Reasons to Quit Social Media

That's an interesting point. The ThinkPad subreddit has been taken over by "Thinkstagram" photos. People seem to love them, based on the votes, but I'd hoped for a place to have actual discussion of ThinkPads.

Of course even being text-only may not help. I used to be an active participant in the old ThinkPad mailing list. A small group but very knowledgeable people with interesting discussion of ThinkPad issues.

But then one person turned the list into his own tech support channel. He would ask things like "How do I do X in Microsoft Word?" People would tell him "That's not really a ThinkPad question." And he would say "Yeah, but you are the smartest people I know, so I figured I would ask here."

After that went on for a while I kind of lost interest in the mailing list and unsubscribed.

tied to specific accounts, where users have one-to-one public conversations and those conversations are foregrounded as the site's content.

I do feel that message forums/ usenet/ bbs/ etc meet those criteria in various ways and I do consider them forms of social media.

I know that this seems overly broad to some people (and they have good reasons even if I don't agree with them in the end). I don't think "social media" is a pejorative in the way a lot of folks use the term... I mean, sure, HN deals with a lot of the horrible parts of what can be done with that media in healthier ways than, say, myspace did.

But just because HN makes it harder to track specific users doesn't mean that it can't be done... people very much do have specific accounts here, and I have often looked up past commentary these users have generated to get more context about their points.

"I don't want to stop eating food, I just want food that is not going to harm me while I eat it"

"I don't want to stop breathing air, I just want air that is not going to harm me while I breath it"

I don't want to cease all contact with other people. I want to interact socially in non-harmful ways.

I feel that the sine qua non of "social media" is user generated content conducted between specific users:

tied to specific accounts, where users have one-to-one public conversations and those conversations are foregrounded as the site's content.

I don't agree that knowing who has up/down voted a comment is as fundamental as the fact that the sites' content -is- the comment.

And while the system doesn't foreground user accounts, I have often found it helpful to look at a user's contributions to better understand their commentary.

Finally, the fact that it's entirely possible to implement a "friends" list or a "feed" based on search results (and that this would apply to the foregrounded content of the site) seems to me to indicate that there's not just a social aspect to the content here, but that this is, in fact a social media site.

I mean, I could search user reviews on IMBD, amazon, or the wiki, but I've never found that to be in line with how I use those sites... here the conversations are the entire reason I use the site. That user generated content is the whole thing for me.