[uhtred]

does social media serve any purpose whatsoever besides marketing and PR, virtue signalling and self promotion?

honestly, what genuine use does something like twitter, mastodon, instagram etc have? No one even reads the shit other people post, they just use it to hook into their own material.

fucking weird world we live in now, where 90% of the population appears to be a narcissist.

[polytely]

You are literally posting this complaint to a social media site.

For me I'm on mastodon to shitpost, discuss media with friends, my account is locked and I only allow followers who give off good vibes. There is nothing narcistic about it, it isn't even tied to my IRL identity.

[uhtred]

Not really, HN is a forum.

[zichy]

Do you realize that a forum is social media?

[uhtred]

No it's not, forums were around on the internet long before the term "social media" existed. Same with comments on a newspaper article, they are not social media.

[rsynnott]

"That's a cat." "No it's not, those were around long before the word 'cat' existed".

[DRW_]

Just because the term "social media" came later and was popularised by certain kinds of social media networks, it doesn't mean it doesn't encompass regular old fashioned forums too.

What is this right now other than a social interaction about a piece of media (the article)? This is a very arbitrary distinction for you to draw.

[uhtred]

see comment below. you are wrong no matter how nerdy your logic.

[kalleboo]

The term "social media" was coined in 1997 in reference to AOL chatrooms. It can totally apply to web forums as well.

[peterlk]

Well, here I am replying to you on a social media platform (HN) to contribute to a discussion. So yes, social media does serve a purpose. It connects people and allows us to have discussions.

The problem you mention is a huge one with modern social media, and I think that it is exacerbated by the perverse incentives of engagement (ad) driven monetization. But there are healthier ways to use social media, and shifting data ownership away from a centralized oligopoly to a federated, decentralized model is a step in the right direction

[Karellen]

Is HN social media?

I tend to distinguish social media from internet fora in that, social media is user-centric. You follow people. But a forum is topic-centric. You follow a discussion group with a specific purpose, and it's an implementation detail if it's hosted on a dedicated website, or a mailing list, or a newsgroup, or a subreddit.

HN could be alt.news.ycombinator, or /r/hackernews. It isn't @hackernews, or... whatever facebook does. I definitely lean towards thinking of HN as a forum, rather than a brand of social media.

Do you think that's a meaningful distinction?

[NoboruWataya]

Personally I don't think it's a meaningful distinction. You can engage primarily with topics on Twitter and Facebook (hashtags, pages, etc), and you can engage primarily with people on HN and Reddit (by mostly hanging out in the comments). Reddit in particular falls squarely in the social media camp to me, and while HN is maybe more topic-focused again (self-posts are less common), it is a matter of degree.

I think any site that people use primarily to interact with others (in public, I guess) is arguably social media. (Looking forward to being savaged by HN pedants looking to reduce that definition to absurdity.)

[Karellen]

> I think any site that people use primarily to interact with others (in public, I guess) is arguably social media.

Isn't that just "the internet"? If mailing lists and newsgroups and BBSs and blogs with comment sections and instant messaging/chat rooms and forums and wikis are all "social media", why did anyone invent the term "social media" 20 years after it had existed instead of just continuing to say "the internet". Or, shudder, "information superhighway" if they really needed a hip slang moniker to use instead?

[NoboruWataya]

> If mailing lists and newsgroups and BBSs and blogs with comment sections and instant messaging/chat rooms and forums and wikis are all "social media"

Yes, I would consider basically all of those things to be social media, with the possible exception of wikis and blogs where most people don't go to the blog specifically to comment and read others' comments. They are all media for social interaction.

On the other hand, news websites like bbc.co.uk or company websites like microsoft.com are not, generally speaking, social media.

I realise we can argue forever about the corners of this loose definition I haphazardly threw out. But what is the rationale for distinguishing between Reddit and HN (on the one side) and Twitter and Facebook (on the other)? The root comment of this thread complained about social media being full of marketing, PR, virtue signalling and self-promotion. You can argue that is an unduly harsh assessment, but BBS, IRC, Reddit and HN have all had their fair share of all that stuff.

> why did anyone invent the term "social media" 20 years after it had existed

Because back in the 90s the mainstream media had nothing to say about BBS and IRC so they didn't need a term for it.

[trealira]

I'm not who you asked, but I agree, and I do think that's a meaningful distinction.

I'm curious: how would you characterize Tumblr? It's true that you generally follow people, but it's unlike other social media in that: blogs are anonymous, people generally have multiple side blogs for different topics, and browsing through tags is just as common as scrolling your dashboard for content posted by blogs you follow.

[uhtred]

Not really. HN is a forum.

[chikitabanana]

Curious, what are your criteria for distinction?

[uhtred]

common sense

[da02]

Very true. There is some positive news. Most books could be said to be "trash", but book publishing is still important. The same was said with blogs: "Oh, most blogs are about people having breakfast." But, I remember Joel on Software, Scripting.com, LRC, and Mises Blog that all had such a positive effect on me. So it is with social media: - people are meeting and getting married via Instagram. - I have chatted with Ph.Ds on Twitter and Youtube, even though I have no college degree. - I helped a UI/UX designer have lunch with Alan Kay. All of it via Twitter. That is something that will never happen to me because I am not in the same "league". He later casually mentioned he had lunch with Ted Nelson. (Sigh! That will never happen to me.) - And lots of people here probably have an anecdote how one-thing-led-to-another that made life a little bit happier. Jeff Tucker would probably say, "It doesn't matter if 98% are narcissistic hunters/gathers. That 2% can change The World and Your Life." (Of course, you would say it more eloquently.)

At least this is what I say to myself when I get depressed we are living in the 21st Century World and people care more about letting men inside women's bathrooms than the fact the US and its "allies" just bombed the Nordstream pipeline that will have a negative effect on millions of Europeans... and how I will be downvoted (2718 currently) for posting this. But, at least you are not alone "uhtred".

[ChrisArchitect]

agree about the narcissism but for a news org, this is their RSS.

[egypturnash]

Do you have... friends?

You can follow friends and see what they are saying throughout the day, and maybe converse with them, in a lower-commitment manner than having a private chat with just them. Their other friends might be part of this conversation too. Maybe some of their other friends will become your friend too.

You have to have some friends first though. If you don't have any then I could easily see how it looks useless.

[uhtred]

I have friends, but I guess I don't see the need to converse with them in public for all to see- why not use something private like whatsapp or signal? Why the need to show everyone else that you have friends?

Do you post a status update telling all your "friends" that you stubbed your toe and then feel depressed when you don't get many heart emojis?

Or do you post a really witty observation about something in the news, so witty you spent all morning thinking of it, and then get depressed when no one reposts it?

sure though, you only use it to communicate with your friends.

[wiml]

That used to be what I used social media for, but Twitter lost its utility for that sometime in the early 2010s.

[egypturnash]

Yeah pretty much. It turned into an Outrage Machine, because that makes more money. I started running a Mastodon for myself and some friends in the mid-2010s and it's been really nice.