alt Hacker NewsSocial media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel insecure, you leverage your emotions for someone else's aims.
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.
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Your theory about cable television is fascinating. I never really watched TV growing up, but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time.
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.
HN is social media. Social media is a spectrum.
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.)
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
I am thrilled you pointed this out. I also get tired of seeing that.
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
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.
When a professor at Rice walked us through Don Tapscott's book Growing up Digital in 2001, we had such an optimistic view of the future. Don highlighted how with broadcast media in the 20th century, the viewer had little choice on what to watch. Now that the internet was available to the masses, he explained how much new generations would benefit from what he called interactive media which enabled someone to explore and learn anything of interest instead of being forced to consume whatever was being fed through the television. When we'd say there was "nothing on" we felt bored, and maybe we did endure some manipulation by commercials, but I agree that contemporary social media is far worse. In the 20th century, boredom from channel surfing at least encouraged some to get off the couch and go read a book or shoot some hoops or play a board game with friends. Allow me the stereotype (exaggeration?) for a moment to note that we had the ultimate nerdy kid who wanted to be cool, and all he could think of with gazillions of dollars at his disposal was to make a thing that turned everyone into anti-social nerds by staying glued to their screens instead of interacting IRL with fellow humans. Who would have accepted that fictional plot as believable?
> It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation.
What baffles me is that they call this manipulation "influencing" and they consider this a positive word.
> HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word.
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.
HN has plenty of social media components.
Think a better version is: HN is not an advertising-controlled social media website. That specific version makes most sense to me.
Ads became the default business model of the web. When people started to get sick of blaring in-your-face blinking banners, it mutated into search ads and placement. The same thing happened to mobile apps and games, YouTube, Facebook, instagram, even Tik Tok. When it becomes too blatant then it embeds itself one level deeper as placements and endorsements.
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.
You absolutely nailed it. It's not 'social' anymore. That's a mask of what it used to be - it's the coercion and manipulation by big tech and by advertisers (AND by 'influencers' who don't have the $$$ to advertise).
- And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. -
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
Social media was first (that I know of) weaponized in 2016 by Cambridge Analytica to manipulate Facebook users to vote for Brexit & Trump. I'm surprised that the article left those totally out.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
I love me some knowledge forums and sites like HN that allow for general discourse. I’m afraid an entire generation doesn’t know what that is like.
HN is not social media. It’s social media with type safety.
I really forgot how stupid cable tv was 20 years ago. In my area, that old stuff is now getting broadcast over the air, which is the only kind of tv I get. It's not the history channel's Ancient Aliens exactly, but it is all the 2nd tier offshoot stuff that didn't air on the big cable channels. About half of them are "about" Hitler, and the topics are treated so unseriously you get things like "Dude, look! This door has an H on it! This must have been where he went!"
It's so stupid you almost can't help watching, but I'll be dammed if they didn't get me to. Wild times.
I must be using social media wrong because all I see on my timeline are funny pics and niche porn.
>And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
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.
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word.
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.
I always delineated the two as one being corporate social media, I do wonder if there is a better word/phrase for it but IME if you use the phrase two describe it as such to those that were online pre-2008 they immediately grasp the difference; but these people are likely a minority.
It's not tiresome. It's spot on. Nothing is as addictive as HN.
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
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.
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(Pedantry erupts below)
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
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.