[everdrive]

Social media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel insecure, you leverage your emotions for someone else's aims.

Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation. It's long past time to leave it permanently.

And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

[malfist]

Your theory about cable television is fascinating. I never really watched TV growing up, but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time.

Social media is totally that today too. I quit facebook in 2016 and reddit in 2023 over similar fears. Back then I said facebook was bad for my mental health, and I quit reddit when they made it harder for me to prevent what I called amygdala-bait. But it's totally the same thing.

These days I love to watch nuanced explanations on youtube of complex issues, but youtube's algorithm desperately wants to feed me stuff like How Money Works and other channels where it's dressed up as nuanced explanations of the world, but every single episode is how X is screwing you over or how the Y is going to blow up the economy any second now.

[PaulHoule]

One of my in-laws who immigrated from Italy with a big family has a "command center" with a computer he trades stocks on and a few TVs and it drives me nuts when he watches Fox News and they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration" which is exactly what his family did to great success.

YouTube is all over the place. You really can get great stuff but are you always a few clicks from blackpill hell: "men suck", "women suck", "famous consumer brands that have lost their way", "it all sucks", ...

[toast0]

25 years ago, my italian grandmother was the same way. No command center, but still wildly anti-immigration; probably stoked by the news. She immigrated as a child, technically naturalized twice (she was naturalized through her fathers naturalization, but married an italian citizen in Italy and renaturalized through his naturalization... because the citizenship of a married woman was determined by her husband's citizenship back then), but definitely in favor of pulling the ladder up.

"They should follow the rules, like I did"

Never mind the rules were a hell of a lot easier to follow back then. I've seen the paperwork, it wasn't much; if you were from an acceptable country, it was pretty close to show up, get a job and be stable for a year or so, then you can naturalize. Nearly impossible if you came from the wrong country though.

Even 'chain migration' for most relationships takes a lot longer than that, and you have to wait for your visa priority date to come up. If you're from an impacted country, some of the waits are quite long. If you don't have qualified family, and you don't have qualified employment, there's a very small visa allocation for lucky people.

[somenameforme]

The historic reason attitudes towards immigration changes is because of scale. This [1] page has a nice graph of the foreign born US population. Towards the end of the 19th century it hit 14.8% which led to significant pushback that culminated in various laws and acts against immigration. That's precisely where the paperwork started to form.

Following those acts and laws, immigration declined to a valley of 4.7% foreign born in 1970. Then it began rising again with more permissive/enabling acts playing a significant role in driving such, like IRCA under Reagan. In any case we're now up to 15.8% with no end in sight, and history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself.

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...

[saghm]

> history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself

Every time in US history that there's been an influx of immigrants, there were people spouting essentially identical arguments to the ones they're spouting now (stealing jobs, lack of assimilation, etc.), and every time it's turned out to be basically a non-issue in the long run. I've long had the opinion that most of the people vehemently "against illegal immigration" would probably have basically the same opinion if the numbers were identical but everyone followed the processes they claimed to support, and seeing how the current administration is trying to deport refugees of color while expanding the programs for only white South Africans feels like a pretty transparent confirmation of that.

[somenameforme]

The problem you run into here is that each time there was a sufficiently large threshold of immigration growth, the government did respond by sharply curbing immigration. So we don't really know how things would have turned out without that. And that was also during times of significantly higher fertility rates, so higher rates of immigration would have had a relatively smaller impact on society. There were also much higher rates of self employment (a quick search suggests ~50% in 1900), so there'd be less concern over the job market and instead even a benefit to be gained from more consumers and even laborers - the same reasons that corporations tend to support immigration in contemporary times.

So in modern times the situation is quite a bit more different and relatively unprecedented, at least if we continue along with anything like the former status quo. But I'd wager that the former status quo is probably dead, even after the current administration leaves office. The DNC is showing good predict market rates for a win in 2028 and I'd wager that they'll run on a much more moderate platform for immigration, far away from both Trump and Biden.

[peyton]

What would you say to somebody who simply feels their quality of life has been lowered (vs. somebody “spouting essentially identical arguments”)?

[adjejmxbdjdn]

People aren’t, and will not, have as many kids going forward. We are seeing this in rich countries and poor countries.

Right before the baby boomers are fully retired is a heckuva time America decided it wants to contract its population by prioritizing keeping the working adult out.

[somenameforme]

Fertility is one of the best examples of a self correcting problem. Fertility causes populations to contract dramatically faster than most appreciate. The formula for the change between generations is a factor of fertility_rate/2. So if a country has a fertility rate of 1 (which is where many countries are trending, if not already lower than), then each successive generation will be 50% smaller.

A generation is proportional to the the practical fertility window of a given era, so somewhere around 20 years. The deaths (and subsequent population change) will lag behind generations by about 50 years, but become largely unavoidable because female fertility collapses rapidly after ~40. And so when there is a shared fertility rate amongst a population, each ~20 years the population will change by the fertility factor.

So you end up bleeding people fast once the death phase kicks in - you're talking about losing 50% of your population each 20 years. This is why places like Japan will still look to today as the 'good ole days'. They're currently only losing about 11% of their population per 20 years, but with a fertility rate of 1.2 they'll trend towards losing around 40% per 20 years.

-----

Anyhow, the point of this all is that there simply are not enough people in the world to make up for this sort of loss. And that's if you're willing to accept an adult male with no education and who may not even speak the language, which isn't exactly the foundation of a great society. When you speak of wanting skilled English speakers, both male and female, then yeah - it's really not happening.

So countries will be left to increase their fertility rates or die. Though even that statement kind of misrepresents what happens. Rather the higher fertility subpopulations within society will gradually come to dominate those societies. So in some manner speaking, perhaps the Bible was write and the meek will come to inherit the Earth. An America made of Amish? Pretty funny to imagine, but not really out of domain of possibility at all. Fertility is going to radically reshape the face of Earth and it's difficult to predict what that will look like other than very different.

[SoftTalker]

The Boomers are retired except for a few who don't know what else to do so they keep working. I'm GenX and looking at retirement in a couple of years.

[thatmf]

Many 1st gen immigrants have the pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you attitude. My grandparents (also Italian) certainly did. Everyone wants to imagine they did it the "right way" and that their struggle is the most unique and deserving one.

Which made it even funnier when I discovered that they never actually legally naturalized.

Many such cases.

[malfist]

My abortion was also the only moral abortion

[PaulHoule]

I think people are pretty ignorant of what the rules are and what the situation on the ground is (just try shipping homeless people from LA to pick fruit on farms in the central valley and see what happens)

On the other hand the "follow the rules" thing is pretty strong and you cannot fight it and win.

I got pretty mad riding the subway in NYC paying the toll and seeing turnstile jumpers hold the emergency door open to let people in.

There are all these rules you have to follow big and small that you don't agree with that you either follow resentfully or you disobey while taking some real or imagined risk.

