Comment by Zambyte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zambyte | Hacker News Reader

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I've flown across the US to meet what will likely be lifelong friends[0], and just went out to dinner and an escape room with some others, all of which I connected with through Bluesky. The worst of social media is terrible, but I would hate to lose the best of it by banning it outright. The really negative parts come are

- Underage people who do not have the emotional maturity to deal with digital public spaces

- Emotional manipulation through "algorithmic" timelines (chronological or bust)

- Waves of unwanted interactions

Social media seems like it can be a positive tool to me. I would love to be able to continue to use it as I am. I do think there is a conflict of interest issue between the mental health of the people that use social media, and for-profit corporations that provide social media services. Regulating social media in a sane way has become difficult due to how much financial sway social media companies have on legislation, but it's an important fight to fight.

[0] I have a thread on my bsky account with a bunch of group photos, if you're interested it shouldn't be hard to find. I'm not linking it because I'm not interested in people engaging in it from here.

This right here is why we keep having this problem. The benefits (or in more cases) the addictions are too enticing. So we take the good with the bad, except the problem is that the bad far, far outweighs the good.

The thing is that I literally just don't have the bad, that's why I listed those things. Bluesky is chronological by default, and that is what I use exclusively. There is a "Discover" feed, but I straight up removed it from my account. I have a few other user made feeds that I use very sparingly (basically just chronological keyword search feeds). There are powerful tools for blocking brigading (blocks detach quotes, or quotes can be detached without blocking). I am a mentally mature adult capable of dealing with public interactions.

It's wise to limit use under different conditions from these, but these conditions are seriously positive. I've never had such a positive experience with social media before. The fedi came the closest, but my experience was limited to interacting with technically inclined people who weren't the most socially skilled. Bluesky is approachable enough that anyone who can figure out mainstream social media can figure it out, so there is a much more diverse set of people.

Hacker News is also social media - at least by most reasonable definitions of social media. Should it also be banned?

Having an account should probably be restricted to adults only. But it's such a low priority target compared to the other platforms.

I think we should ban all users until they provide 10 photos of their face from different angles and lighting. Passport and birth certificates and a lawyer letter confirming it’s really you trying to sign up under the username: LexiMax

Then all this will be synced with govs so can read all your messages. And sell to ad companies to spam you later. (They can link your phone number, email etc to you as you provided real id on all those).

And if you travel to some country that doesn’t approve what you ever said, maybe you broke their law, so you deserve a few years in prison.

No, because banning social media at large probably isn't the right answer. It's certain interaction patterns that cause harm. That can be pushed back against either technologically (ex chronological feeds) or culturally (ie via moderation).

There's no perfect solution but some are significantly better than others.

The banned interaction patterns are the ones that make social media social media.

And oxygen is also a poison. I don't know what's wrong with HN, but the moment there's _any_ basis for comparison, so many people here are extremely confident that there's no difference between the two things. I'm sure it's an earnestly-held belief, but it's maddening and simply incorrect.

Further, if in some contrived scenario we had to lose HN to get rid of all social media, I'd happily do it.

Social media doesn't mean communicating with people you know. Social media means optimized algorithmic feeds. You could have met the same friends over email.

Blue sky is a social network, not social media.

A subtle but important distinction

I am super curious about this distinction! Could you say more?

On a network, people interact with each other.

In ~media~, you have a few specialized ~creators~, and doom scrollers.

Compare Lunarstorm anno 2000 and instagram 2026.

The "media" in "social media" doesn't refer to image/video/audio, it refers to "the medium being used". Twitter/Blue Sky/etc are all social media. Read it like "a medium being used for social interaction".

It was renamed from social network to social media by business executives, who hijacked the social networks built by us

OPs is closer to the truth; the shift from network -> media shows a useful distinction between what the focal point of activity is.

Note that "social" (as in social interaction with people you know) in "social networking" is a requirement, while it is not in "social media". You may as well call it "parasocial media" since that is the way most people use it most of the time.

Thus 'social media' is primarily based on content, while 'social networking' is primarily based on social connection and interaction.

If anything the terminology shift was the other way, we called forums and MySpace social media back then even though MySpace is called social networking now. "Networking" back then was pretty restricted to business / self-promotion oriented stuff like LinkedIn.

We didn’t call forums back then “social media”, we called them discussion forums…

I was there, just go to the official phpBB forums and search my name..

I was also there. We (ie the people I interacted with) called myspace social media and considered discussion forums to be a specialized subset of social media.

We also considered myspace to be a social network (due to the friend graph) while forums were not.

The chans were a weird almost edge case. I think they qualify as social media but the lack of persistent identities significantly changes the dynamics (obviously).

Nobody called a phpBB forum “social media” 20-25 years ago.

Nobody.

Not only did we do it back then, scroll around this thread - it's still a thing today, people are calling HN "social media".

As far as I know chans are always considered "image boards" and they are usually distinct by the fact that the information is "pushed off" the board after a time or amount posted afterwards.

Image boards, which are a subset of forums, which are a subset of social media.

This is based on changes in trends and is somewhat of a moving target so I'll give some dates.

