Posted by 1vuio0pswjnm7 6 hours ago
Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation. It's long past time to leave it permanently.
And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
Social media is totally that today too. I quit facebook in 2016 and reddit in 2023 over similar fears. Back then I said facebook was bad for my mental health, and I quit reddit when they made it harder for me to prevent what I called amygdala-bait. But it's totally the same thing.
These days I love to watch nuanced explanations on youtube of complex issues, but youtube's algorithm desperately wants to feed me stuff like How Money Works and other channels where it's dressed up as nuanced explanations of the world, but every single episode is how X is screwing you over or how the Y is going to blow up the economy any second now.
YouTube is all over the place. You really can get great stuff but are you always a few clicks from blackpill hell: "men suck", "women suck", "famous consumer brands that have lost their way", "it all sucks", ...
"They should follow the rules, like I did"
Never mind the rules were a hell of a lot easier to follow back then. I've seen the paperwork, it wasn't much; if you were from an acceptable country, it was pretty close to show up, get a job and be stable for a year or so, then you can naturalize. Nearly impossible if you came from the wrong country though.
Even 'chain migration' for most relationships takes a lot longer than that, and you have to wait for your visa priority date to come up. If you're from an impacted country, some of the waits are quite long. If you don't have qualified family, and you don't have qualified employment, there's a very small visa allocation for lucky people.
To quote Mon Mothma in Andor:
I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This Chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza. What took place yesterday… what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide! Yes! Genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest? The monster we’ve helped create? The monster who will come for us all soon enough is Emperor Palpatine!
Edit: Apologies, I think I mean his documentary: Can't Get You Out of My Head. Essentially it asserts that all revolutions fail, because the people who attempt to overthrow simply become the new guard.
> People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
Don Henley wrote a song about that kind of news:
"We got the bubble headed bleached blonde
Comes on at five
She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye
It's interesting when people die
Give us dirty laundry"
His most famous videos are on the topic of bullshit jobs, the movie Wolf of wallstreet, various X is collapsing and a Money Laundering Explanations
Content creators are a slave to the algorithm. It's so easy for Google to just not show put your video on the feed, even your subscribers. That's why every video looks the same now, if you refuse to play you don't get views.
Most subreddits that do any sort of product recommendation have the same problem. For a while, the pilot metro was the fountain pen de jure, or Stronglifts the default recommendation for weightlifting (and now it's never recommended).
If they hive mind rallies around products like this, it also rallys around other ideas, policies and whatnot. Just look at the politics subreddit and see nonstop "Israel bad" "Chuck Schumer is feckless" or "jews control the funding of the democrats" everywhere. Even where it doesn't make sense. You can have one of those muckraking websites that run an article like "Schumer didn't vote against [insert house bill]" and it gets to the top and the narrative is relentless against schumer, even though he literally can't vote against a house measure since he's in the senate. Is he feckless? Absolutely. Does that mean everything he does or doesn't do is a sign of his fecklessness? Absolutely not.
In the hivemind, there's no room for nuance, it's all "look at that bitch eating crackers"
Pretty sure if you unmasked the subreddit mods, the reason for the "circling around a particular brand recommendation" observation would become clear.
It used to be more subtle with real people paid to post, but AI has made the quantity of it skyrocket, to the point where you can start to notice it, if you pay attention.
For example you'll see some comment about Jews, and very rapidly a bunch of upvotes. And you'll see a very similar comment elsewhere, with the same upvote pattern.
I've cut back quite a bit my participation in these types of sites once I realized just how many of the "people" I'm talking to are actually bots.
For another example of a structural problem, California has been trying to add housing for the past few years but it has been one piecemeal solution after another. People who own homes don’t want their lives to change, cities like how they are laid out already, parking requirements exist to prevent developers from skimping at the time, environmental reviews are meant to protect the environment… at no point was anyone thinking “I want a housing problem that leads to job flight and homelessness” — everyone is just solving their own problem at the time but together it creates a major structural obstacle.
The people at YouTube don’t actually care about controlling the narrative. They just want to make money while removing problematic content, but they’re not exactly sure what problematic content is and Google tends to invest in algorithms more than support, but the end result is channels get randomly removed sometimes.
The world’s problems are hard because not because people are generally malicious, but because everyone is just doing their own thing. That’s why the only fixes are structural, but structural solutions are really hard.
So all is well in that aspect. That's how news have always been, since the first pyres were constructed to light fires to alert neighbouring communities of enemies arriving.
But the sickening aspect of cable news is the way the presenters talk. The voice they use to speak to the watcher is pure venom. It's an extremely angry and condescending voice, and the TV watcher is made to feel inferior to the broadcasters and therefore give attention to the "very important" things they are talking about. Weak minds are conditioned to feel respect and reverence to those who treat them with despise, and unfortunately also to feel the opposite to people who they believe themselves superior to.
It's completely deliberate, to make people addicted to it.
Consider if a well dressed person came to your house and started talking in the same voice as the TV anchors do. You would instantly think it was a dangerous psychopath on the loose, and try to find a weapon swiftly to ward them off. If somebody at a barbecue started talking like the TV anchors, you'd think they were on drugs and tell them to leave. People would call the police.