To take one stupid example I've been through multiple toilets in one bathroom and haven't found one that flushes reliably. It's easy to blame the regulation in New York State that a toilet has a maximum flush volume and you'd better believe I am thinking about going down to PA to get a toilet and see if I have better luck. We all have these things that we could be resentful about and one thing that keeps it in check is knowing that other people are subject to this too: when we see people who seem to be "cutting the line" it makes our blood boil.

Now you can say it is not what people think, like really the chicken houses that hire 600 illegal immigrants wouldn't want to hire legal workers because then they'd have some protections, and that's all true. But the iron law of political psychology applies and if you want to change attitudes it would be a big help to move immigrant workers out of the shadows or to cut back on rules that make people resentful with little benefit.

[malfist]

Absolutely. It's a very thin line to go from "just pointing out a problem" to "everything is a problem" to "everything is broken" to "nothing I can do will change anything" and then people disengage in the process and politics and everything else becomes the domain of whoever can shout the loudest with volume, rhetoric, or money.

To quote Mon Mothma in Andor:

I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This Chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza. What took place yesterday… what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide! Yes! Genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest? The monster we’ve helped create? The monster who will come for us all soon enough is Emperor Palpatine!

[dottjt]

I think the "nothing I can do will change anything" is actually a predominant theme that's emerged over the past decade. I don't know if you've watched any of Adam Curtis' documentaries, but his documentary HyperNormalisation explores this in great detail (most of this documentaries have a similar theme I've found).

Edit: Apologies, I think I mean his documentary: Can't Get You Out of My Head. Essentially it asserts that all revolutions fail, because the people who attempt to overthrow simply become the new guard.

[Terr_]

Night Watch (2002), by Terry Pratchett.

> People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

Additional context: The city is being (mis-)ruled by a paranoid dictator, whose brutal secret police don't care too much about if you're innocent. The cynical protagonist is frustrated that some of the resistance is also extremist or at least overly-optimistic about what's going to happen next.

[Loughla]

My favorite quote from any novel comes from that book as well;

"Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes."

[sidrag22]

Adam Curtis docs are wonderful. I've grown so accustomed to when people suggest a doc, its some youtuber that posts a doc once a week and utilizes the youtube documentary style to disguise how poorly executed it is. Adam Curtis is certainly not that, for anyone considering this suggestion.

[PaulHoule]

God that guy pushes conspiracy theories I haven't heard anywhere else!

[Ray20]

> they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration" which is exactly what his family did to great success

Where is the contradiction here?

[jacobolus]

One is people's lived experience: "Hard-working families immigrate to a land of better opportunity and build a life for themselves, integrating as upstanding members of the community."

The other is nativist propaganda: "Hordes of scary 'aliens' are coming to take your jobs and destroy your way of life, bringing their drugs and crime and turning your neighborhood into a trash heap. They might even eat your pets!"

People have difficulty noticing that the second story is supposed to be a description of what they or their ancestors personally lived as the first story; people compartmentalize and sometimes believe the propaganda version even though it directly contradicts their lived experience.

[PaulHoule]

Well they did it and got prosperous by successfully contributing to the economy and improving it for all of us.

In Binghamton there are Turkish immigrants who run Middle Eastern restaurants which our extended family love to go which are so much like the Italian restaurants that Italians still run and I'll see a teenager hanging out there who seems so much like an Italian teenager.

A person seeing that similarity could (and should) have a sense of "these people are going to come here and contribute and pay taxes and grow the economy to help support me" which is what the outcome is most of the time.

[throw-the-towel]

Shit, the jokes about "monitoring the situation" are actually true.

[anal_reactor]

I've noticed that I watch much less funny shit and much more "you should be afraid" but I really don't know how to change this.

[somenameforme]

Is it not also possible that you should be, at least figuratively speaking? I think it's fairly obvious that not only are we at an inflection point in society, but we're at numerous inflection points happening all simultaneously - geopolitics, economics, tech/social media/"AI", fertility/sustainability, and much more. We're even at presumably happy inflection points like with progress into space.

But the point of this is that in a relatively short period of time, the world is going to look far different than the overwhelming majority might ever expect. This is because most expect the status quo, in some form, to indefinitely persist, yet of course it never does. And it seems we're on the cusp of major shifts across many different domains, all at once.

[bijowo1676]

anxiety is what creates uninformed consumerism, which drives the capitalism

[frantathefranta]

I'm probably a heavier user of reddit than most but I recently deleted the reddit app on my phone because it's just too much. I still use the site though, but now I use an iPad with old.reddit to make using it as difficult as possible.

[justonceokay]

Reddit is fun for a while but there is a strong “lowest common denominator” problem that plagues almost every subreddit.

[malfist]

There's a very strong hive mind there. It takes very little to grassroots a subreddit. Just like at the biking subreddits and tire recommendations. It's almost always the GP 5000 that is recommended. Which, don't get me wrong, it's a great tire. But it isn't always the best, and there are tires out there that beat it. The community has just latched on to the one true tire and that's all you'll ever see recommended.

Most subreddits that do any sort of product recommendation have the same problem. For a while, the pilot metro was the fountain pen de jure, or Stronglifts the default recommendation for weightlifting (and now it's never recommended).

If they hive mind rallies around products like this, it also rallys around other ideas, policies and whatnot. Just look at the politics subreddit and see nonstop "Israel bad" "Chuck Schumer is feckless" or "jews control the funding of the democrats" everywhere. Even where it doesn't make sense. You can have one of those muckraking websites that run an article like "Schumer didn't vote against [insert house bill]" and it gets to the top and the narrative is relentless against schumer, even though he literally can't vote against a house measure since he's in the senate. Is he feckless? Absolutely. Does that mean everything he does or doesn't do is a sign of his fecklessness? Absolutely not.

In the hivemind, there's no room for nuance, it's all "look at that bitch eating crackers"

[ryandrake]

Reddit is a pretty extreme example, though, where mods are basically subreddit dictators. For whatever reason, Reddit gave enormous amount of censorship and conversation-shaping power to mods, to the point where a handful of like-minded mods can enforce in great detail what is allowed to be discussed and what isn't.

Pretty sure if you unmasked the subreddit mods, the reason for the "circling around a particular brand recommendation" observation would become clear.

[trumpdong]

Mods are also not as independent from each other and from Reddit staff as Reddit would like you to think. At the beginning it may have been whoever created the subreddit, but that stopped being the case over time - we saw the extreme case in the 2023 API crisis when Reddit staff simply fired all the moderators who disagreed with them, and installed moderators who agreed with them more.

[suburban_strike]

> For whatever reason, Reddit gave enormous amount of censorship and conversation-shaping power to mods

It's been "bad" since the 2010s, but censorship went into overdrive once OpenAI struck a deal with Reddit a few years ago (2021?). The mods do the dirty work of aggressively sanitizing all future training data for "safety" so the entire site is curated to align with ChatGPT now.

