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Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

I'm in my mid-30s, grew up tinkering/programming/etc., but I have to admit I just don't get social media. But then I'm not a very sociable person in general. My wife (not a techie), however, is all over facebook/pinterest/twitter/etc. doing God knows what while I'm coding all day.

How I learned of the existence of Pinterest:

Me: "Where did you say you posted that thing?"

Wife (annoyed): "Pinterest"

"Your what?"

"Pinterest"

"WTF is Pinterest?"

"Seriously?!"

edit: Pintrest, Pinterest, eh?

View on HN

Part of that is just gender.

Pinterest is aimed almost exclusively at women. You haven't heard of it because you're a dude and it's not marketed to you or your friends.

Hell, I'm enough of a tomboy that I don't really use it. I looked at it a year and a half ago when I first started transitioning to female because I heard that girls are supposed to like it, and I never got into it because it was all about fashion and shit that I have no interest in.

(OK, I did start getting into it in the last week or so... but I've mostly kept to the '80s/'90s nostalgia boards, which seems to be a much smaller part of the community than the fashion boards.)

Pinterest is fantastic at what it does, which is an online pinboard of stuff you like around a theme.

The obvious use case is wedding planning. One board each for dresses, rings, locations, cakes, table decorations, invites, etc etc. or for redecorating a room - it's brilliant for that kind of stuff.

(I say brilliant, and I'm a Pinterest fan but the site has some user-hostile behaviours on mobile so I ise it a lot less often than I used to.

Unless you don't have a pinterest account in which case it becomes amazingly unhelpful. Many times I've searched for something boardgaming related, I like to make things for my games, and been blocked by the pinterest gatekeeper. I refuse to sign up so every time I leave.

Yes, that's part of the user hostile stuff. It's a shame because it makes me reluctant to recommend pinterest. I don't ever link to my pinterest here for example.

I'm in the same boat. I blame it on karma; I spent a couple decades lambasting people for not knowing about BBS, IRC, email, www, etc.

Oh you don't get social media?

You're using one right now.

This is a web page, sonny. Pretty much as simple as they were in '92.

The technology doesn't matter

From Wikipedia

"Social media are computer-mediated tools that allow people to create, share or exchange information, ideas, and pictures/videos in virtual communities and networks." (Someone added "Web 2.0" later there but it's immaterial. Well, HN lets you vote without refreshing the page, I guess that's "Web 2.0")

The content is driven by users, either by creating (FB, Twitter) and/or curating it (Pinterest AND HN) -> Social Media

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system ("A bulletin board system, or BBS, is a computer server running custom software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through email, public message boards, and sometimes via direct chatting.")

HN is actually a fairly primitive BBS running over TCP/IP.

I'd argue that the BBS is the earliest form of social media (or one of the earliest, at least).

Finger?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol

I know what a BBS is, I used them

(I'd say HN is not one, since we don't use a terminal program to access it and not using a modem over POTS)

Yeah, Hackernews is basically pg's guestbook and it needs more MIDI.

Don't forget the visitor counter and the "men working" gif

Optimized for IE used to be what the cool kids did because it supported iframes before Netscape and all of a sudden it wasn't a big deal to use frames in that way. It took a while before div based layouts actually were easy to get working in most browsers to the point where most people stopped using Photoshop and cutting everything into borderless tables.

I'm not afraid to admit that I still do table-centric HTML design on occasion (disclaimer: for specific, usually non-public, uses); it's really not all that much worse semantically than the current trend of "oh I'll assign a grid-three-seventeenths-or-whatever-the-fuck CSS class to this div in WangularStrap.js", considering that in both cases you're embedding formatting information in the data being presented (and therefore totally missing the point of "semantic" web programming).

And animated flame gifs.

So are FB & Twitter & Pinterest, old-timer!

There's a massive difference between topic-centered, article-oriented forums and social-oriented "life walls", in which people are drawn to share their personal life and basically have an "online life hub".

One is centered around the topic, the other is centered around the person.

Reddit is topic oriented and nonetheless is social media. Because the curation of topics is done by the users (same thing here, with some content created by the users themselves)

Pinterest is about curation of content and it is social media as well

As I said, it's about the difference between "topic-oriented" and "person-oriented".

Pinterest has a very different demographic which is more likely why GGP hadn't heard of it, but I would put it in the same bucket as Reddit/HN. Facebook, Twitter etc however are person-oriented.

The only thing all these have in common is user-generated content. But at that point you can call anything with user-generated content social media. Forums? Sure. Newspapers with curated user-submitted articles? Why not.

Seconded. I've never really drunk the social media koolaid and I feel just as native as the next guy. Got started on a used 2400 baud modem in the early nineties when it was not easy to get connected to the internet, let alone browse the web. I feel like that grit's gotta be worth something. Of course, this is to say nothing of the people I know and respect who wrote their first programs on freaking punch cards.

A good friend has been trying to get me into SM since Tribe and I've never really liked any platform I've tried. I'm mostly private and find no utility in chronicling my life in the open for everyone to see. If I want to share event from time to time I still do, just not via, for instance, Facebook.

I'm in my early 20s and I'm in the same boat. Reddit/HN/Slashdot are the extent of my use of social media and a lot of my peers in college were the same. Hell, I know a handful of people who work at Facebook/Twitter/etc who didn't even have Facebook/Twitter/etc accounts when they were hired, some of them still don't.

I suspect that an FB account for Facebook is "Mandatory" (because a lot of work is done "inside" FB - think of it as their internal comm tool, but of course you don't need to use it to post pictures of your weekend)

You've just described my girlfriend and I with uncanny precision

Pinterest, btw.

see what I mean?

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