[bunderbunder]

In 2026, expecting articles about social media to contain a definition of the term ‘social media’ is so peculiar as to seem disingenuous. Can you perhaps explain exactly what you think is so ambiguous about how they use the term that we can’t just assume the common meaning?

[rob-lag]

What's missing for me is that they never seem to mention which social media platforms in particular these statements are directed at.

There are many social media platforms, some of them similar, but some are also vastly different from each other (e.g. Hacker News vs. TikTok)

Making statements about all of social media without such clarifications makes them pretty unreliable for me.

[alistairSH]

Even HN has a clout score, and seeing it move up/down, or slapping that up/down arrow, can trigger the same dopamine as social media by MegaCorp.

[close04]

And the content discovery algorithm is tuned to please the masses, the users drive the algorithm which promotes or buries the content for everyone else. I think the moment you use a socially driven algorithm to show/hide content from users is when you're planted firmly in social media territory.

[cryptopian]

It's why I prefer not to get bogged down in litigation over what counts as social media. It's far more productive to look at the individual mechanisms that make web platforms bad for socialising.

[alistairSH]

Agreed. For me, "social media" is just any website/app that allows users to contribute content and make comments.

HN is absolutely "social media", as it Facebook and WhatsApp.

With that said, I do believe social media platforms exist on a spectrum of "mostly benign, maybe even useful" to "mostly harmful" with closed groups/forums well to the benign end, targeted subjects with heavy moderation somewhere to the benign end of the spectrum (HN falls here), and "free for all" well to the "harmful" end (this is where most of Meta lives).

[bunderbunder]

I’m not sure how much it makes sense to pick this nit for a public opinion survey of this nature. The survey is being sent to people who mostly won’t think of the term in such precise ways, and even in social sciences it’s considered poor form to try to measure more precisely than your noise floor permits.

That said, I would assume most respondents have a more popular conception of the term. That’s going to be inherently a little fuzzy, but implies implies sites like X, Facebook and TikTok count, that Reddit is marginal, and that more “oldschool” things like webforums, chat services and even Hacker News are out.

[bcjdjsndon]

Exactly

[bcjdjsndon]

Some people fear paedos talking to kids, others fear kids watching bad videos or reading bad comments. They are two vastly different complaints.

One is about communications, the other is a more general concern about content that could extend to and audiovisual form.

Yet another definition is essentially a synonym for tiktok. Or sometimes they mean just twitter.

The UK online safety act leans heavily towards communication (ie comments or DMs, hence Wikipedia being caught up in it)

> assume the common meaning?

Which is? Point me to a defintion