[ars]

What you are describing is not hivemind, but rather paid participants. Companies pay for these "grassroots" recommendations, and Iran pays for those Jews posts.

It used to be more subtle with real people paid to post, but AI has made the quantity of it skyrocket, to the point where you can start to notice it, if you pay attention.

For example you'll see some comment about Jews, and very rapidly a bunch of upvotes. And you'll see a very similar comment elsewhere, with the same upvote pattern.

I've cut back quite a bit my participation in these types of sites once I realized just how many of the "people" I'm talking to are actually bots.

This talks about a company doing it: https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/bots-targeting-the-r-ga...

This talks about Iran doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz8whKktkQg

[malfist]

I don't know. I don't think it takes too many paid participants to sway a large group of non-paid participants who perpetuate the paid position.

Especially for product reviews, at the end of the day, the best product is the one you bought since most of them work well enough. I buy a new tire for my bike and buy the one reddit recommended and the next ride, buoyed by excitement for the new tire, go out and ride 1-2 mph faster than before, now all of a sudden I'm a convert. It's the best tire ever and I recommend it to all my friends.

Nevermind I don't have anything to compare it too.

This is super common in astrophotography community. You ask people what's the best camera or best mount and because they're so expensive most people only have had one, or maybe two and so everyone comes along to recommend their particular item because clearly it's better than the rest, when in fact, it's all about equal but nobody has compared. Part of that makes sense too, right? I buy a mount for my telescope from Software Bisque that's $14k and I decide to add another pier to my backyard observatory, $14k is a lot to gamble on and I know I'm happy with the mount I currently have, I'm just going to buy it again. I never tried iOptron's $7k alternative because if I hated it, I've wasted $7k

[romanows]

I'm actually pretty thankful that the GP 5000 is a solid consensus recommendation for general road racing. I see some others being mentioned though, I think Pirelli Zeros?

Contrast that with gravel tires, where there is zero consensus. The conditions vary and the sport is evolving quite a bit over time as well, so it's understandable. But it's a huge time suck to try and puzzle out a near-optimal decision. I wish there was a "good-enough" consensus.

[pydry]

>see nonstop "Israel bad" "Chuck Schumer is feckless" or "jews control

9 times out of 10 somebody who perceives a huge amount of anti Semitism online wrapped up in criticism of israel will absolutely categorically refuse to condemn the genocide.

When they refuse, this is how you can tell that it is simply projection and disguised islamophobia.

Israel is also pretty open about funding bots to spread that kind of message both offline and online.

[everdrive]

Exactly right. It's a good place to gather information, but it's not a good place for discussion or for community. It's very useful; but it's not a place to spend time.

[haunter]

I follow dozens of subs through RSS and that’s pretty good. You just need a reader which has features to filter out certain users and words (like Newsblur what I use)

[downsplat]

Yep, if you haven't lost the will to put a bit of curation work upfront, RSS never stopped being the right answer. Substack has been a pretty good addition to the landscape, bringing lots of people into blogging (without calling it that). But for the skimming/reading interface, RSS beats the app.

[joseda-hg]

In defense of 'How money works' I don't think there's much in the way of positive anything to cover for his format/field, not for current times in particular

His most famous videos are on the topic of bullshit jobs, the movie Wolf of wallstreet, various X is collapsing and a Money Laundering Explanations

[SpicyLemonZest]

There's lots of positive things to cover. He made a video 2 weeks ago about tourism, his first ever as far as I can tell, and there's plenty of interesting things a general Youtube audience could learn about how money flows around in the context of tourism. But he chose to instead talk about "The End Of Budget Tourism", believing (perhaps accurately!) that a negative framing would help get people to click on his video.

[jandrese]

YouTube is ruthless in promoting clickbait headlines and thumbnails where it's someone's face with a shocked expression and an attention grabbing byline. You don't play by their rules the algorithm will bury you.

Content creators are a slave to the algorithm. It's so easy for Google to just not show put your video on the feed, even your subscribers. That's why every video looks the same now, if you refuse to play you don't get views.

[Anthony-G]

I used to only rarely look at Youtube (repairs, cooking, the odd live concert) but since I started looking at it more often (for guitar and piano tutorials), I’ve found its UI to be too distracting. I added the following custom uBlock filters to make it less annoying:

    ! Remove the "Up next" sidebar (the #secondary container) so that the main content area (#primary) takes up the full width.
    youtube.com##ytd-watch-flexy #secondary:remove()

    ! Ensure the video takes up the full width when playing full screen.
    youtube.com###panels-full-bleed-container:remove()

[chasd00]

> but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time.

Don Henley wrote a song about that kind of news:

"We got the bubble headed bleached blonde

Comes on at five

She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye

It's interesting when people die

Give us dirty laundry"

https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/donhenley/dirtylaundry.html

[dredmorbius]

Great song.

And long before that, Yellow Journalism:

Journalism historian Frank Luther Mott used five characteristics to identify yellow journalism:

1. scare headlines in huge print, often sensationalizing minor news

2. lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings

3. use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts

4. emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually with superficial articles and comics

5. dramatic sympathy with the "underdog" against the system.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism>.

The same or highly similar tactics apply equally in the 2020s as they did in the 1880s (and before).

What many people don't realise: the "prestigious" journalistic prize, the Pulizter, is named for one of the most infamous low-quality yellow journalism publishers, Joseph Pulitzer. This is an early example of successful greenwashing of a reputation.

[Anthony-G]

Upvoted your comment but my inner pedant can’t help but point out that’s more an example of whitewashing rather than greenwashing (which itself is a derivative of whitewashing).

[dredmorbius]

Fair point ;-)

[trumpdong]

Plane crashes are one thing. They're going to happen, and what can you do about it?

Today's news is not plane crashes, it's how immigrants are burning down Seattle. Obviously total nonsense but a certain kind of person eats it right up.

[nancyminusone]

I do find it amusing how on the internet the X and Y can be governments or corporations, or the hosted platform itself. Seems like something a competent "we control everything" organization should be able to prevent. But as long as you do nothing but come back for another helping of rage, I guess they're fine with it.

[harrall]

Cuz the actual nuanced reality is that it’s structural. (Most) corporations don’t want to control the world but they do have their own self-interests, but because there are so many corporations there’s always some corporation controlling some facet.

For another example of a structural problem, California has been trying to add housing for the past few years but it has been one piecemeal solution after another. People who own homes don’t want their lives to change, cities like how they are laid out already, parking requirements exist to prevent developers from skimping at the time, environmental reviews are meant to protect the environment… at no point was anyone thinking “I want a housing problem that leads to job flight and homelessness” — everyone is just solving their own problem at the time but together it creates a major structural obstacle.