The next time you catch a TV news anchor, picture them being with you in your living room instead of in the TV studio. You will instantly conclude that the person is mentally and spiritually unwell to talk and act like that. You can practically smell the reptilian from them. Do the same thing with politicians and other leaders too. Many of them say things that on paper seem nice, but with a demeanour that you wonder when they're going to break out into "Who is the boss of you!? I am the boss of you!?"[1]
And I don't think they can see it in themselves or smell it on themselves, like everybody else with a mind can.
They're two different scenarios so it's not exactly a surprise they sound different. Same goes for anyone giving a public speech, their cadence and tone would sound bizarre if they were just say in a room with you.
> The voice they use to speak to the watcher is pure venom. It's an extremely angry and condescending voice, and the TV watcher is made to feel inferior to the broadcasters and therefore give attention to the "very important" things they are talking about.
I can't say I identify with that at all. I do not hear "pure venom" when I listen to a newscaster. They're usually either trying too hard to be serious or trying too hard to be lighthearted and chummy. But neither is venomous.
IMO the biggest problem with cable news is that it runs constantly. News doesn't. So they have to fill endless dead time with hyperbole. One newscast in the evening ought to be enough for anyone, really.
> Same goes for anyone giving a public speech, their cadence and tone would sound bizarre if they were just say in a room with you.
Then imagine these newscasters giving a public speech in that same way. You'd think you had stepped into the quarterly meeting of psychotics planning a spree.
EDIT:
And most importantly in my living room example: That's where the TV is. If you wouldn't invite a person in the flesh and blood to your living room to behave like this, why would you invite them through your TV?
What about true crime and murder series on Netflix? Who would want to spend their evenings with a flesh and blood person in their bedroom who would go on into gory details for hours about murders and abductions? But still people invite these reptilians to their bedrooms through the TV.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bagdikian
is most famous for his book The Media Monopoly but his obscure 1971 book The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media was highly predictive of what news on the web was going to look like because he had worked for the RAND corporation and tried to sell a very unprogressive (in terms of business) media interest on the idea of online personalized news and they didn't want to make the investment.
That book has some of the most damning indictments of the concept of "news" from a McLuhanite perspective that ever been put to writing, most of all a description of how the editor of a small-town newspaper has about 6 seconds to look at a newswire story and decide if he wants to run it. It's a fundamental act of violence against the framework of reality to throw out 99.999% of it and the kind of "bias" that people get stuck on where people think we need an equal balance of stories that infuriate right-wingers and infuriate left-wingers.
I can say circa 1990 people in my pod noticed this phenomenon that "ruling class" people who get interviewed on TV as well as many TV performers (new anchors!) seem to show a kind of asymmetry of facial expression that you don't see so much in ordinary people.
Today we might blame the botox but it's widely thought that this is a sign of emotional suppression
https://www.jnforensics.com/post/chirality-a-look-at-emotion...
Though as much as we wish we could be observant and understand people like Cal Lightman in Lie to Me signs of deception are never completely reliable.
"Só para as pessoas perceberem lá em casa" is the standard phrase TV pundits use back in $home_country. Translates to something like "just so that you there sitting at home can understand". It's incredibly condescending, truly the gall of these mfs with zero credentials and maximal confidence, speaking assertively about every single topic always with the tone that implies everybody else is a moron.
I haven't watched actual TV for many years so this passes me by except on occasion, but when I see that there are people that watch hours of this garbage every day, part in the TV and part regurgitated on social media... By god it explains many things rotten with the world.
Why didn't you say which one? I bet it is Fox.
He was the Google boss who said in 2016 that he doesn't know his own salary.
Presumably he wants what's best for all of us.
This is why cultural stories now are higher than before on the main site. It used to be the case that news was _just_ news. Politics, crime, economics, health, environment, etc. Now culture stories, like puff pieces about the royals or entertainment end up on the front page.
Back in the day, both the BBC and universities were funded by the government without the stereotype of a fresh MBA graduate in charge. Back in the day before MOOCs, the BBC produced programmes for the Open University because that was the way to get video content out to the nation.
> puff pieces about the royals
have been on the front page of the tabloids since way before the internet.
Fox and CNN are both bad, but different flavors of bad.
"if you're not paying for it, you're the product" and that is just as true here as anywhere.
Yes, HN is a front for YC. However, HN is still very much about longform submissions and nuanced discussion. There aren't very many places like that anymore, and those that still exist are dying, with some exceptions (mostly car forums, for some reason).
(Instagram wasn't always this way! It was originally an alternative to Flickr, but focusing on sharing images and discussion instead of photography. It gradually became the psychological gateway drug that it is now, though even that was a response to threats like Vine and Quibi that unlocked short-form video at scale.)
You can imagine HN like a documentary channel compared to Facebook’s reality TV, but even “documentaries” can be dopamine sinks that aren’t actually informative (or accurate).
(But personally, I see lots of short and pure opinion posts here, documentaries are long and at least pretend to contain facts; so I’d hesitate to compare it to a documentary channel even with the caveat.)
Good explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445343
Many other Internet forums are similar--they might technically have the capability, but the prevailing culture might be that people rarely do it.
Adding to this is that HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't get attention. That makes it fundamentally different from other social media platforms today.
> HN makes it quite difficult (technically impossible, but you can link out) to embed media such as videos and pictures, which makes it fundamentally different than "social media".
What’s the difference? Submissions usually include at least one picture, sometimes videos or interactive content.
> HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't get attention.
I’m sorry, but this isn’t true. HN has less AI than say Reddit, and many users try to combat, but I still frequently see top-voted (obvious) AI-generated articles and less frequently comments.
