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Comment by dgfitz | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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).

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

Hypermedia?

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