The people at YouTube don’t actually care about controlling the narrative. They just want to make money while removing problematic content, but they’re not exactly sure what problematic content is and Google tends to invest in algorithms more than support, but the end result is channels get randomly removed sometimes.

The world’s problems are hard because not because people are generally malicious, but because everyone is just doing their own thing. That’s why the only fixes are structural, but structural solutions are really hard.

[carlosjobim]

News are for news worthy things - which are things that deviate from everyday life. Wars, disasters, crime, in short things of concern. As well as political struggles, economic struggles, and any kind of conflict.

So all is well in that aspect. That's how news have always been, since the first pyres were constructed to light fires to alert neighbouring communities of enemies arriving.

But the sickening aspect of cable news is the way the presenters talk. The voice they use to speak to the watcher is pure venom. It's an extremely angry and condescending voice, and the TV watcher is made to feel inferior to the broadcasters and therefore give attention to the "very important" things they are talking about. Weak minds are conditioned to feel respect and reverence to those who treat them with despise, and unfortunately also to feel the opposite to people who they believe themselves superior to.

It's completely deliberate, to make people addicted to it.

Consider if a well dressed person came to your house and started talking in the same voice as the TV anchors do. You would instantly think it was a dangerous psychopath on the loose, and try to find a weapon swiftly to ward them off. If somebody at a barbecue started talking like the TV anchors, you'd think they were on drugs and tell them to leave. People would call the police.

The next time you catch a TV news anchor, picture them being with you in your living room instead of in the TV studio. You will instantly conclude that the person is mentally and spiritually unwell to talk and act like that. You can practically smell the reptilian from them. Do the same thing with politicians and other leaders too. Many of them say things that on paper seem nice, but with a demeanour that you wonder when they're going to break out into "Who is the boss of you!? I am the boss of you!?"[1]

And I don't think they can see it in themselves or smell it on themselves, like everybody else with a mind can.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QM_AcLBSQM

[afavour]

> The next time you catch a TV news anchor, picture them being with you in your living room instead of in the TV studio. You will instantly conclude that the person is mentally and spiritually unwell to talk and act like that.

They're two different scenarios so it's not exactly a surprise they sound different. Same goes for anyone giving a public speech, their cadence and tone would sound bizarre if they were just say in a room with you.

> The voice they use to speak to the watcher is pure venom. It's an extremely angry and condescending voice, and the TV watcher is made to feel inferior to the broadcasters and therefore give attention to the "very important" things they are talking about.

I can't say I identify with that at all. I do not hear "pure venom" when I listen to a newscaster. They're usually either trying too hard to be serious or trying too hard to be lighthearted and chummy. But neither is venomous.

IMO the biggest problem with cable news is that it runs constantly. News doesn't. So they have to fill endless dead time with hyperbole. One newscast in the evening ought to be enough for anyone, really.

[carlosjobim]

Some are absolutely better than others when it comes to this. But I was shocked and instantly repulsed when hearing and seeing CNN at an airport after having been away from televisions for a few months.

> Same goes for anyone giving a public speech, their cadence and tone would sound bizarre if they were just say in a room with you.

Then imagine these newscasters giving a public speech in that same way. You'd think you had stepped into the quarterly meeting of psychotics planning a spree.

EDIT:

And most importantly in my living room example: That's where the TV is. If you wouldn't invite a person in the flesh and blood to your living room to behave like this, why would you invite them through your TV?

What about true crime and murder series on Netflix? Who would want to spend their evenings with a flesh and blood person in their bedroom who would go on into gory details for hours about murders and abductions? But still people invite these reptilians to their bedrooms through the TV.

[afavour]

> But still people invite these reptilians to their bedrooms through the TV.

You recognize that you're the outlier here... has it occurred to you that maybe your reaction is the unusual one, not everyone else's? There's literally a podcast called My Favorite Murder that has millions of subscribers. A lot of people go to live shows for it. They literally do invite people in flesh and blood to sit in front of them and talk about murders. It's not necessarily my kind of thing either but there's no doubt it's popular.

[carlosjobim]

> has it occurred to you that maybe your reaction is the unusual one

I am very well aware of that, what would make you think otherwise?

> There's literally a podcast called My Favorite Murder that has millions of subscribers.

Millions of people are subscribed to meth or fentanyl as well, and a lot of other things.

I have no doubt that murder podcasts are popular, and that there are people who are so far gone that they would go to a live show. Something being popular doesn't mean that it is good for you.

If a person close to you had been the victim of a brutal murder, how would you feel that people took great pleasure in that kind of thing, calling it "their favorite murder"? It's dehumanizing.

[matwood]

I used to fall asleep to Forensic Files every night. Something about the host's voice on low volume puts me right to sleep.

[PaulHoule]

The basic problem of CNN is that a person who tunes in at 5:30 pm has to get basically the same story as someone who tunes in at 7:30 pm so they have to repeat the same "news" over and over again. You could have a magazine format with lots of little documentaries about little different things that happen all over the world and you would be better "informed" in the sense of learning something but you wouldn't have as much shared experience with other viewers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bagdikian

is most famous for his book The Media Monopoly but his obscure 1971 book The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media was highly predictive of what news on the web was going to look like because he had worked for the RAND corporation and tried to sell a very unprogressive (in terms of business) media interest on the idea of online personalized news and they didn't want to make the investment.

That book has some of the most damning indictments of the concept of "news" from a McLuhanite perspective that ever been put to writing, most of all a description of how the editor of a small-town newspaper has about 6 seconds to look at a newswire story and decide if he wants to run it. It's a fundamental act of violence against the framework of reality to throw out 99.999% of it and the kind of "bias" that people get stuck on where people think we need an equal balance of stories that infuriate right-wingers and infuriate left-wingers.

[andrepd]

> But the sickening aspect of cable news is the way the presenters talk.

"Só para as pessoas perceberem lá em casa" is the standard phrase TV pundits use back in $home_country. Translates to something like "just so that you there sitting at home can understand". It's incredibly condescending, truly the gall of these mfs with zero credentials and maximal confidence, speaking assertively about every single topic always with the tone that implies everybody else is a moron.

I haven't watched actual TV for many years so this passes me by except on occasion, but when I see that there are people that watch hours of this garbage every day, part in the TV and part regurgitated on social media... By god it explains many things rotten with the world.

[PaulHoule]

Try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwgJgTL5JmE

I can say circa 1990 people in my pod noticed this phenomenon that "ruling class" people who get interviewed on TV as well as many TV performers (new anchors!) seem to show a kind of asymmetry of facial expression that you don't see so much in ordinary people.

Today we might blame the botox but it's widely thought that this is a sign of emotional suppression

https://www.jnforensics.com/post/chirality-a-look-at-emotion...

Though as much as we wish we could be observant and understand people like Cal Lightman in Lie to Me signs of deception are never completely reliable.