When something has lots of em-dashes and other https://tropes.fyi, I recommend checking on Pangram.
how can they participate in the daily "social media bad" two minute hate sessions demanding regulations and bans if they acknowledge that things they like are also "social media"?
hence the mental gymnastics.
But we're a long way from that now.
That is the very definition of social media.
"Social media I like" vs. "Social media I don't like" isn't valid categorization.
Is the linux kernel mailing list social media? was usenet?
What do you think social media is? What are the clear criteria that make something social media, or make it not social media?
If you know HN is not social media that you have a clear demarcation of what is.
On Reddit, Instagram, Tiktok et al I can create a community on that platform. I can get find other people into Booktok, I can join the Rowing subreddit, I can get into Knittinggram or whatever. Posters expect roughly their micro-community to see their posts, users expect to see their micro-community's posts.
On hacker news I see the same community everyone else does. If HN was a vBulletin forum with threads posted for links it would function almost 1:1 the same, I guess all you'd need to change is a modification for making threads bump on vote behaviour instead of latest-post.
But fair enough. Don't forums have subforums for different interests, topics and specific discussions and sub-communities? They have the option to follow other members or topics in a customized consumption experience. In my personal experience on large and small forums, including those I administered or moderated, most users lived their entire life in specific subforums. The user that only posted in the CPU subforum, or the Nikon subforum. The user who created the "photos of flowers" or "case modding" topic and only hung around there with kindred souls in their micro-community. Forums were really reddit at a smaller scale.
> I guess all you'd need to change is a modification for making threads bump on vote behaviour instead of latest-post.
This is downplaying the weight the hidden algorithm has on what you see on HN. Much like every other social media site and very much unlike classic forums, submissions and comments here live and die at the hand of an algorithm that decides whether today you get to read about the Israel/Gaza conflict, about Democrats/Republicans. This algorithm is driven on one hand by the social aspect (people deciding what's media and what isn't, hence the "social"), on the other hand by some obscure engagement rules that none of us can see or define.
I don't make it "seem" more complicated, it "is" more complicated because experts don't fully agree on exactly what social media is. Everyone tries to use their experience, preference, and common sense and these all vary.
P.S. The current top comment isn’t there because it’s the most recent, the only objectively correct one, or a mod pinned it. It’s there because the algorithm driven by social engagement decided it’s the media I should see first.
I get that this isn't at all where we are any more. And y'know, everyone's gonna use terms to mean whatever they want. I'm fine with that. I guess I just think its pointless if "social media" means "anything online where people can write messages"
I have no idea why people are making some mysterious deep question out of this, wikipedia quite literally offers a definition[1]. Web 2.0 based platforms, user generated content, social networking including social mechanisms such as followers, groups and lists.
This doesn't apply to HN. You could randomly assign everyone a new name tomorrow and it wouldn't matter. Identity is virtually irrelevant here, there are no mechanisms to connect users to each other, there are no networks of people, users do not generate their own content and there is a criterion that what is discussed is of of public, not merely social or personal interest.
If some crash wiped out all HN users tomorrow and we'd all start over at zero almost nothing would change. If that happend on social media, like Instagram, the site would be dead. That's the social part.
I knew someone who described everything he didn't like in politics as "socialism". He literally couldn't define "socialism" when pressed; it was always a circular reference to the current irritant.
I haven't posted any personal pics, or stories about things that I've done in my life or am currently doing, so how can it be social in the same way that social media is? To me, there's a clear distinction between a news aggregator and discussion forum like HN, and a social media site. Sure, I can post something that I'm working on or a blog post that I've written, but it's still framed as news to be discussed, not a social interaction.
But I don't think it's a meaningful distinction to begin with. Usenet was an endless time sink to get angry at things that didn't matter and argue with strangers who might not even be real people. It wasn't monetized, but it still made it easy to waste years of your life.
HN has an algorithm that manipulates what you see, and we do not know at all how it works.
- The focus isn't on connecting. It has a "friends" feature (I believe?), but the social graph is extremely weak.
- You are not expected to use your real name. On the contrary, it comes off as weird unless you're a celebrity.
- There is no algorithm maximizing engagement, or at least not a hyper personalized algorithm that analyzes your scrolling speed and every sensor under the sun feeding into a machine learning system designed by professional psychologists to keep you hooked.
- Individuality isn't as encouraged. The user name is small, and there are no avatars, or at least used to be (I don't use the new interface very much). The focus is on the content instead.
I suppose you can find a definition of "social media" that includes Reddit, and surely the differences are fluid, especially since we can recognize some efforts by Reddit to become more like the real social media sites, but I vote for putting it in a different category for the sake of discussion.
You can’t bump a thread to the top of HN so everyone sees it
I am thrilled you pointed this out. I also get tired of seeing that.
Social media is the development that they can also use that personalized feed to show media, and actually, your real friends don’t generate enough content to keep you hooked 24/7. So the site is quickly overwhelmed with professional content creators and other entities that are looking for engagement. The site might pander to them intentionally, or it might just fail to prevent them, but in any case they take over. This turns it from a sharing network to a passive consumption broadcasting one.
Hackernews was never a social networking site really, and so it never had the infrastructure to develop into a social media site. It is more like an evolution of a phpBB board, or something like 4chan (but, thankfully, with just enough moderation to keep out all the unpleasantness).
