31–40 of 74 posts
> "More than half (51%) of participants indicated that maintaining an online presence feels like work." Well, because it is. Social media turned most of its users into digital beggars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is more than enough research. https://thehighwire.com/news/metas-internal-research-proves-... But nothing's going to change as long as we continue pretending that billionaires hoarding pieces of "special" paper (or numbers in a bank account) are less mentally ill than people hoarding pieces of regular paper (or other things).
You think billionaires are hoarders because the shares they own become worth a lot of money when they build successful companies?
A non-hoarding economy would look very different, be far more exciting and inventive, and wouldn't be staging an ecological suicide run.
Its strange for me. Some years ago, I only thought that the younger kids/adults was had the "separation anxiety" when it came to social media, but I have a 40 year old sister in law that is purely obsessed and it is crazy. I'm a big tech person but I know how to put my phone down. Heck most of the time I don't even have it on me.
Understand that social media endorphin-inducing algorithm optimizers, have made these sites optimized for _all_ ages, so it should not be a surprise. Very few of us are immune.
> "More than half (51%) of participants indicated that maintaining an online presence feels like work." Well, because it is. Social media turned most of its users into digital beggars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think billionaires are hoarders because the shares they own become worth a lot of money when they build successful companies?
It's like playing cookie clicker except the higher your number goes up the more social status you and power you have.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
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.
Its strange for me. Some years ago, I only thought that the younger kids/adults was had the "separation anxiety" when it came to social media, but I have a 40 year old sister in law that is purely obsessed and it is crazy. I'm a big tech person but I know how to put my phone down. Heck most of the time I don't even have it on me.
Understand that social media endorphin-inducing algorithm optimizers, have made these sites optimized for _all_ ages, so it should not be a surprise. Very few of us are immune.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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).