[nunez]

I know this works on YouTube Premium, but I have my watch history turned off and use the desktop app with UnTrap for YouTube so that it turns off all of the distracting nonsense I don't use (Shorts and recommendations)

[everdrive]

A bit of a tangent, but Google is doing everything they can to stash more "recommendations" everywhere. Even now, you need a browser filter to keep them out of the subscriptions view.

[UltraSane]

"one of them always has a 24 hour news going "

Why didn't you say which one? I bet it is Fox.

[walthamstow]

It doesn't matter which one. My mother mainlines BBC News which is state-owned, establishment-centrist, has no adverts or profits, but has the same effect of dialing up the viewer's fear of the outside world.

[ffsm8]

While I'm not American, calling bbc centrist in 2026 is just objectively false. It was centrist in 2000s, but it hasn't been in at least a decade.

[Nursie]

I tend to think it's probably doing OK as it gets heavy criticism from both the left and the right.

From the left, it gets accused of cow-towing to right wing interests, not holding conservatives and corporatists to account and generally being far to easy on the like of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.

From the right it gets called all sorts of names, my dad (unfortunately a convert to GBNews in his 70s) rails at it for being lefty garbage that won't speak the truth about immigration and other 'issues' he has been programmed to care about by the ragebait he watches. Of course part of the hate from the right is to do with Murdoch and his belief that it constitutes unfair competition.

Me, I listen to Radio 4 from overseas and generally the coverage is pretty neutral AFAICT, if a little prone to 'bothsides' arguments where one side is clearly nutty as a fruitcake.

(Sidenote - it really is sad to watch an intelligent man who was impressive in his globe-spanning career now get angry in front of 'news' services featuring smug, lippy anchors who tell him immigrants in boats are coming for his stuff. They couldn't afford the price of entry to his leafy London-outskirt suburb in the first place...)

[galangalalgol]

Whose interests does it serve now? That is the main thing to understand of you are to get anything out of news.

[gambiting]

Everyone can agree BBC has an agenda. But it usually looks like no one can agree what that agenda actually is.

[NopIdoN]

FWIW there's a new Director-general: Matt Brittin, whose CV includes Cambridge rowing team, MBA from LBS, McKinsey, Trinity Mirror (owner of The Daily Mirror) and 18 years at Google.

He was the Google boss who said in 2016 that he doesn't know his own salary.

Presumably he wants what's best for all of us.

[ffsm8]

That question is more about identifying propaganda by various actors.

While that's a related issue, it's something different to being centrist... Eg it's possible to create propaganda while being centrist, it just can't be left/right wing political.

[UltraSane]

It matters very very much. Fox News is much much worse than most news channels. It was created specifically as GOP propaganda.

[intended]

Unfortunately, pointing this out is not fun. In general, everyone assumes that there is little actual difference between CNN and any Murdoch enterprise. The difficulty in disabusing this position in a few short sentences, is one of the reasons there is such a chasm in American politics.

[UltraSane]

People don't want to hear that fox news was created specifically to lie.

[duderific]

Remember when Fox was sued by the voting machine company for libel (or slander, can't remember which), after Fox supported and broadcast claims that the machines were rigged against Trump in 2020, and Fox argued that nobody should take what they say seriously, because they're merely entertainment.

[Quarrelsome]

sadly forces in the BBC also value "engagement". Idk how we got here, it never used to be like this.

This is why cultural stories now are higher than before on the main site. It used to be the case that news was _just_ news. Politics, crime, economics, health, environment, etc. Now culture stories, like puff pieces about the royals or entertainment end up on the front page.

[red_admiral]

Because the BBC now has to justify its licence fee to the government, so they need engagement metrics and all the rest like what proportion of X demographic they're reaching.

Back in the day, both the BBC and universities were funded by the government without the stereotype of a fresh MBA graduate in charge. Back in the day before MOOCs, the BBC produced programmes for the Open University because that was the way to get video content out to the nation.

> puff pieces about the royals

have been on the front page of the tabloids since way before the internet.

[Quarrelsome]

> have been on the front page of the tabloids since way before the internet.

Yeah but not the BBC. There used to a be a line. :(

[nancyminusone]

I had a relative for which it was CNN. We even share the same political views, but watching that stuff or having it on in the background literally from 8 am until midnight is tiring.

[croisillon]

when in a hotel on vacations we sometimes have a television and hence bbc or cnn... i used to nickname cnn "the fire squad": whatever the topic they're just shouting and hyperventilating... it is tiring indeed

[malfist]

It's actually CNN, but they flip to local news often too to hear about all the car wrecks and local murders and robberies and other things to make them afraid.

Fox and CNN are both bad, but different flavors of bad.

[UltraSane]

Fox is bad in a way far more fundamental than CNN. It was created specifically to lie to people.

[austin-cheney]

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

I am thrilled you pointed this out. I also get tired of seeing that.

[yifanl]

We keep saying it, because it's what it is. There's some black box (that can _sometimes_ be reached via dang) that determines what you see on HN's front page, and this place is just as susceptible to trends and rabbit holes as any short form video app, it just doesn't have the funny sound effects.

[appplication]

> just as susceptible

It’s really not though. There is no personalized algorithm, which is 98% of the issue with social media. It may seem pedantic, but it’s like saying a horse and a car are essentially the same thing, the car just has an engine.

[NewsaHackO]

The personalized algorithm is not the root issue though. The root issue is that social media sites live by increasing engagement of its viewers. Because of this, they all get away from the original stated purpose of bringing people together, and go all in on maximizing engagement by increasingly shady ways. Of course, the personalized algorithm is a huge one, but there are also things like "Show HN" controlling what is on the front page, selectively taking down flagged material. Remember, HN has advertisements as well, and will regularly post job ads for positions in startups. They know that outright going in the direction of 'personalized algorithm' would alienate their viewerbase, so they avoid it, but still do all of the other practices that social media sites do.

[mcmoor]

I think it can be argued that, because human interests are so different and fractal, there's only so much damage that can be done with non-personalized algorithm. Ads for a certain demographic will just alienate the other demographic. But with personalized algorithm, the poison can be customized for each person and be more fatal.

[trumpdong]

We can imagine 100 different websites each with different non-personalized algorithms - another algorithm decides which one is best for you and directs you to that site. That's effectively a personalized algorithm with extra steps.

That's where we are. HN is one of those sites.

[NewsaHackO]

Yes, just because it is uncomfortable for them to realize, doesn't make it not true. Words have meanings.

[alphazard]

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

Whatever you want to call it, HN has followed a similar trend. It's rare to see the authors of small, but interesting/innovative, projects show up in the comments, surprised to see their work on the front page. That used to be common, even the default, if you look far enough back.

Now the front page is current events and marketing campaigns. I don't think I've seen a single software project here in the last year that wasn't already extremely popular, or being pushed by a company with a marketing budget.

In theory AI should have helped. I know people are still making cool stuff, faster now with AI, but it's harder and harder to find it.