The important distinction is that the feed isn’t personalized, content is ranked based on what the community finds interesting. This seems to surface better stuff. It could just be the moderation and the type of content (tech stuff has always been easier to find on the internet than, say, politics). But there’s probably something to the fact that content has to be “better” in the sense that it can’t just appeal to a specific quirk (weakness?) of an individual viewer.
If it’s a larger site that contains socialization, like blog comments, the blog itself may not be social media but the comments can be. I define TikTok, Twitch, and part of YouTube as social media because the videos themselves are casual and therefore quality as small-talk (if you only visit YouTube for large videos or videos without commentary, you’re not visiting the social media part).
A 1-on-1 or small group chat isn’t social media, but a large group chat, Discord, or other invite-only platform is. Because when these get large enough, they have the parasocialization, shock, and constant activity of open social medias (even some self-promotion, but it’s more authentic and IMO not an issue).
Some people argue text doesn’t count because it’s not “media”, but I don’t think it matters, because in practice people share media on text forums and I don’t think there’s much difference anyways (e.g. name dropping a movie, is that sharing media?).
I define Stack Exchange as not social media, because it actively strongly discourages socialization. Video game lobbies are social media iff users heavily socialize in the chat (the clans in Warcraft, Eve, and Clash of Clans may qualify; large Minecraft server chats may quality).
Ultimately, I define social media based on parasocialization, with tendency to promote and consistently provide high-dopamine text and other media. Someone else can define it as “a parasocial dopamine sink with notifications and ‘friends’” like Twitter, or “a parasocial dopamine sink that encourages your real name” like Facebook”. I include sites like HN because I think, while they’re significantly better, they’re still “social” in a way regular communication isn’t, and can still have most of the negative effects (you can engage positively with HN, but you can engage positively even with TikTok and Facebook, if you use it selectively productively).
HN is social, it has an algorithmic feed, people upvote and downvote your content, hell it has a social credit score. The idea that HN somehow isn't "social media" is hard to take serious. This is Reddit for a niche audience.
The main difference is that HN has a small and relatively high quality community, plus the traffic is low enough that it gets a fair amount of manual moderation. It's still social media and if there were enough people here, we'd eventually read stories of kids who offed themselves over downvotes. But we're thousands, not billions, so the law of large numbers doesn't apply.
If your FB feed or Youtube feed is garbage, spend some time curating it. HN is mostly curated for you, which appears to be creating unrealistic expectations of the broader world.
HN, on the other hand, your attention matters less. They aren't paying for this platform using our "attention" necessarily. I'm sure it is a way to curate an audience of tech-enthusiasts where they can exploit our knowledge and push their investments in front of our eyes.
I like HN for that reason, I don't feel like I'm the product as much as with other attention-seeking platforms.
HN doesn't feel the need to keep my attention 24/7.
But it isn't like YT (which is running in the background nearly 24/7) or Reddit, that I habbitually check. Those feel way more addictive. Same with Instagram, but I don't really care for short form content, so it doesn't capture me the same way as news and long form videos.
People don’t want to admit it’s social media because that delegitimizes their argument “all social media bad!” and instead of refining their argument they just double down. It’s a very human behavior.
I believe these are the exact technical advancement the top-level poster was contrasting with cable networks, so the distinction matters here.
The lack of any kind of personalization whatsoever on Hacker News is a huge differentiator. There are no notifications, so if you want to find out if somebody replied to you, you've got to go check. Everybody's front page is exactly the same. There are no direct messages. There are no in-line images or videos or even emoji. The feed is not endless. There is no targeted advertising. There are no reactions to posts other than upvote/downvote.
I guess you can lump HN in with Instagram and TikTok, but it just feels like a very different product, in ways that are relevant to the analysis of whether its existence is a net positive for society.
Much more effective is trying to identify the mechanisms by which a communication platform breaks social interactions. Is the feed sorted by engagement or chronologically? Does the platform encourage you to chase metrics? Does the default feed include content you didn't subscribe to? Are comment threads difficult to trace through?
not every user submitted feed with upvotes is the same
You absolutely can follow people here. Accounts have profiles and you can look at all their comments and submissions. If you want to make it convenient, there are browser extensions. But I don't see why that matters. You stick around here long enough you tend to recognize the frequent commenters.
And what do you mean you have no idea who I am? That's a choice. Like you, I have plenty of identifying information in my profile. People who want anonymity create throwaway accounts, just like reddit et al.
Both a wheelbarrow and a Ferrari have wheels.
* The platform is a closed garden with a goal to own the content, user submissions, and any personally identifiable data or relationships thereof.
* User interaction is primarily limited by a terms and conditions policy as opposed to a code of conduct. The goal is to impose constraints upon user rights as opposed to user behavior.
* There exists a profit incentive directly tied to engagement frequency. The goal is to quantify content visibility and sell those numbers to third parties.
* Exchange and reselling of user profile data, user submissions, and any analysis or relationship there upon is beyond user control, awareness, or agreement.
A preference for unfalsifiable babbling. As worthless as arguing what exact colors the word "pink" refers to. Just define a range.
It's worse than bikeshedding because then at least you get a bikeshed. At the end of this discussion, at best you get a synonym.
It’s really not though. There is no personalized algorithm, which is 98% of the issue with social media. It may seem pedantic, but it’s like saying a horse and a car are essentially the same thing, the car just has an engine.
