[chongli]

This has been discussed a few times here on hacker news. The argument I prefer (that I can’t find anymore, sorry) is that hacker news is different from social media because it gives every user the same feed. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc give each user a custom feed based on perceived preferences. This has been argued to lead to users being isolated within their own echo chambers. Hacker news seems to suffer less from that problem because it continually exposes users to new topics and points of view they might not have sought out.

[krapp]

If Twitter and Facebook were exactly the same, minus the algorithmic feeds, would they no longer be social media?

If not, what would they be?