Hacker News

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.

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 ?

HN is social media. Social media is a spectrum.

You can imagine HN like a documentary channel compared to Facebook’s reality TV, but even “documentaries” can be dopamine sinks that aren’t actually informative (or accurate).

(But personally, I see lots of short and pure opinion posts here, documentaries are long and at least pretend to contain facts; so I’d hesitate to compare it to a documentary channel even with the caveat.)

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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/

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

- 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

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...

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

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.

You absolutely nailed it. It's not 'social' anymore. That's a mask of what it used to be - it's the coercion and manipulation by big tech and by advertisers (AND by 'influencers' who don't have the $$$ to advertise).

> 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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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

>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.

> 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.

(Pedantry erupts below)

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

The article made me reminisce. I was a young adult when Facebook crept in. I felt the constant pressure to do cool stuff so I could put it on Facebook and get likes. I used to browse through friends walls, look at their carefully manicured photo albums, no doubt driven by similar anxieties.

Sad as it was, at least the incentives were somewhat aligned with a healthy social life. Seek out cool things in life, preferably with friends, share.

This has its own downsides of course too, but is a world away from going on Facebook today, full of people definitely shutting down thekr life businesses, turning wood into MacBook cases and incoherent AI generated videos of 300m waves. I seriously can't remember the last time I put something on Facebook, certainly not in this decade. Never mind any of the other ones...

As people’s default shifts to consumption, they stop posting content themselves. They also stop living a life worth posting about… especially when they start comparing themselves with “influencers”, who have made a full time job out of pretending to live an interesting life.

The problem with filtering out all the junk as a solution is that it doesn’t fix the actual problem of those sites with perverse incentives having control. It seems like the real goal should be to get people off these platforms. That’s the only way to really stop it.

I wonder how long companies would keep paying for ads when a site is 100% bot traffic? They could keep the ruse up for a while, but likely not forever.

> It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this.

what if your friends used it too?

would there be more content (as they seek to connect to real peopl), or less (as they leave)?

Look into Morphe as a revanced alternative, it's by the peeps who make the Youtube patches and I find it better to use and it can draw on the same patches.

Interesting, I thought Revanced was just for YouTube, I didn't realize it worked with other social media sites too.

Hacker News is certainly addictive. As I've started to limit my interactions on other sites like Instagram and X by removing the apps from my phone, I've seen I spend more time on this site than I did before. The content is a lot more interesting and relevant to me, so I don't see it as a problem (Yet) but I don't think that'll always be the case.

I feel that this is one of the consequences of spending so much time on Social Media sites, that my brain hast just started to look forward to "distractions" when I don't have anything else to do. If I don't have Instagram, I'll open X. If I don't have X, I'll open Reddit, or LinkedIn, or Hacker News. It's hard to get away from this constant need for distractions all the time, and I've found myself to procrastinate on simple things whereas I wouldn't have done that a few years ago.

I'm glad that features like Noprocrast exist. It's unfortunate that other media sites would never implement these features because their business model is entirely driven on people spending more and more time on their sites.

this made me think of humdog’s pandora’s vox https://gist.github.com/kolber/2131643

We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.

You’re just learning how small minded people are? In the US there was an attempted insurrection filmed live. We elected the guy who led it who then pardoned 1600 jailed criminals. Now he is trying to creat a slush fund to give them millions as reparations. 33% of the country is delighted by this. These are Plank sized brains.

I could very quickly sus out what was on FOX news last night by the conversations my coworkers have.

What are the tells? Since COVID I’ve noticed that every new person I meet seems to harbor at least 1 or 2 oddball opinions. Conversation tends to veer into weirder places than it used to, creating a surreal sort of feeling of being in the world. I’ve felt that this is just a result of everyone being tuned by whatever personalized feed is amplifying or directing their base instincts.

Anti-social take. People are being exploited by some of the smartest people in the world who use natural human desires against people but somehow they are at fault for being small minded?

Curious how old you are?

There was definitely a sweet spot if you were in highschool or college in like 2004 - 2010 (so born something like 1986 - 1994?) where online social media was almost painstakingly manicured to mirror real-life social dynamics.

Many people remember the drama of deciding who your "top friends" were on MySpace.

I am very critical of social media but this is far too of a myopic take. There is a ton of real life social benefit to these platforms.

Simplest example - someone posts a picture/video of them in a city that I also am in and now I know they live there / traveling there and I can meet up with them.

For a window, it was really social, early to late 2000s (anyone in NL remember Hyves?). It was a great way for keeping up with friends as you went to different schools, when they were traveling, etc.

There were a bunch of things that destroyed it: Ajax [1], async tech made it possible to continuously push new dopamine shots when viewing a page; the rise of smartphones, since before smartphones you could only check social media when you were behind a computer, which was not true for most people most of the day; and the realization that dopamine shots + ads can bring in a lot of money.

Even though we had cell phones in the early 2000s, in most countries it was just for calling and some SMS (which was expensive outside the US). You would only go to Hyves, Myspace, or whatever when you had some time in the evening. I am sure some people got addicted, but it was much harder than having a device that tries to entice you all day to look.

