[stickfigure]

I'm making it as a very serious argument.

HN is social, it has an algorithmic feed, people upvote and downvote your content, hell it has a social credit score. The idea that HN somehow isn't "social media" is hard to take serious. This is Reddit for a niche audience.

The main difference is that HN has a small and relatively high quality community, plus the traffic is low enough that it gets a fair amount of manual moderation. It's still social media and if there were enough people here, we'd eventually read stories of kids who offed themselves over downvotes. But we're thousands, not billions, so the law of large numbers doesn't apply.

If your FB feed or Youtube feed is garbage, spend some time curating it. HN is mostly curated for you, which appears to be creating unrealistic expectations of the broader world.

[jermaustin1]

I agree that HN is "social media", but I'm starting to wonder if Facebook/Twitter/TikTok/Reddit/YouTube aren't "social media", but instead a new category of media tangentially related as OP posted to cable news. Something like "attention media" where your attention is the point of it.

HN, on the other hand, your attention matters less. They aren't paying for this platform using our "attention" necessarily. I'm sure it is a way to curate an audience of tech-enthusiasts where they can exploit our knowledge and push their investments in front of our eyes.

I like HN for that reason, I don't feel like I'm the product as much as with other attention-seeking platforms.

[stickfigure]

I suspect a big part of the reason you feel this way is that you don't see advertising on HN. Because HN itself is one gigantic advertisement.

[jermaustin1]

That isn't true, because I don't see ads on YouTube either, but I know their algorithms keep leading me to staying on it as much as possible.

HN doesn't feel the need to keep my attention 24/7.

[stickfigure]

Genuine question - how many times a day do you load HN? Is it already getting enormous amounts of your attention?

[jermaustin1]

I don't have the data to quantify it, but M-F, 6a-4p, maybe once an hour or so just to check the headlines. If I have comments, I might check my threads to see if I need to respond. On the Weekends, though, I might check it in the morning and again before bed just to see if anything interesting happened.

But it isn't like YT (which is running in the background nearly 24/7) or Reddit, that I habbitually check. Those feel way more addictive. Same with Instagram, but I don't really care for short form content, so it doesn't capture me the same way as news and long form videos.

[stickfigure]

Well just to offer another data point, I check HN far more often than any of the others. Many times a day. I consider it far more addictive - there's usually something interesting, and scanning is low investment. Youtube requires headphones and willingness to block out the world for 15+ minutes at a time. Facebook just doesn't have much interesting in it anymore since friends stopped posting.

I feel like all of this is fine? HN is winning the attention game for a niche audience of people vaguely like me. TikTok is winning the attention game for other kinds of people. I don't understand why we have to agonize over this. What would you rather people spend their attention on? What would you rather spend your own attention on? Why don't you?

[pennomi]

By strict definition it obviously is social media. “Interactive forms of media that allow users to interact with and publish to each other, generally by means of the Internet.”

People don’t want to admit it’s social media because that delegitimizes their argument “all social media bad!” and instead of refining their argument they just double down. It’s a very human behavior.

[gilgad13]

The feed is algorithmic, but its not personalized, and the algorithm isn't directly optimizing for engagement.

I believe these are the exact technical advancement the top-level poster was contrasting with cable networks, so the distinction matters here.

[pessimizer]

> I believe these are the exact technical advancement the top-level poster was contrasting with cable networks

You would have had to guess, because it went unspecified.

If we're talking about algorithms to surface content, we should talk about them; although I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with cable television. Cable television advertised in the way we are told than advertising is not bad: they created specialized channels, and took advertisements on those channels that people who were interested in those specialty subjects would also be interested in. They didn't track or attempt to manipulate individuals.

I don't know what cable television did that was special or above and beyond what a magazine or a newspaper supplement 100 years ago would have done. The only difference between TV and magazines is that you don't consume TV, it's simply pointed in your direction - and you can't skip around ads. This is notably not true about modern television, though. If anything, it has technically fallen backwards since DVRs (or even videotape in general.)