In the 2000s, 'forums' were forums, and 'social network' was the dominant term for products like FB and Myspace. A movie even came out with that name. Both were also 'communities'. These are verifiable on Google trends.

In the 2010s, 'social media' became the preferred term, mainly because it contrasted with 'the media' as the other major source of information available, but also because it was just an easier to use and more generic term than 'social network'. 'Forums' were still largely forums, tho like all activity online, on occasion it got lumped into 'social media'.

Sometime in the 2010s we started to delineate 'social network' from 'social media' as distinct eras of social products and properties of how the products work. This became extremely clear once the era of video took over in ~2020, as video is historically 'media' in a way that exchanging text never was.

The term 'networking' is/was its own thing and mostly unrelated to 'social networks'.

FWIW I did market analysis for Yahoo's online communities division in 06 and worked on two FB app startups, one which was a college social network, and interfaced a lot with FB in 08-12. All of these words and fine delineations were essential to my work and part of the research I was doing at the time. I looked over my notes to confirm.

This delineation does not match the common usage of the terms as I understand them. If you want to talk about parasocial media then just use that term.

By that logic, Discord would be a network. There's no default feed for Discord, you need to actively seek out friends and community.

Meanwhile, HN would be closer to media. It technically has a few personalities, and one default feed to doom scroll.

> "specialized ~creators~"

I can understand what this means in the context of visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok. (Slight quibble on TT in that a number of very large creators there record from their cars, kitchens, or otherwise do not employ specialized production.)

In any case, what does "specialized creators" mean in the context of (primarily) text-based platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook? Does that mean they are not social media?

> On a network, people interact with each other.

On any platform that would be considered social media by any definition, popular posts serve as a place for people to interact with each other. They are more ephemeral than a subreddit, but they serve the same function.

I am honestly not trying to troll, I just don't understand the distinction.

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook have the same patterns. There's no requirement for them to be in video form.

Most successful Twitter and Facebook posts are visual anyway.

This is a distinction that no existing or proposed law has made and is based solely on your feels.

A social network exists between people, it does not require a platform or technology. Social media is a medium where people correspond.

https://www.techtarget.com/searchunifiedcommunications/answe...

All the explainers in the world don't matter if people don't actually use the terminology that way.

And yet here we are, using the terminology that way.

Not uniformly, no. The local comment subtree is plenty evidence of that.

Blueskys only difference is that it hasnt been enshitified yet.

And when (if) that happens, everyone will just continue to use the same network through a better app. Blacksky is a notable example of this already happening.

Sorry but you sound exactly like that comic. "Our blessed homeland, their barbarous waters"

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-ba...

More seriously, I have seen similar exchanges many times on this social media where one party tries to exempt what is clearly a social media from his anti-social media agenda because he finds it personally more palatable. Usually he tries to exempt Reddit or HN but in this case it is Bluesky, which has the same features as Twitter ten years ago and is notorious for being always politically charged. It makes me think whatever criticisms he may have against social media are actually less about social media but about people he does not like being on social media. Like a driver complaining about all the other cars causing a congestion while he sits in his own car.

But fear not, because our blessed regulators (totally different from their tyrannical censors) will save us from the Big Bad. Never mind when Nepal blocked WhatsApp in its social media ban or when UK came after Wikipedia!

Disagree, that's reductive and beside the point.

It's useful to have words that distinguish major classes of activity online, even if several types are combined on a given platform. "Messaging", "Chat Rooms", "Streaming", "Forums", "Social Networking", and "Social Media" are all different things. You can quibble about what constitutes the edges of the definitions but they all have different key activities they enable.

If you lump everything together, you fail to understand the necessary nuances to identify the problems let alone solve them.

The key to understanding any given social platform is to understand the proportion of which activity that platform enables. This tells you things like the incentives, constraints, externalities, etc of the platform. Different designs have different effects.

I don't disagree in general. I wouldn't call 4chan a social media, for example.

What I find hilariously objectionable is pretending that bluesky is somehow better than all the social medias out there. It's not. It was founded by jack dorsey and copied the UI and features of old Twitter. Its main selling point is "twitter but no Elon musk" and is, from my perspective, almost exclusively inhabited by politically antagonized people seeking a refuge which then resulted in US politics sucking the air out of everything else on that platform.

Can people forge constructive relationships on bluesky? I am sure they do, but they can also do it on X, Reddit, Facebook or whatever "bad" social media out there.

> What I find hilariously objectionable is pretending that bluesky is somehow better than all the social medias out there. etc.

Whether or not it's "better" is orthogonal to the point at hand.

I agree it has roughly the same inherent design biases as X with a few nuances, though it now has drastically different creator incentives both explicitly and implicitly.

Can we still call 4chan antisocial media?

Block lists, starter packs, and quote detaching did not exist on Twitter ten years ago. Person-scale moderation is simply more effective on Bluesky, and that leads to a better experience.

I don’t understand your point.

I don’t use any of these platforms, except HN. But the distinction between social media and social networks is pretty clear.

https://www.techtarget.com/searchunifiedcommunications/answe...

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