[grey-area]

> In theory AI should have helped.

Why would generative AI help stop enshittification? If anything AI has made low-effort slop far more common on the front page and sometimes it gets voted up because of a snappy headline and few people attempting to read it, particularly if long-form and initially convincing.

[alphazard]

I agree with everything you said. Most open source projects are limited by contributor labor. Generative AI does help with that problem, but it introduces a sea of vibe coded slop as a side effect. Truly a Genie/Jinn.

[intended]

This was always going to be the case, no genie situation at all.

Information sharing networks with humans in it can only track so many things, or spend limited time on consumption. The more stuff on the network, the harder it is for things to be seen. The stuff that gets seen is content that is evolved to gain attention, or is resourced to gain attention.

This is as inevitable as sunrise.

[Aurornis]

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

I came here after reading the comment section for the "Dopamine Fracking" story right below this one. In that comment section there are arguments that Hacker News isn't social media because it doesn't have social features like friending people you know. The argument is that it's a place to discover cool content and comment on it.

Which is precisely the argument being made in this BBC article: That traditional social media is becoming less about communicating with friends and more about discovering content and commenting on it. Which is the exact purpose of sites like Hacker News and Reddit.

> "I spend a lot of time scrolling through videos made by content-creators," says Lucie, also 16. "They're more interesting than the posts of people I know."

> "What we're seeing is social media splitting in two," says social media consultant Matt Navarra, author of the Geekout Newsletter. "Big platforms like Instagram and TikTok are becoming more about entertainment and discovery. WhatsApp is becoming the place people go to actually be social.

EDIT: I had to use Wayback Machine to find this:

> 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features

> Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.

That's from https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinato...

That has been erased from the internet, but it was widely understood that sites like Reddit and HN could were social and had addictive properties for people without strong self control.

[post-it]

The content here is very different. I can kill maybe an hour a day reading HN, which is a lot, but the feed does end. Most days, I don't want to spend an hour here, because the feed is designed to push popular content to the top, and a lot of it is content I don't care about. Other sites have infinite feeds designed to keep me personally hooked as long as possible.

[whateveracct]

HN is a secret third thing: A forum

[stephenhuey]

When a professor at Rice walked us through Don Tapscott's book Growing up Digital in 2001, we had such an optimistic view of the future. Don highlighted how with broadcast media in the 20th century, the viewer had little choice on what to watch. Now that the internet was available to the masses, he explained how much new generations would benefit from what he called interactive media which enabled someone to explore and learn anything of interest instead of being forced to consume whatever was being fed through the television. When we'd say there was "nothing on" we felt bored, and maybe we did endure some manipulation by commercials, but I agree that contemporary social media is far worse. In the 20th century, boredom from channel surfing at least encouraged some to get off the couch and go read a book or shoot some hoops or play a board game with friends. Allow me the stereotype (exaggeration?) for a moment to note that we had the ultimate nerdy kid who wanted to be cool, and all he could think of with gazillions of dollars at his disposal was to make a thing that turned everyone into anti-social nerds by staying glued to their screens instead of interacting IRL with fellow humans. Who would have accepted that fictional plot as believable?

https://dontapscott.com/books/growing-digital/

[titzer]

Ads became the default business model of the web. When people started to get sick of blaring in-your-face blinking banners, it mutated into search ads and placement. The same thing happened to mobile apps and games, YouTube, Facebook, instagram, even Tik Tok. When it becomes too blatant then it embeds itself one level deeper as placements and endorsements.

It will never stop because the parasitic ads are the only thing holding up the edifice anymore. It's crazy to me because ultimately what holds up the economy is money changing hands for services, and ads aren't that. So ads are fundamentally driving people to spend money elsewhere. I just don't understand how the system holds up a multi-hundred billion dollar advertising parasite...everything would be cheaper if there were no ads.

[trumpdong]

According to Cory Doctorow, Proctor&Gamble - one of those giant corporations that each owns 20% of the food supply but doesn't use their own name as branding - cancelled $200m of online ad spend and saw no change in sales.

If more companies realise this, what happens?

[bryanlarsen]

> HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word.

The article's main claim is that traditional social media is not social media any more. That Facebook et al are now junk entertainment. So IMO HN hews much closer to the traditional role of social media than Facebook et al do.

[eszed]

That's what I took away from it, too. Facebook circa 2008 was great: your friends talked what were up to; everyone posted their pictures from that party last night; you didn't see anything from anyone who wasn't at most a second-degree connection. There were problems - people were jerks, and worse, and some people got pulled into chasing clout, and promoted bullshit - but they were human-scale problems, and you could largely scrub your feed from things / people like that. Unfortunately for the entire world, that sort of use wasn't profitable enough.

[Gigachad]

The problem for Facebook is there is a limit to how much your friends would post. You could check Facebook for 15 minutes and then you had seen everything your friends had posted and had to come back tomorrow for more. New Facebook/instagram can trap users in hours of scrolling video in a zombie like state.

[Gigachad]

HN is more like a forum where strangers discuss ideas. Old school social media was a place you posted life updates to your friends and family. New social media is content creator short form video while the majority of users are entirely passive consumers.

[jmye]

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word.

That it's less destructive than Meta doesn't make it less "social media" - and I'd argue that it's style (links fall off the page quickly and discussion becomes impossible after a relatively short period of time, solely to foster a sense of "missing out") is part of what defines current "social media".

It's a noisy attention sink, whatever high-mindedness people want to pretend it has.

[amelius]

> It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation.

What baffles me is that they call this manipulation "influencing" and they consider this a positive word.

[djeastm]

Similar is when people refer to themselves or others as "content creators"

Not filmmakers or artists or writers... "content creators".

Like they exist just to produce a continual stream of this amorphous "content" for consumption.

Now, perhaps that's all that art/writing, etc ever was. But to just abandon even the pretense is another in a long line of surrenders we've made to commoditization.

[reg_dunlop]

Was there ever a time when any of the classical/fine arts were used as propaganda or promotional material, prior to the medium elevating to loftier aims?

Is this history repeating itself?

The idea that content creators could be considered artists is one I may have considered before, but only tangentially.

What I'm also curious about...is how this commoditization and consumption via "influencers" has altered any individuals attitudes towards blatant manipulation. Free will seemed to be a much more guarded value. Now, the willing surrender of our free will seems to be the norm...

[trumpdong]

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/

[grvdrm]

HN has plenty of social media components.

Think a better version is: HN is not an advertising-controlled social media website. That specific version makes most sense to me.

[tekla]

HN is literally an ad.

[grvdrm]

I don't think of Show HN as quite the same. Nor Ask HN. I know that otherwise there is plenty of "advertising" within posts/comments/etc.

Where I think the argument that it's not social falls down is aligned with some of your comments. The feeds, upvotes, downvotes, etc. Let's not forget the spam.

