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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

I believe that reddit and HN are social media. They're a different form than Facebook or TikTok, but we come here to be social just the same.

If someone used HN to find interesting articles, then spends 90% of their time reading the articles and only comes to the comments briefly to see that other people think, then it would be fair to call HN a news aggregator site for that person.

But realistically, for most people, it's the opposite - 90% of time chatting with people in the comments, with the actual articles (or even just their titles) mostly just used as conversation starters, with the conversation often veering into wildly different threads that barely relate to the original topic. That's social media.

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Regardless of whether I consider HN social media or not, the point of my response is exactly the same.

But if you want to have the (less interesting) conversation about definition, I don't call HN social media, because there's no media. It's just talking to other people.

You say

> or most people, it's the opposite - 90% of time chatting with people in the comments

Exactly! I didn't even read the article. I'm just here talking to people. So I don't call it social media for the same reason that I don't call whatsapp social media. It's just social.

Media is shared information, including text. Traditional media is created by institutions like newspapers and mass broadcast. Social media changed that so that anyone can create the information. When we write comments here, we are creating short pieces of media and sending them out to be read.

I find this conversation, about what social media is, and whether some kinds of social media can be healthy, highly interesting, important even.

I also think it's important that we on HN are aware that we're engaging in social media because any time this conversation comes up, there's lots of people saying that they don't use social media, they only use HN, which leads to feeling superior to people on other forms of social media. I don't think that's valid or healthy.

If you or I use HN for 30-60 minutes everyday and we find utility in that, there's no difference to a teenager using TikTok for the same time, we don't get to feel superior or talk about social media addiction without being aware that includes us.

Tiktok has a bad rep but it has some pretty great content too, informative, well produced. Same with YouTube.

> I also think it's important that we on HN are aware that we're engaging in social media because any time this conversation comes up, there's lots of people saying that they don't use social media, they only use HN, which leads to feeling superior to people on other forms of social media. I don't think that's valid or healthy.

> If you or I use HN for 30-60 minutes everyday and we find utility in that, there's no difference to a teenager using TikTok for the same time, we don't get to feel superior or talk about social media addiction without being aware that includes us.

No, I do feel superior: I'm being challenged, and I'm having to articulate my ideas and points of view.

When you're on tv/tiktok/instagram/youtube you're consuming something that's been prepared for you. Whether the content is informative or well produced is irrelevant to my point.

Totally different when it comes to how much critical thinking you need to exercise for those two activities.

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