[alex1138]

There's a massive whitewashing of what "social media" is. I don't feel there's one singular definition but I could be wrong, maybe I am the one who missed the boat. But I'd really love to see it quantified more

eg "Social media leads to addiction!" - ok take Facebook

Are you referring to

a) non-chronological feeds? Who knows what posts you'll actually find? You come back for more. You can't just log off for a week and come back and the most recent posts are there (you don't even see everything, the platforms regularly hides stuff). That's certainly addiction

b) fake notifications? That's fraud, and certainly addiction

c) the corollary of a), you don't know who's seen your posts so your mental model gets shaped. That's certainly addiction

d) forced Messenger and read receipts can be addiction especially given bullshit like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 so FB wants to subvert email

I'm fine with people railing against all this. I just want people to quantify it more

[pdonis]

I would say "social media" is a site that is trying to monetize your data, and using convenience as a lure to get you to give it your data to monetize. ("Data" here includes everything you post there.)

[jacquesm]

I would say social media is any website where the connections between the participants are as important or even more important than the content. As soon as you get 'followers' it is game over.

[alephnerd]

> As soon as you get 'followers' it is game over.

This is already happening on HN now via HackerSmacker [0].

I've found a couple HN users who have that have apparently been using it to follow and target me with comments whenever I post.

[0] - https://hackersmacker.org/

[jacquesm]

Highly annoying. Hn should block that thing from linking.