That said, I still find social networks like Mastodon very useful. Not so much as a replacement for keeping up with friends/family, but it makes it very easy to discover what people who are in niches I'm interested in are up to. And since it does not have an algorithmic feed or ads, the addiction factor is much lower.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

You're confusing social networks and social media.

Social media was never meant to be a virtual extension of social life. It's what it says on the tin: media created by users, and shared from user to user. Old-school BBS were social media.

Of course you can have actual social experiences, make friends, etc. on social media. But that almost never happens.

Online social networks on the other hand basically do not exist any more.

I 'member when facebook was campus only. For about 5 minutes my friends were friends.

10 minutes later it was just a frenzy of (trying to) poke people that I thought I might have seen at some point that year, and conversations about how many "friends" people had.

For a brief period it was social. Even if you had hundreds of people you had barely interacted with there were still people you continued to interact in real life from that lot.

Getting updates helped me even to form friendships long after the first interaction where we had added each other, I'd see someone I had connected with visiting a place nearby, and could go grab a beer with them while they are around. Or the other way around, I'd be visiting their city and would try to catch up, more often than not it helped to keep in touch, develop a deeper friendship, etc.

That is absolutely dead nowadays, it's drowned in noise on any "social" feature (feeds, Instagram stories [and similar features in other "social" apps], etc.), just a barrage of ads, influencer bullshit, and the odd friend update that isn't just a meme...

The worst part for me is that it was a deliberate choice from these companies to disappear with most social aspects of these apps in favour of the money printing scheme that created the whole influencer culture.

I still have hopes for the rebound, when people get extremely fed up with how these apps work, and something different appears to retake what "social" means, not this doublespeak-esque meaning it came to be.

When I was in college it served as a useful directory of everyone I met (like, "oh, who was that guy again?" type of questions) and also essentially every offline event was organized through Facebook. It served a clear social function that posting in meme groups does not.

I wrote a humor post about it https://open.substack.com/pub/yelluwcomedy/p/old-school?r=7c...

Facebook definitely was social before about 2010. Especially if you were at uni in the golden era before they left everyone in.

You pretty much only had people you actually knew as friends. People posted photos and messages about real life. No sharing of posts, memes, few stupid people. It was great.

We'll probably never get that back.

It was quite social if you only added your actual friends instead of everyone.

Now the feeds are just pure algorithm and very seldom I see someone I know.

40 years old now and as relevant as ever.

IMO even better than Chomsky's Necessary Illusions (1989) or Bernay's Propaganda (1928) at giving you that backstage at Disney world feeling.

It is so well-hidden, in fact, that there is no visual indicator that it exists at all, so you cannot be blamed for thinking it is gone. On the homepage (house icon) tap the Instagram logo and select "Following." It will present you with a chronological feed of posts from only those you follow.

Again, there is NO ARROW or any UI to indicate this is possible. You used to be able to set it as the default view, but that has been eradicated it seems.

This is why I don’t understand why my family/friends keep wanting me on Facebook or Instagram. It’s not about keeping up with each other. They just want it to be slightly easier to send me memes. But if I wanted to browse memes, I could just go do that. I don’t need them sending me their feed with a bunch of jokes that are funny to them, but not me.

X is excellent for following niche research interests but they’ve been pushing quite hard to force political news/opinions into the feeds which is really annoying.

My bar for "is it social media?" is "is the sole benefit network effects?"

Now that GitHub's availability has hit one 9, I consider it just a social network. Any code I put there is just for marketing. Real work stays far away.

I use the firefox extension "Unhook" to completely hide suggested content on Youtube. Really effective, I kindof can't believe how much time I spent getting suckered into watching video essays that absolutely did not deliver.

Time box it. I play video games for 1 hour on Fridays. More than that and it makes me depressed.

Books are a thing.

That makes talking about the issues a lot simpler. Calling HN a social media makes much more sense if we talk about Instagram, or Facebook as entertainment or advertising platforms.

Twitter was similarly bad.

A better heuristic is market share. We should reintroduce media ownership rules that cap audience share to something < 10% per distribution channel. Meta, Disney, Paramount, etc should not exist.

"Fantasy Media" or "Social Fantasy"?

After all, the advertising powering the media is all about creating a fantasy around a future you will be living once you have bought the product.

Or just f ad media.

I've started visiting quiet rooms[1], just to hear myself think again. The world and the internet has become so loud that some quietness is refreshing. Luckily for me there are several where I live so I've even got a choice.

Strangely these rooms are quite different to being silent at home or somewhere else private. For me it seems to be that these spaces are public, you are being silent in public spaces - a different setting and experience than in places that are private. Being silent together can be disconcerting!

It's also different to using noise cancellation or listening to music or other forms of "silence", truly unique in many aspects.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_room

I don't think the quality of discussion about social media suffers from lack of specification. Whether or not you consider HN to be social media, or wherever your decision boundary is, doesn't change that most of the conversation does apply to the general class of apps/websites that have become de-facto short form video platforms. Which lots of people use, so the effects of use are consequential and worth discussing.

The conversations on consciousness though...oh man. I have to steel myself before diving into that mess.

What do you think it means? One meaning of anti-social is "hostile toward society". Do you think this doesn't describe social media?

Very cool and worthwhile way to spend your one fleeting existence dude: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=throwawaypath