What about Reddit? What about 4chan?

Yeah, agreed. While there are gray areas in the definition, and I can certainly waste an absolute shitload of time on HN and Reddit, both of those sites allow anonymity, and neither provide user-specific personalization (with Reddit you can obviously choose to subscribe to certain subreddits, but that's not done for you, and AFAIK everyone gets the same view and order of stories and comments). What you see in the future is not just inferred from what you clicked on in the past, and that for me is the cardinal sin of most social networks.

Legally, it doesn't matter. You can talk to people? Social media it is.

HN has upvotes, downvotes, and people chasing them for exposure, just like Reddit. The biggest difference is the lack of subs. Everything goes into the same category so you can't have highly specialized echo chambers. The moderators also seem to be a touch more professional.

HN is absolutely social media and it does have some of the dark patterns that plague other platforms. They're just more reigned in. A change in moderation policy or new moderators could destroy this site in a week.

I personally don't think kids need to be banned from participating here. However, the law is often a blunt instrument and it's probably better to get kids off of Facebook and HN if distinctions cannot be made.

Can you define, in a precise and actionable way, the specific things that make X social media and this web site not? "More like a forum" might be clear in your head, but it's not a test the system can apply in an objective way.

The relative lack of dark patterns is true, but the more distinguishing feature is that HN is boring to the majority of people, and isn't destructive because not using it doesn't make you excluded from society, and hence it has little leverage on the users. If HN pulls the enshittification trick, a much bigger portion of people will just stop using it.

I'll try to convert it into a metric: measure the number of involuntary users via the comments saying "I hate this website". You rarely see people here saying HN is bad to the point of being a net negative on them, for example, but this is true of all normie sites, including reddit.

Retweet/repost is a part of your first bullet point, and is big in itself. There is a book about the history and present of social media from a few years back that calls out the retweet function as a major clshift in the viral nature of social media and its use to spread (mis) information.

The two first I'd get behind, the latter two I just don't think matter too much.

Algorithmic, for profit, social media is by far the worst technology ever foisted upon humanity. Even most of the issues with AI/LLMs become moot if we where to remove platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X and to some extend YouTube. Removing the ability to spread misinformation and fueling anger and device thought would improve society massively. Social media allows Russian and Chinese governments to effect election, they allow Trump to have an actual voice and they allow un-vetted information to reach people who are not equipped to deal with it.

It's time to accept that social media was an experiment, it could have worked in an uncommercial settings, but overall it failed. Humanity is not equipped, mentally, to handle algorithmic recommendation and the commercialization of our attention.

You'll have bots spreading propaganda in notime if it gets succesful even without those. So the 'algorithmic recommendation' (aka ads and propaganda) don't even have to come from the platform operator.

I think it’s pretty easy to write a law that doesn’t include email and sms. They have no engagement algorithms.

Forums require a little more finesse - but a good starting point is distinguishing upvotes from personalized engagement-based algorithms.

Basically I don’t buy that your concern is a problem in practice.

Edited to add - here is the guidance for Australia’s law for reference: https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci...

It works better here than most other types of blacklists, since networks take time to build up, and the "value" of social media is mostly derived from the fact that you can use it to interact with other people, not the software itself.