Those mechanisms are pervasive across many social platforms, so why are they so different here? Don't think they are.

[trumpdong]

HN is literally an ad for Y Combinator.

[lfuller]

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

This is claimed by users of Reddit regularly as well and I think most people here would consider Reddit to be a typical example of social media.

[Gigachad]

You could argue back in the day reddit was a forum rather than a social media. But after the new UI and several years of changes, particularly when they started to ignore your subscribed subreddits and just showing whatever in the home feed, it’s now fully social media.

[bluesounddirect]

I completely get the cable tv bit. Grew up without cable just OTA tv and Radio . I remembered how i would feel left out of the cable tv connection / conversations . Then I eventually moved on to living in the city and not really watching TV except simpons reruns and the news hour on pbs for many years . The parallels reveal how we just need to go out to social place outside of our homes . The pool, a restaurant, bar , library, a club a religious place and be involved. But more importantly we all need our own opinions again, and not to be so offended when you disagree.

[red-iron-pine]

HN is absolutely social media in all senses of the word and meets your definition of cable TV pretty well -- it's a news blog run by a startup incubator as a way to increase discussion and submarine in their concept and products.

"if you're not paying for it, you're the product" and that is just as true here as anywhere.

[nunez]

Not in the sense that's disucssed in the article. Social media like a forum (which is "old school" social media IMO) instead of like Instagram (short video clips, reactions, designed for max engagement and dopamine hits).

Yes, HN is a front for YC. However, HN is still very much about longform submissions and nuanced discussion. There aren't very many places like that anymore, and those that still exist are dying, with some exceptions (mostly car forums, for some reason).

(Instagram wasn't always this way! It was originally an alternative to Flickr, but focusing on sharing images and discussion instead of photography. It gradually became the psychological gateway drug that it is now, though even that was a response to threats like Vine and Quibi that unlocked short-form video at scale.)

[zuzululu]

I agree half way. While recent years HN seems to have imported much of Reddit, it still has an anti-establishment undertone and decent moderation to keep it from sprawling

[TulliusCicero]

I miss the early days of FB where people just wrote thoughts about what they were feeling or doing.

I wish we had something like that where there was no reposting/resharing, and links & photos were allowed but deemphasized in the UI. Also, no like button, that just encourages empty engagement.

[shimman]

I always delineated the two as one being corporate social media, I do wonder if there is a better word/phrase for it but IME if you use the phrase two describe it as such to those that were online pre-2008 they immediately grasp the difference; but these people are likely a minority.

[da_chicken]

Not just television. Also the supermarket checkout aisle magazines. Not just tabloids, although that, too. Also the "glossy" magazines. Vogue, People, Us, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, McCall's, Seventeen, etc.

The commercialization of the engines of culture continues.

[KellyCriterion]

- And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. -

Thats right in that sense - but in a sense of doom scrolling, it is for me: Very often Im clicking through dozends auf pages, fortunately I have to activly do a click to get to the next site, so this dampens a little bit :-D

[everforward]

There’s also an end to the feed. I forget the limit, but at one point I think I hit the maximum number of pages at like 50 (quality drops pretty dramatically, by like page 10 there was almost nothing interesting or notable).

[icepush]

This is so different from my personal experience that I feel like one of those kids being told chickens used to be dinosaurs.

I have an account on facebook, on which I am pretty active. If I attend some infrequent event (Which I do fairly often) I will take a picture of it and post it there, with a description of what it's about. That's pretty much the extent of what I put on facebook. Sometimes I see similar posts from people in my friends list, or videos about whatever facebook thinks I am interested in this month (Right now it's showing me lots of people taking apart pumps and motors). What sites are you using, and what exactly are they showing you ?

[wuliwong]

So you infrequently post on FB, that is exactly in line with the article. You didn't mention whether or not the content you see in your feed is from people that you know in real life or not, so I can't evaluate if your experience is inline with the article. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[icepush]

I did say my feed is a mixture of content from people I know, and people I don't. My comment wasn't that long.

[xnx]

Additionally, "social media" is as inaccurate a name "ride sharing". A better name would be "targeted ad scroll media".

[willXare]

HN is not social media. It’s social media with type safety.

[cautiouscat]

I agree but there’s definitely room for nuance. I follow a lot of artists because I genuinely like seeing their work. I follow a lot of miniature painters for their tips and tricks. I follow my close friends to see what they’re up to.

I think the folks you’re talking about are influencers. Which I wholeheartedly agree with your take in that case.

[ambicapter]

That’s just advertising. Yes, mom and pop stores can advertise “just like” the multinational corporations can. Guess who gets the lion’s share of airtime and guess who has armies of men+machines crafting the most convincing messaging.

[cautiouscat]

How is someone showing a 3D render with no products or services to buy from advertising to me? In addition, why does that matter if I enjoy the content?

It’s not “just” advertising. Again this is nuanced.

[ThrowawayTestr]

I must be using social media wrong because all I see on my timeline are funny pics and niche porn.

[KellyCriterion]

Are you on the correct site/app?? :-P

[IAmBroom]

Rule 34, bro.

[RC_ITR]

>And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

The amount of times I've read a very thoughtful article only for the comments to be political drivel (the worst was peak-COVID SF discourse) weakens your argument quite a bit.

It's even more foolish to think outside forces aren't using bots/tech to sway the discourse.

Just because it's not engineered for the mainstream's dopamine addiction doesn't mean it doesn't do the same thing.

[Tangurena2]

Social media was first (that I know of) weaponized in 2016 by Cambridge Analytica to manipulate Facebook users to vote for Brexit & Trump. I'm surprised that the article left those totally out.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

[hedora]

That incident was definitely ahead of its time, but before that, targeted ads for scams were propping the industry up. For instance, Experian used to spend $$$ to funnel people into credit card scams -- one year, they stole our CC#, and I called our top 5 US bank to dispute the charges. The bank fraud department rep said Experian drove most of their case load, to the point where they had a special flow to block just Experian affiliates because physically reissuing stolen cards was too expensive. You can back estimate how many predatory ad dollars that involved. Of course, there was also a long tail of smaller companies that wanted to sell supplements, useless other useless services, etc.

Before that, you could pay for placement on all the major search engines except early Google, which basically just broke search. (Google does similar stuff now, in the same way they "don't" sell personal information or read your gmail, but somehow make lots of money off it anyway, and target things only mentioned in private correspondence).

LLMs will be next. The only solution is to refuse to pay for access with your attention. That means no copilot, gemini, alexa or siri, since those are all ad supported or adjacent now. ChatGPT and Claude are on borrowed time. I suspect the open weight models will be the last ones to fall.

[intended]

Social media was weaponized from the days of PHP forums. I remember Palantir shilling sock puppet management technology at a time where most people didn’t even know what a moderator was.

AFAIK, Russia’s Internet Research Agency was the first organization to weaponize social media and the internet.

