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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

A simple chronological feed of content is not social media though. That's just reading authors who you like.

Well that depends on how we define social media. Facebook started out as a chronological feed, did it only become social media once it began algorithmically curating users' feeds?

I think it became social media when it enabled two-way/multi-way messaging, if that wasn't there from the start. If it was originally just a feed of posts, yeah it wasn't really social media, it was just another form of blogging.

IIRC twitter was originally called a "micro-blogging" platform, and "re-tweeting" and replying to tweets came later. At that point it became social media.

blogs often have a place for comments. twitter was a microblog that elevated comment replies to "first class tweet status" as a continuation of the microblog idea

Media outlets are often one-way though. I can't message news networks on TV and at best their sites may have a comment section enabled. They're still media, and if I can similar see content from my peers that seems to check the "social" box at least in my opinion.

Something like RSS doesn't work for direct messages, but it does still allow for you and I to post to our feeds. Nothing stops it from going a step further and acting much like twitter, we all post to our own site but they can be short messages and they can reference a post on someone else's site as "replying to" or similar.

I think you are restricting social media by defining as what it became (at the time driven by "eyeball" metrics), instead of defining it by what it could or should be.

Oh. Do you think I have to read authors I don't like so I can beat them arguing over internets? Ok.

Yeah that’s what social media was 10 years ago. It was better, more like a big sprawling group chat than a stream of engagement bait.

It's not better as demonstrated by the revealed preferences of a vast majority of the users. People DO want algorithmic feeds and NOT chronological feeds. It's a common narrative here that everyone wants chronological feeds, but it's not true just like the claim "Everyone wants small phones". People say one thing and do another.

I don’t accept the results as revealed preference.

1. Users are not given a choice (well, accept to leave, and I know many people who have).

2. This is measured on time spent, not user satisfaction.

In practice, we demonstrated that algorithms designed to be addictive are addictive (success?), not that there’s an actual preference.

That's an idiotic argument against chronological feeds. The better argument is that high-frequency posters will bury the once every other month poster.

I tend to get tired of high-frequency posters and unsubscribe or find a way to wall them off in a separate feed.

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