I came here after reading the comment section for the "Dopamine Fracking" story right below this one. In that comment section there are arguments that Hacker News isn't social media because it doesn't have social features like friending people you know. The argument is that it's a place to discover cool content and comment on it.
Which is precisely the argument being made in this BBC article: That traditional social media is becoming less about communicating with friends and more about discovering content and commenting on it. Which is the exact purpose of sites like Hacker News and Reddit.
> "I spend a lot of time scrolling through videos made by content-creators," says Lucie, also 16. "They're more interesting than the posts of people I know."
> "What we're seeing is social media splitting in two," says social media consultant Matt Navarra, author of the Geekout Newsletter. "Big platforms like Instagram and TikTok are becoming more about entertainment and discovery. WhatsApp is becoming the place people go to actually be social.
EDIT: I had to use Wayback Machine to find this:
> 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features
> Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.
That's from https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinato...
That has been erased from the internet, but it was widely understood that sites like Reddit and HN could were social and had addictive properties for people without strong self control.
I have an account on facebook, on which I am pretty active. If I attend some infrequent event (Which I do fairly often) I will take a picture of it and post it there, with a description of what it's about. That's pretty much the extent of what I put on facebook. Sometimes I see similar posts from people in my friends list, or videos about whatever facebook thinks I am interested in this month (Right now it's showing me lots of people taking apart pumps and motors). What sites are you using, and what exactly are they showing you ?
I think the folks you’re talking about are influencers. Which I wholeheartedly agree with your take in that case.
It’s not “just” advertising. Again this is nuanced.
What baffles me is that they call this manipulation "influencing" and they consider this a positive word.
Not filmmakers or artists or writers... "content creators".
Like they exist just to produce a continual stream of this amorphous "content" for consumption.
Now, perhaps that's all that art/writing, etc ever was. But to just abandon even the pretense is another in a long line of surrenders we've made to commoditization.
Is this history repeating itself?
The idea that content creators could be considered artists is one I may have considered before, but only tangentially.
What I'm also curious about...is how this commoditization and consumption via "influencers" has altered any individuals attitudes towards blatant manipulation. Free will seemed to be a much more guarded value. Now, the willing surrender of our free will seems to be the norm...
Whatever you want to call it, HN has followed a similar trend. It's rare to see the authors of small, but interesting/innovative, projects show up in the comments, surprised to see their work on the front page. That used to be common, even the default, if you look far enough back.
Now the front page is current events and marketing campaigns. I don't think I've seen a single software project here in the last year that wasn't already extremely popular, or being pushed by a company with a marketing budget.
In theory AI should have helped. I know people are still making cool stuff, faster now with AI, but it's harder and harder to find it.
Why would generative AI help stop enshittification? If anything AI has made low-effort slop far more common on the front page and sometimes it gets voted up because of a snappy headline and few people attempting to read it, particularly if long-form and initially convincing.
The article's main claim is that traditional social media is not social media any more. That Facebook et al are now junk entertainment. So IMO HN hews much closer to the traditional role of social media than Facebook et al do.
The commercialization of the engines of culture continues.
Think a better version is: HN is not an advertising-controlled social media website. That specific version makes most sense to me.
Where I think the argument that it's not social falls down is aligned with some of your comments. The feeds, upvotes, downvotes, etc. Let's not forget the spam.
Those mechanisms are pervasive across many social platforms, so why are they so different here? Don't think they are.
This is claimed by users of Reddit regularly as well and I think most people here would consider Reddit to be a typical example of social media.
Plenty of variants of "people who don't use AI will be left behind" are sprinkled around various threads about AI. It's an attempt to both manipulate via fear as well as sell.
It will never stop because the parasitic ads are the only thing holding up the edifice anymore. It's crazy to me because ultimately what holds up the economy is money changing hands for services, and ads aren't that. So ads are fundamentally driving people to spend money elsewhere. I just don't understand how the system holds up a multi-hundred billion dollar advertising parasite...everything would be cheaper if there were no ads.
Thats right in that sense - but in a sense of doom scrolling, it is for me: Very often Im clicking through dozends auf pages, fortunately I have to activly do a click to get to the next site, so this dampens a little bit :-D
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
Before that, you could pay for placement on all the major search engines except early Google, which basically just broke search. (Google does similar stuff now, in the same way they "don't" sell personal information or read your gmail, but somehow make lots of money off it anyway, and target things only mentioned in private correspondence).
LLMs will be next. The only solution is to refuse to pay for access with your attention. That means no copilot, gemini, alexa or siri, since those are all ad supported or adjacent now. ChatGPT and Claude are on borrowed time. I suspect the open weight models will be the last ones to fall.
It's so stupid you almost can't help watching, but I'll be dammed if they didn't get me to. Wild times.
Hard disagree. The upvote/downvote system and the algorithmic front page makes it a social media to me.
What's probably tiresome is trying to come up with a proof that it is not. Your frustration and the insult "pedantry" will not suffice.
If you had a real proof, you would simply include it, instead of performing emotion about being so lowered to even have to discuss HN being social media. The idea that people shouldn't argue with you because it might injure or tire you to be argued with is so 2022.
If you have something specific to say about the actual actions that are taken in what you call social media (but does not include HN), there's plenty to discuss - in fact the difference which you insult as pedantic is the most important thing to talk about. Why is one mediated talking to people good, and the other mediated talking to people bad? And if we try to make it an argument about something other than vocabulary, or even worse the vague-assed "changes in technology," it might accomplish something.