[jimbo808]

It's worse in many ways but also better in one way, which is that buried in all the propaganda and manipulation is usually the truth somewhere in there. Before, the truth was simply not available.

[pessimizer]

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

What's probably tiresome is trying to come up with a proof that it is not. Your frustration and the insult "pedantry" will not suffice.

If you had a real proof, you would simply include it, instead of performing emotion about being so lowered to even have to discuss HN being social media. The idea that people shouldn't argue with you because it might injure or tire you to be argued with is so 2022.

If you have something specific to say about the actual actions that are taken in what you call social media (but does not include HN), there's plenty to discuss - in fact the difference which you insult as pedantic is the most important thing to talk about. Why is one mediated talking to people good, and the other mediated talking to people bad? And if we try to make it an argument about something other than vocabulary, or even worse the vague-assed "changes in technology," it might accomplish something.

It's insane how this is enough to begin a thread on HN. Vague negative handwaving and insults (nerd-sniping, I guess?). That's not going to hurt whoever you think is doing evil, that's going to help them.

"Social Media" isn't a thing. It's a bag of techniques for mediating communication between people who are usually not asking for a mediator. Talking about those specific techniques and their applications is always going to be more useful than arguing about the referent of some term that you have no obligation to sign onto unless you find it useful.

But god if you're so tired could you just not participate?

[snthd]

The product is you?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FQbW31Fa4SM

[reactordev]

I love me some knowledge forums and sites like HN that allow for general discourse. I’m afraid an entire generation doesn’t know what that is like.

[nancyminusone]

I really forgot how stupid cable tv was 20 years ago. In my area, that old stuff is now getting broadcast over the air, which is the only kind of tv I get. It's not the history channel's Ancient Aliens exactly, but it is all the 2nd tier offshoot stuff that didn't air on the big cable channels. About half of them are "about" Hitler, and the topics are treated so unseriously you get things like "Dude, look! This door has an H on it! This must have been where he went!"

It's so stupid you almost can't help watching, but I'll be dammed if they didn't get me to. Wild times.

[close04]

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

For an arbitrary definition of "normal"? The last remark is unwarranted and can only have a chilling effect on the conversation. Or outrage bait, a typical sign on social media.

Why is it not social media? It exhibits the same signs as seen on any social media platform. Can you define social media so we can all follow the same play sheet?

I see the same opinions here as I see on Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, or X even from the same people here as there. The topics that reach the front page are the most popular, or divisive, or "addictive". A lot of people post for the karma, there's a lot of pandering to popular opinion. There's an opaque algorithm that decides which topic stays on the front page and for how long, which comment stays on top and for how long, when a post or comment gets flagged or reappears, etc. that dictates how the conversation can be carried and on which topics. There are a lot of political topics where some voices or opinions are buried while others are pinned to the top. Some people spend hours and days posting here. There's a lot of astroturfing. The parallels can go on. The main difference is scale and at this small scale it can maintain a higher level of quality... most times. But quality isn't what defines social media, is it?

Many on HN see themselves as better than the "simpletons" who fall for "normal" social media, and any view that challenges that is tiresome. But your dismissal of whether HN is social media holds water like a sieve.

[jquery]

Well said. But I think when people say “HN isn’t social media” what they’re really saying is “HN is nutritious social media, not junk food social media”. Not sure I agree with that, but there’s some arguments to be made at least. HN generally doesn’t let itself get too political. Anyone who posts too much political or polemic stuff will get put on a “cooldown list” that rate limits their posting (ask me how I know).

HN is also highly resistant to jokes and memes dominating the conversation. On other social media sites, the top comments are generally jokes or jabs.

HN also lacks pictures or video or ads or infinite scrolling, and makes self-promotion quite difficult.

Is HN social media? Yes. So were BBS’s back in the day. But is it the omnipresent toxic social media that’s currently rotting society’s collective brain on a generational level? At the very least, it’s not that.

[chownie]

Is it not clear at this point that the real issue is how lacking the term "social media" even is? We have people here arguing that BBSs were social media, it will not be long until email is considered social media.

At this point it's a vague term meaning "a place where you talk to another person online" and nothing more than that.

I'm solidly of the opinion especially after seeing so many arguments of this form on HN that the whole world has accidentally forgotten the term "social network" at some point, because "social media" means nothing.

[close04]

> Is it not clear at this point that the real issue is how lacking the term "social media" even is?

It's very clear. Empirically a common sign across all social media is basing very strong opinions on very vague personal interpretation of something that that will forever stay unwritten so it can't be challenged. Anyone can just cement their claim to eternal correctness by ending a personal opinion with some outrage bait like "anyone who doesn't agree with me is tiresome".

[armchairhacker]

“Social network” is a better term. I think “parasocial network” is better; the former implies small group chats while the latter doesn’t.

Except “mainstream social media”, because everyone knows what you’re talking about, including some who’d be confused by “mainstream parasocial network” because they don’t know what parasocial means.

[anonymars]

I think it can become diluted to a meaningless term, or co-opted to mean different things to different audiences (not to sidetrack from the point but the first two examples I can think of what I mean are "fake news" or "woke")

So you're not wrong at all, but I think there's also a significant difference when the personalized algorithms come into play, which can segregate people into their own epistemological echo chambers

I suppose I'd summarize as

1. I don't think we have a precise term for the actual thing, and "social media" is one loose term people use for it

2. There's a spectrum for this, maybe multidimensional:

* Does it display the same reality for everyone? For example obviously true social media will be different depending on your friends, but chronological vs engagement are different. Even new reddit and old reddit I think differ here too

* Infinite scrolling? Or specific page advancement?

* Text? Pictures? Video? (Video duration?) Each one is different

So in that respect, sure, they're all social media, but they're very different, and I think there's probably combinations of those features that result in very different effects/harms

[rockskon]

HN has its own share of enticement/manipulation - most recently with regards to AI.

Plenty of variants of "people who don't use AI will be left behind" are sprinkled around various threads about AI. It's an attempt to both manipulate via fear as well as sell.

[Kiro]

It's not tiresome. It's spot on. Nothing is as addictive as HN.

[throw-the-towel]

Wikipedia is.

[haunter]

> HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word

Hard disagree. The upvote/downvote system and the algorithmic front page makes it a social media to me.

[jandrese]

IMHO both of these problems stem from the same source: Engagement.

Anything that attempts to maximize engagement will inevitably optimize for outrage, anger, and disgust. You will end up handing the platform over to trolls and propagandists. Platforms need to optimize instead of quality and sanity, but unfortunately that is expensive will never get as many views and advertiser dollars as cheap outrage content. It's a big reason why our current media landscape is so hellish, the other main reason being the continual takeover of more and more media outlets by billionaire aligned interests.

[geophph]

(Pedantry erupts below)

[Gud]

HN is not and never has been “social media”. It’s a threaded discussion forum.