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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.

I won't. I don't do social media. I have a Facebook account but I never use it. I don't even have a Twitter account. I don't use TikTok or any other such apps. If I'm using my smartphone and it's not for a call, texting, or an essential app like my bank's, it means I'm reading an e-book on it. (It's true that I get most of my ebooks from walled gardens--Google and Amazon. Unfortunately the vast majority of freely available ebooks are simply unreadable because of crappy formatting. But it's still not social media.)

But I'm an extreme outlier. I wish I weren't, and to be honest I'm not sure I understand exactly why I am. But that's how it appears to be.

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> I don't do social media

You do realize Hacker News is social media right? And that too owned and operated by YCombinator.

And unscrupulous data crawlers have been mining HN's datasets for years. Heck, there's a fairly robust live HN dataset on Hugging Face right now [0].

OP is right.

[0] - https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news

How many times must we trundle underfoot this lazy canard that HN is social media. A link aggregator with comments is not what anyone thinks of for that term.

I mean, there is discussion and a sense of community here. I’m not sure what exactly defines social media, but this is more than just a link aggregator.

Old forums weren't called social media. I think for it to be social media it has to be about your social graph, here on HN I almost never read peoples names and I don't really connect with people so it isn't social media, its just media with comments.

If I could subscribe to peoples feeds and such then it would be social media, but HN doesn't have that feature.

> there is discussion and a sense of community here

That's been true of discussion forums for longer than the Internet has been available to the public. I was on discussion forums over dialup in the 1980s. The term "social media" didn't even exist yet, nor did the business model of trying to monetize people's online data.

I don’t believe Hacker News is social media, it’s news aggregator/message board.

Social media requires social network effects, where a large part of the draw is the network effect, and that just isn’t a part of HN.

There's a massive whitewashing of what "social media" is. I don't feel there's one singular definition but I could be wrong, maybe I am the one who missed the boat. But I'd really love to see it quantified more

eg "Social media leads to addiction!" - ok take Facebook

Are you referring to

a) non-chronological feeds? Who knows what posts you'll actually find? You come back for more. You can't just log off for a week and come back and the most recent posts are there (you don't even see everything, the platforms regularly hides stuff). That's certainly addiction

b) fake notifications? That's fraud, and certainly addiction

c) the corollary of a), you don't know who's seen your posts so your mental model gets shaped. That's certainly addiction

d) forced Messenger and read receipts can be addiction especially given bullshit like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 so FB wants to subvert email

I'm fine with people railing against all this. I just want people to quantify it more

I would say "social media" is a site that is trying to monetize your data, and using convenience as a lure to get you to give it your data to monetize. ("Data" here includes everything you post there.)

I would say social media is any website where the connections between the participants are as important or even more important than the content. As soon as you get 'followers' it is game over.

> As soon as you get 'followers' it is game over.

This is already happening on HN now via HackerSmacker [0].

I've found a couple HN users who have that have apparently been using it to follow and target me with comments whenever I post.

[0] - https://hackersmacker.org/

Highly annoying. Hn should block that thing from linking.

> You do realize Hacker News is social media right?

No, I don't. HN is a news and discussion site. It's not trying to monetize my data.

> unscrupulous data crawlers have been mining HN's datasets for years

They've been mining every byte of data that's visible on the web for years. That doesn't make every single website on the Internet social media.

Was Facebook social media before it started adding ads or not?

Will non-monetized old school "forums" escape the wrath of "social media" bans for children? Will HN?

> Was Facebook social media before it started adding ads or not?

AFAIK it's had ads for practically its entire existence, and other than venture capital investments, ads have always been virtually its entire revenue.

Depends on what you consider "practically its entire existence": the same could be said of Google Search if we are looking at how long they did not compared to the rest of the time, but I distinctly remember the period when they did not and when I recommended them to my entire social circle as The Search Engine (compared to Yahoo, Altavista, MSN or whatever else was there at the time) or The Social Network (compared to MySpace, I can't remember anything else that was comparable).

> Will non-monetized old school "forums" escape the wrath of "social media" bans for children?

I haven't seen anyone trying to apply such bans to them. Have you?

> Will HN?

I guess we'd have to ask the HN moderators that question.

The first Google search hit for the UK variant of the law[1] says this:

  This includes a range of websites, apps and other services, including social media services, consumer file cloud storage and sharing sites, video-sharing platforms, online forums, dating services, and online instant messaging services.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act...

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