It's insane how this is enough to begin a thread on HN. Vague negative handwaving and insults (nerd-sniping, I guess?). That's not going to hurt whoever you think is doing evil, that's going to help them.
"Social Media" isn't a thing. It's a bag of techniques for mediating communication between people who are usually not asking for a mediator. Talking about those specific techniques and their applications is always going to be more useful than arguing about the referent of some term that you have no obligation to sign onto unless you find it useful.
But god if you're so tired could you just not participate?
That it's less destructive than Meta doesn't make it less "social media" - and I'd argue that it's style (links fall off the page quickly and discussion becomes impossible after a relatively short period of time, solely to foster a sense of "missing out") is part of what defines current "social media".
It's a noisy attention sink, whatever high-mindedness people want to pretend it has.
Anything that attempts to maximize engagement will inevitably optimize for outrage, anger, and disgust. You will end up handing the platform over to trolls and propagandists. Platforms need to optimize instead of quality and sanity, but unfortunately that is expensive will never get as many views and advertiser dollars as cheap outrage content. It's a big reason why our current media landscape is so hellish, the other main reason being the continual takeover of more and more media outlets by billionaire aligned interests.
For an arbitrary definition of "normal"? The last remark is unwarranted and can only have a chilling effect on the conversation. Or outrage bait, a typical sign on social media.
Why is it not social media? It exhibits the same signs as seen on any social media platform. Can you define social media so we can all follow the same play sheet?
I see the same opinions here as I see on Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, or X even from the same people here as there. The topics that reach the front page are the most popular, or divisive, or "addictive". A lot of people post for the karma, there's a lot of pandering to popular opinion. There's an opaque algorithm that decides which topic stays on the front page and for how long, which comment stays on top and for how long, when a post or comment gets flagged or reappears, etc. that dictates how the conversation can be carried and on which topics. There are a lot of political topics where some voices or opinions are buried while others are pinned to the top. Some people spend hours and days posting here. There's a lot of astroturfing. The parallels can go on. The main difference is scale and at this small scale it can maintain a higher level of quality... most times. But quality isn't what defines social media, is it?
Many on HN see themselves as better than the "simpletons" who fall for "normal" social media, and any view that challenges that is tiresome. But your dismissal of whether HN is social media holds water like a sieve.
At this point it's a vague term meaning "a place where you talk to another person online" and nothing more than that.
I'm solidly of the opinion especially after seeing so many arguments of this form on HN that the whole world has accidentally forgotten the term "social network" at some point, because "social media" means nothing.
Except “mainstream social media”, because everyone knows what you’re talking about, including some who’d be confused by “mainstream parasocial network” because they don’t know what parasocial means.
It's very clear. Empirically a common sign across all social media is basing very strong opinions on very vague personal interpretation of something that that will forever stay unwritten so it can't be challenged. Anyone can just cement their claim to eternal correctness by ending a personal opinion with some outrage bait like "anyone who doesn't agree with me is tiresome".
So you're not wrong at all, but I think there's also a significant difference when the personalized algorithms come into play, which can segregate people into their own epistemological echo chambers
I suppose I'd summarize as
1. I don't think we have a precise term for the actual thing, and "social media" is one loose term people use for it
2. There's a spectrum for this, maybe multidimensional:
* Does it display the same reality for everyone? For example obviously true social media will be different depending on your friends, but chronological vs engagement are different. Even new reddit and old reddit I think differ here too
* Infinite scrolling? Or specific page advancement?
* Text? Pictures? Video? (Video duration?) Each one is different
So in that respect, sure, they're all social media, but they're very different, and I think there's probably combinations of those features that result in very different effects/harms
HN is also highly resistant to jokes and memes dominating the conversation. On other social media sites, the top comments are generally jokes or jabs.
HN also lacks pictures or video or ads or infinite scrolling, and makes self-promotion quite difficult.
Is HN social media? Yes. So were BBS’s back in the day. But is it the omnipresent toxic social media that’s currently rotting society’s collective brain on a generational level? At the very least, it’s not that.
The amount of times I've read a very thoughtful article only for the comments to be political drivel (the worst was peak-COVID SF discourse) weakens your argument quite a bit.
It's even more foolish to think outside forces aren't using bots/tech to sway the discourse.
Just because it's not engineered for the mainstream's dopamine addiction doesn't mean it doesn't do the same thing.
It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this. It can be full days with the same post at the top. And the worst part is that I hadn't noticed how empty it was until I did the change.
Sad as it was, at least the incentives were somewhat aligned with a healthy social life. Seek out cool things in life, preferably with friends, share.
This has its own downsides of course too, but is a world away from going on Facebook today, full of people definitely shutting down thekr life businesses, turning wood into MacBook cases and incoherent AI generated videos of 300m waves. I seriously can't remember the last time I put something on Facebook, certainly not in this decade. Never mind any of the other ones...
The problem with filtering out all the junk as a solution is that it doesn’t fix the actual problem of those sites with perverse incentives having control. It seems like the real goal should be to get people off these platforms. That’s the only way to really stop it.
I wonder how long companies would keep paying for ads when a site is 100% bot traffic? They could keep the ruse up for a while, but likely not forever.
what if your friends used it too?
would there be more content (as they seek to connect to real peopl), or less (as they leave)?
I had to use the Wayback Machine to dig this up:
> 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features
> Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinato...
