Hacker News Reader

To me social media platforms are primarily for sharing updates about the lives of people and remaining connected to either friends or followers.

HN is primarily a news site that allows discussions - I wouldn't classify it as social media. Heck, Reddit barely qualifies as social media for me.

My internal definition is probably two decades out of date, however.

Reddit absolutely counts as social media they want, it's likely much more useful to them than your facebook account since people post a lot more interesting stuff on reddit vs a facebook account. Your comments on this thread are more interesting to dictators than your dog photos on facebook.

If HN counts the so does the comment section of every website that a person might ever use.

Probably artificial cybernetics (other than voting) + insists on using real name.

There are no features on HN to "connect" to others. The discussions and content of HN could be 100% the same even if all usernames and profiles were hidden. So I'm not sure a definition of social media could possibly include a site where the people are disconnected from the content.