I think a lot of intellectuals were forced to take Cambridge Analytics' marketing claims as truth because of the political positions they entrenched themselves in shortly after that scandal broke.

It's certainly caused a lot of 50s narratives about Vietnamese and Chinese communist mind control to come back posing as serious science, and a bunch of Key's "Subliminal Seduction"'s grotesque sexiness mixed in to make it nominally anticorporate. Although, predictably, it has generally been expressed politically as giving social media more ability or even responsibility to suppress the speech of average, un-notable citizens when they go against government narratives about controversial subjects.

That is not defeating social media, that is defining and institutionalizing social media as a trust and a means of government control. There is no reason we couldn't have had this same argument about telephones, other than that the average US citizen was less disdainful of their own civil rights back then - civics was drilled in as a religion, and it involved obligations the state had to you. Obligations that you are not allowed to give up if you want to live in a civilized, democratic country.

This was why we don't have government police whose job is to listen to random phone calls and periodically butt in to tell the speakers to change the subject, or arbitrarily cutting the line, collecting lists of people who need more intervention, or banning people from being able to use phones because they were seen at a political protest. If you ever wonder why the mails are so sacred, it's because the mail came about when people were prouder and had more shame than we have now.

If you want to regulate algorithms, regulate algorithms. Don't regulate "social media." If you have to argue about what it is, it is a useless term.

[rpdillon]

Sure, but deconstructing the platform to look at the engagement points is also useful. Some things that I think set HN apart in a good way:

The lack of any kind of personalization whatsoever on Hacker News is a huge differentiator. There are no notifications, so if you want to find out if somebody replied to you, you've got to go check. Everybody's front page is exactly the same. There are no direct messages. There are no in-line images or videos or even emoji. The feed is not endless. There is no targeted advertising. There are no reactions to posts other than upvote/downvote.

I guess you can lump HN in with Instagram and TikTok, but it just feels like a very different product, in ways that are relevant to the analysis of whether its existence is a net positive for society.

[stickfigure]

> if you want to find out if somebody replied to you, you've got to go check.

Let me spin this a different way: Because there are no notifications, HN users need to frequently come back and check. This is "positive random reinforcement" and is one of the most powerful mechanisms known for creating and maintaining addictive behavior. It's the same principle that slot machines and loot boxes use.

> There are no direct messages.

I'm not sure why this is good or bad, but it's not really true. Many people (including you and me) put their email address in their profile.

> The feed is not endless.

The feed is definitely endless. If you mean specifically that it's paginated rather than loads automatically... do you really think it matters? Like, you think that HN quality would suffer if users didn't have to click the "more" button?

I don't think HN quality would suffer, just as I don't think FB quality would improve by adding a "more" button.

> There are no reactions to posts other than upvote/downvote.

Upvoting, downvoting, and commenting are HUGE social functions. Facebook doesn't even have downvotes. You could easily spin this as a major social negative for HN. You downvote other people!?! Sounds toxic!

The other points (frontpage, images, emoji, advertising) are interesting but honestly I'm not seeing how this makes HN something fundamentally different. It does probably make HN appeal to a different audience. Which is the point... but don't confuse "great audience" for "better social technology".

[Karrot_Kream]

> Let me spin this a different way: Because there are no notifications, HN users need to frequently come back and check. This is "positive random reinforcement" and is one of the most powerful mechanisms known for creating and maintaining addictive behavior. It's the same principle that slot machines and loot boxes use.

I personally fall victim to this. On days I just browse the site I only refresh a few times a day or maybe just once in the afternoon. If I write a comment I constantly refresh and spend way more time reading the site. It's one of the most negative patterns for me on here.

> But don't confuse "great audience" for "better social technology".

I'd go further and say that this framing itself is a bit toxic. Nothing about the interests in this site make the audience "great" simply different and more relevant to you. There's an underlying "the nerds are better than the pleb normies" that suffuses this entire discussion that I find hilarious given how low the average comment accuracy is here for non tech things.