Even Hacker News acknowledged 15 years ago that it was a social site and that social news sites could be "dangerously addictive". The goalposts for defining social media keep moving as people try to avoid any definition that captures their own internet usage, but I think it's important to be honest about what we're all doing here.
Also the noprocrast feature is still there right in your profile, though I don't know if it's documented anywhere.
I feel that this is one of the consequences of spending so much time on Social Media sites, that my brain hast just started to look forward to "distractions" when I don't have anything else to do. If I don't have Instagram, I'll open X. If I don't have X, I'll open Reddit, or LinkedIn, or Hacker News. It's hard to get away from this constant need for distractions all the time, and I've found myself to procrastinate on simple things whereas I wouldn't have done that a few years ago.
I'm glad that features like Noprocrast exist. It's unfortunate that other media sites would never implement these features because their business model is entirely driven on people spending more and more time on their sites.
I don't know every social media site, but many of them do have built-in time limit functionality. It's even better documented than what's on Hacker News.
First two random ones I searched for (Instagram and TikTok)
https://help.instagram.com/2049425491975359/?cms_platform=ip...
https://www.tiktok.com/support/faq_detail?id=754359745915568...
We pretend we're the victims, but none of these platforms would have been built without an army of willing, enthusiastic, highly-paid engineers who made small "ethical compromises" every day.
And now that there's money made in something else, many of us would accept a seven-digit offer from OpenAI in a heartbeat, leaving the task of figuring out the downstream effects to other people.
But the same people decrying corporate social media declare mastodon a "failure" because it hasn't captured literally 100% of Facebook users and doesn't male thirty billion dollars. Shrug.
We need a national conversation (which we seem to be having) about the corrosive nature of these algos.
I personally think they should be liable for much more than they are under section 230.
There was definitely a sweet spot if you were in highschool or college in like 2004 - 2010 (so born something like 1986 - 1994?) where online social media was almost painstakingly manicured to mirror real-life social dynamics.
Many people remember the drama of deciding who your "top friends" were on MySpace.
Instead I can remember online topic focused forum boards, of which some I had numerous daily interactions with the same people over years. These online forums made no pretense about replacing real life social dynamics and yet they were still so much better for real social experiences than the social media that replaced them at that time.
To me social media has always felt artificial for people who shout into a vortex hoping for attention.
But that was 20 years ago.
None of my friends at the time used it (or even MySpace) and I didn’t even have an account, so I found this very odd. The first time I realized it may have actually been popular was when a couple sorority girls came in and wanted me to make an account to friend me… not to actually be my friend, but because they had a contest on who could get the most friends. I did not make an account that day, and it told me everything I needed to know about how shallow the connections were. Those were in the glory days, 2004-2005, and it was already pretty shallow in certain circles. It only went downhill from there.
Might also say more about me and my social behaviour than the social media platforms themselves, I never cared about it too much.
a bunch of ppl turned to Facebook as it was just what the mob did, but it still required to be active in groups indeed
Simplest example - someone posts a picture/video of them in a city that I also am in and now I know they live there / traveling there and I can meet up with them.
That’s just a really odd relationship to me. Maybe it’s a social media thing.
FWIW, I hear things like this but have never heard of any of my friends that use social media actually doing it. In the same way that you could use an Emmy as hammer, but nobody does.
Do those people also have access to your travel schedule? Mine don't.
Maybe you're just not as globally social as me? I've lived in 5 different countries and have friends all over the world and in probably 20 different US states that I can name off the top of my head.
Do I have close friends that I regularly contact? Do I send them a message when I'm in town to see if they are there? Absolutely. But it's not mutually exclusive with a cohort of people I will link up with when I'm traveling.
> well enough to link up
It seems bizarre to me that you only limit yourself to these people. I regularly try to meet up with people I don't know super well but want to get them or their city better. Social media has absolutely helped facilitate this.
I don’t need Facebook to tell me someone I vaguely remember from high school is in my area to then meet up with them. If I vaguely remember with them I hardly care.
And if I am actually close with someone, I don’t need Facebook either as we’d be in contact over text or discord.
That said, social behaviours do differ so YMMV. For me personally, I’m glad I’m not on social media as it seems like a huge waste of time with more downsides than upsides.
There were a bunch of things that destroyed it: Ajax [1], async tech made it possible to continuously push new dopamine shots when viewing a page; the rise of smartphones, since before smartphones you could only check social media when you were behind a computer, which was not true for most people most of the day; and the realization that dopamine shots + ads can bring in a lot of money.
Even though we had cell phones in the early 2000s, in most countries it was just for calling and some SMS (which was expensive outside the US). You would only go to Hyves, Myspace, or whatever when you had some time in the evening. I am sure some people got addicted, but it was much harder than having a device that tries to entice you all day to look.
That said, I still find social networks like Mastodon very useful. Not so much as a replacement for keeping up with friends/family, but it makes it very easy to discover what people who are in niches I'm interested in are up to. And since it does not have an algorithmic feed or ads, the addiction factor is much lower.
Social media was never meant to be a virtual extension of social life. It's what it says on the tin: media created by users, and shared from user to user. Old-school BBS were social media.
Of course you can have actual social experiences, make friends, etc. on social media. But that almost never happens.
Online social networks on the other hand basically do not exist any more.
10 minutes later it was just a frenzy of (trying to) poke people that I thought I might have seen at some point that year, and conversations about how many "friends" people had.
