[tkgally]

I am close to never having used a central-platform social media site. I had a Facebook account for a few months about ten years ago because the manager of a project I was working on insisted that we use it to communicate. I closed down the account soon after the project finished. I have never had an account on MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

The one exception, perhaps surprisingly, is Instagram. About eight or nine years ago, my daughter was starting out as a freelance illustrator, and I was fascinated with how she and other illustrators shared ideas and learned from each other through Instagram. It seemed like a new form of culture propagation. For a year or two, I posted my own music and photographs to an Instagram account that I set up under a pseudonym. I never got any engagement from it, but I started following some people who posted content that was interesting to me. I continue to follow twenty or thirty accounts and enjoy checking them every day or two, but I stopped posting myself a long time ago and my account continues to be under the pseudonym, so I don’t think it really counts as social media use.

[jacquesm]

This comment is super funny. You are on a central-platform social media site making this comment.

[bamfly]

No feed. No social network. Et c.

Reasonable people disagree over whether it's appropriate to label any piece of software in which two or more people interact "social media". I tend to think it renders the term uselessly broad.

[jacquesm]

Reasonable people know how to use a dictionary:

"websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking"

[bamfly]

Right. Because some people use it that way and dictionaries have (not inappropriately!) leaned strongly descriptivist for decades. They should have such a definition in them.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure what about my post prompted you to jump to suggesting I'm an imbecile.

[jacquesm]

> Meanwhile, I'm not sure what about my post prompted you to jump to suggesting I'm an imbecile.

If that's your take I can't stop you but it's just a play on your own wording.

[tkgally]

Good point. I was aware of that, of course, but, like some others here, I like to believe that HN is different in significant ways: no images or videos, no personalized feed, no following or being followed, no targeted advertising, etc.

[rfrey]

You are correct, of course, but to me HN is more similar to a bbPHP forum than Facebook or Twitter. (Forums are themselves central-platform social media sites, but to me they are quite different.)