can you elaborate ? This has imho nothing to do with social media. I check hackernews daily, I pick articles (or discover new tools ...) that spark my curiosity and I read them, period.
Sometimes I engage and exchange with other people, leave my opinion etc ... This is nothing close to what Facebook, Instagram and co are up to ...
If you like it (HN for example), then it’s not social media.
I mean just look at what you just typed. You talk about a site you check daily for new content and interact with other people on. That’s social media — which in this case you just happen to like.
You're correct in some sense. But the kind of "social media" we're actually talking about is the one that tries to hook you up and manipulate you. I mean, this is what I am talking about here.
In that sense, everything is social media. A blog post is social media, because the strict definition of social media is something like that :
"Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks"
Social media’s addictive nature is driven by a personalized feed using every trick in the book to maximize the time you spend there.
Nothing about HN falls into that category. The UI is as unaddictive as it can get. The feed is not personalized. There are restrictions on how much you can post. You cannot follow anything. You cannot express interests (beyond the broad interest you’ve expressed by visiting HN in the first place). There is no endless scroll. Heck, even the pagination with very limited options is almost designed to ensure you don’t go beyond a couple of pages.
And it’s obviously not social media because there is no friend/follower/connection graph
I think we're all correct in some sense. The thing is @paulcole is taking "social media" in the strict definition of the term, when most of the people here are talking specifically about a bunch of social media.
Which makes sense to me. Because ask someone on the street to provide the names of 3 social media platforms, they'll in 99% of the cases mention Facebook, Instagram etc ... And none of them knows that a blog post is social media ...
Indeed. Most of the time I don't even bother to read the usernames of people I'm interacting with — or just glance at them briefly to separate the voices in any given thread. The comments here, for me, are about their content and their place within the context of the article linked and the following discussion, not who wrote them.
Social media is all about following people or interests and having the platform tailor an algorithm for you in order to present you with a unique view of their data. Hacker News has none of that.
> Most of the time I don't even bother to read the usernames of people I'm interacting with
This is interesting because I never really noticed that I have no idea who wrote what unless somebody else points out "hey, look, John Carmack just replied!" or whatever.
Whatever is written on HN stands on its content alone. It is meritocratic in the best way.
I agree with what you just said. One cannot compare HN with Facebook for instance. Even though I understand what others are saying. We need a better definition for "social media" I guess. Or we might need a new definition to target specifically those you mentioned.
"Social media is when u talk" has to be one of the worst internet revisionisms in recent times. The term describes big, massively centralized (micro)blogging platforms attached to your social circle and real identity. Forums are not social media, chatrooms are not social media, content aggregators are not social media.
it seems to me that you’re confusing this idea of “harmful social media” - i.e. facebook, twitter, etc - with the concept of social media itself. HN avoids dark patterns and tries to circumnavigate the engagement trap, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an online medium through which people - including you - communicate
It's great to see that some people have experienced the same thing I have.
I have deleted Facebook and Instagram 4 years ago. Best decision I ever made. As @smeej said, there's benefits to it, but there's too many downsides to it so in the end, for me, it's definitely not worth it.
Have also done the same thing with mainstream media, television and streaming services (Netflix & co).
Instead I focus on reading books or blogs that I am really interested in, I take time to write, take notes, think, spend time with my loved ones and pursuing hobbies.
I'm sure I do not even need to elaborate on the privacy aspect of all the (mainstream) social media apps ...
Also, I will be transitioning from Whatsapp to Threema in the next few weeks. People ask themselves "how to", when you have friends, groups or whatever in Whatsapp. At one point, you need to take a decision. Your well-being and mental health and/or privacy or being "mainstream" (or whatever term fits inside the quotes). I personally do not care (as I am a privacy advocate). I will notify everybody and then I will move on. There's still other ways they can contact me if needed and they do not want to ditch whatsapp, and tbh, I am not asking anybody to do it. I somehow think that the better way is to lead by your actions. So I will try my best.
There is a way out. I'm not saying everybody should quit, but everybody should assess the impacts all of it has in their own life. I'm also thinking it might be important for us to realize this pretty quickly, because in the end, we might create a system that resembles the one they have in China, i.e. you do everything from your smartphone and you're tracked 24/7.
For e.g. a poll in Germany found that 23% of 18-30 years think that it might be good to have a social credit system [1] (this tendency is up around 30-40% in comparison to the same poll a few years back). This is scary. And imho, social media is greatly contributing to it, because the main point in social media is to hook people, i.e. providing addictive dopamine shots.
Anyone who has dropped social media and looks around notices that most of social media users are completely addicted and zoned out of (real - [whatever this is supposed to mean]) life.
Wrong approach imho. This means, all the tools developed for ethical hacking are "bad" because they can used for "bad". This is like saying we shouldn't sell knifes because knifes can be used to kill someone. It's just silly.
This tool could be used to teach people, e.g. in OSINT challenges, it could be used to gather information for a pentesting job, it can be used to teach people about best practices online etc ...
A knife has many uses, from cutting wood to stabbing people. This tool is very much specialized in the stabbing (not necessarily people, as you said, you could stab a ballistic dummy to see the damage it does). Do you really a think a stab-only knife should be sold with no background checks, with no tracking of who buys it ?
> This tool could be used to teach people, e.g. in OSINT challenges, it could be used to gather information for a pentesting job, it can be used to teach people about best practices online etc
Or just... look yourself up. Like most of the people on this HN thread have done.
We could debate where they are but surely there are limits? I wouldn't want everyone to have access to things like Pegasus (https://citizenlab.ca/2022/10/new-pegasus-spyware-abuses-ide...). You could argue Pegasus could be used to hack a phone of a child predator to save a life, just as you could argue this tool could be used to educate. Maybe for you this username tool falls outside of yours, but it looks more like a switchblade than a butter knife to me.
Sometimes I engage and exchange with other people, leave my opinion etc ... This is nothing close to what Facebook, Instagram and co are up to ...
Please explain.