[pdonis]

> You do realize Hacker News is social media right?

No, I don't. HN is a news and discussion site. It's not trying to monetize my data.

> unscrupulous data crawlers have been mining HN's datasets for years

They've been mining every byte of data that's visible on the web for years. That doesn't make every single website on the Internet social media.

[necovek]

Was Facebook social media before it started adding ads or not?

Will non-monetized old school "forums" escape the wrath of "social media" bans for children? Will HN?

[pdonis]

> Will non-monetized old school "forums" escape the wrath of "social media" bans for children?

I haven't seen anyone trying to apply such bans to them. Have you?

> Will HN?

I guess we'd have to ask the HN moderators that question.

[necovek]

The first Google search hit for the UK variant of the law[1] says this:

  This includes a range of websites, apps and other services, including social media services, consumer file cloud storage and sharing sites, video-sharing platforms, online forums, dating services, and online instant messaging services. 

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act...

[pdonis]

> Was Facebook social media before it started adding ads or not?

AFAIK it's had ads for practically its entire existence, and other than venture capital investments, ads have always been virtually its entire revenue.

[necovek]

Depends on what you consider "practically its entire existence": the same could be said of Google Search if we are looking at how long they did not compared to the rest of the time, but I distinctly remember the period when they did not and when I recommended them to my entire social circle as The Search Engine (compared to Yahoo, Altavista, MSN or whatever else was there at the time) or The Social Network (compared to MySpace, I can't remember anything else that was comparable).