Getting updates helped me even to form friendships long after the first interaction where we had added each other, I'd see someone I had connected with visiting a place nearby, and could go grab a beer with them while they are around. Or the other way around, I'd be visiting their city and would try to catch up, more often than not it helped to keep in touch, develop a deeper friendship, etc.
That is absolutely dead nowadays, it's drowned in noise on any "social" feature (feeds, Instagram stories [and similar features in other "social" apps], etc.), just a barrage of ads, influencer bullshit, and the odd friend update that isn't just a meme...
The worst part for me is that it was a deliberate choice from these companies to disappear with most social aspects of these apps in favour of the money printing scheme that created the whole influencer culture.
I still have hopes for the rebound, when people get extremely fed up with how these apps work, and something different appears to retake what "social" means, not this doublespeak-esque meaning it came to be.
You pretty much only had people you actually knew as friends. People posted photos and messages about real life. No sharing of posts, memes, few stupid people. It was great.
We'll probably never get that back.
Now the feeds are just pure algorithm and very seldom I see someone I know.
My life is worse because instead of see the above I see only fads. Now that I only check my feed once a month I see less fads are more real life - but I also have reason to believe there is more going on from those distant friends that facebook chooses to hide from me because I don't interact with them enough.
YMMV, but I got all of these through words of mouth (and WhatsApp status updates). I think it’s ok to be estranged from a friend or a relative. The next time, we meet, I can ask them how everything is going and what has happened. And if they want they can show me pictures then.
Facebooks business model after around 2011 explicitly became disconnecting people. This isn't stated loudly enough or often enough, but algorithmic feeds and mixing 'news' 'entertainment' with real status updates meant that social networks in general became forces for disconnection and polarisation around this time.
Early FB and Twitter were useful and operated in precisely the opposite way - because they didn't use any algorithmic filtering whatsoever.
I've recently tried to promote a product on social media (well, I still try, I'm just not successful) and, especially as someone who doesn't really use it otherwise (outside of HN and reddit), I can't even manage to be part of the problem:
- Anything I post on Twitter, personal or corpo account, gets <20 views. Every time I scroll through it (again, on either account), it seems most things barely get any views. I am forcing myself to use it, thinking it would help, but I also find it insufferable.
- Facebook has been actually reasonably useful for local things/news and had a surprisingly personalized feed until I realized half the comments (from seemingly real accounts) were clearly written with (or by) AI. When I was forced to post myself (again, for promotion), I noticed FB actively prompts you to use AI to "improve writing" or whatever it was in its own app. Lovely, so even the few islands of real human comments I found are written by robots.
- Instagram auto-bans me, despite going to their verification/selfie spiel. It is literally impossible to reach a human for support, since Meta laid them all off. Seems to be a common theme and it sounds like I'm not missing much. Also locks me out of Threads (I don't know a single person who uses that).
- BlueSky seemed nicer, until I realized interactions to my posts (personal account only) have largely been OF bots. Also lovely.
- Mastodon etc are all enormous tech bubbles that may be interesting, but not what I am looking for.
> The social platforms continue to be monetised predominantly by ad revenue. That is still the core business model. And ad revenue continues to grow," ... > Might there be a backlash coming? Don't many people go on to social media to see how friends are reacting to their posts or comments before settling down to scroll through professionally made content?
Now, I suspect I can solve all these issues by paying them money - actually, I'm fairly sure that would fix the Twitter thing at least - but I _also_ suspect that all that would do is show my traffic to other bots, since I more and more get the feeling that no sane human being is voluntarily putting up with this. But clearly, that's not the case.
People's opinions are groomed and programmed. It's pretty hilarious how small minded people are.
I feel like I keep seeing this claim, month after month, but then I look it up and he's still got around the same ~38% approval. I keep getting my hopes up that people are finally realizing how awful he is, only to be disappointed again. It's depressing.
Most people attacking the Capitol were unorganized protestors, who were gathered as cover for the real effort, which was quite well organized. It was well described in Congressional hearings; people were convicted of conspiracy; lawyers have been disbarred, etc.
Intentional typo as a good pun?
It might partially come from the fact that writing essays isn't deemed important anymore, when you hear people talk about how X or Y is good/bad they can hardly write down why. I've seen articles how we're going from a written culture to an oral culture and the sort of cranks you get with social media certainly fit with the latter.
People who read a lot or get deep into history podcasts and have a hot take on the French Revolution know that this is some whacky shit and if they bring it up explain it first.
TikTok people say the crazy thing and they're surprised when everyone gives them the look. Also the thing they bring up is usually provocative, factually ridiculous, and a little unhinged.
We’re not lacking for opportunities to believe the worst of each other. It’s not something TikTok invented.
Interestingly, in-person "nerd" events seem to be going just fine - LARP, D&D, board games, historical reenactment, trading card games and tournaments like M:tG, and a lot more.
So much of social media now feels built around whatever is trending that week, not the relationships you actually want to keep up with.
That’s why I’m building Dearest (https://dearest.co) : a private, email-based Sunday photo digest for families and friends. Everyone sends a photo and a short update by Saturday night, and contributors get the group’s digest on Sunday morning. Hopefully this keeps us social and in touch.
IMO even better than Chomsky's Necessary Illusions (1989) or Bernay's Propaganda (1928) at giving you that backstage at Disney world feeling.