 'you' which seems to be the main focus for social media, furthermore you can't follow people and there are no push notifications so it is impossible to create 'an audience' other than whoever is there.

Those are distinguishing factors that are strong enough to differentiate otherwise the BBS I used to hang out on would have been social media and IRC would be as well. I don't buy that broad categorization. Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter -> social media. Reddit not and HN definitely not.

Though the quantity of 'meme' content may have to factor in there somewhere and then we have a continuum of online participation with on one end personal messaging and on the extreme other IG, TT, FB etc.

I think there are important differences between news forums like this one and social media:

- HN doesn't have notifications

- HN doesn't provide affordances for virality: you can't "retweet"/"subtweet"; you can't start trends like #ProtectTaylorSwift; you can't brigade people; etc

- HN doesn't have a personal algorithmic feed

- HN doesn't have DMs

- HN links elsewhere (mostly) for the main content

- HN's moderators are available directly, and they also participate in discussions

- You can't be an influencer on HN: you might be a patio11 or something, you might even get jobs from your HN karma or posts, but hawking products based on your clout for a kickback is astroturfing/shilling and the community is pretty good at snuffing it out

---

I guess overall my argument is that if forums--even forums like Reddit or random vbulletin forums--are social media then the term kind of loses meaning. It opens the door to questions like "are blogs social media, after all there are accounts and comments sections".

I know people highroad social media and its users a lot (I'm guilty of this haha; finally my misanthropy is good for something!), so there's something attractive about an argument that cuts holier-than-thou HNers back down to size (trying to be generous and lighthearted here, again I'm a member of this crew). I just think the shoe doesn't fit in this case. There are good things about social media! Black Twitter! Queer/Geek Mastodon! But I really feel like those services are meaningfully different than forums--especially this one.

Hacker News isn't social media. No matter how much you want to claim it is.

Haha, good point. I'm not a hopeless case after all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com