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Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

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Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#51

Post by armchairhacker »

titzer wrote: post #35
armchairhacker wrote: post #27

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…

You don't see pictures and videos directly on the site. It's text links and text comments and discussions. In the minimal sense of the word, even printed text is media, so it's technically true that HN is social media, but I think it's more like a news aggregator and discussion forum.

How does being text only make it not social media?

Good explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445343

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#52

Post by cjrp »

estearum wrote: post #16
Insanity wrote: post #2

Social media was never really “social” in my opinion. Reading updates from hundreds of people you have shallow interactions with offers the illusion of having a social life. So I’m not sure if this change to “fads” makes it meaningfully less social than it already was.

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.

It's been downhill since FB removed pokes.

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#53

Post by emodendroket »

skydhash wrote: post #39
bluGill wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Close friends are better. However I want to know how my now very distant old friends (ie from high school) and relatives are doing. I want to know when they have babies, see a couple pictures of their kids dance reticle - it gives me something to talk about when our next reunion comes around. My life is worse because instead of see the above I see only fads. Now that I only check my feed once a month I see less fads…

> I want to know how my now very distant old friends (ie from high school) and relatives are doing YMMV, but I got all of these through words of mouth (and WhatsApp status updates). I think it’s ok to be estranged from a friend or a relative. The next time, we meet, I can ask them how everything is going and what has happened. And if they want they can show me pictures then.

All right, but "I personally don't care for that" wasn't actually the proposition anyone was arguing with.

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#54

Post by dust-jacket »

armchairhacker wrote: post #27

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…

see IMO it isn't. HN is an online community. Same as forums, and BBSs were. I don't think they were social media really - they're online spaces that form around a shared interest, where Facebook etc were originally online spaces that augmented a real world community.

But we're a long way from that now.

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#55

Post by [deleted] »

everdrive wrote: post #36
armchairhacker wrote: post #27

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…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#56

Post by kiicia »

armchairhacker wrote: post #27

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…

HN is public forum (one of the last), it's a bit different thing

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#58

Post by trollbridge »

armchairhacker wrote: post #27

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…

I've never appreciated the low-effort handwaves of claiming that HN, old-school Internet forums, USENET, etc. are "social media", simply because they aren't. HN's primary medium is text, often headlined by a link to some other site. That isn't social media. HN makes it quite difficult (technically impossible, but you can link out) to embed media such as videos and pictures, which makes it fundamentally different than "social media".

Many other Internet forums are similar--they might technically have the capability, but the prevailing culture might be that people rarely do it.

Adding to this is that HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't get attention. That makes it fundamentally different from other social media platforms today.

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#60

Post by armchairhacker »

kiicia wrote: post #56
armchairhacker wrote: post #27

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…

HN is public forum (one of the last), it's a bit different thing

Reddit is a forum, is it not social media?
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