[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.