Comment by Aurornis
2 days ago
I’m surprised at how much regulation has become viewed as a silver bullet in HN comments.
Like you said, the implicit assumption in every call for regulation is that the regulation will hurt companies they dislike but leave the sites they enjoy untouched.
Whenever I ask what regulations would help, the only responses are extremes like “banning algorithms” or something. Most commenters haven’t stopped to realize that Hacker News is an algorithmic social media site (are we not here socializing with the order of posts and comments determined by black box algorithm?).
HN let's you choose what order (active, new, top[actual algorithm])
That's not true of Facebook, new does not show you true posts in order of recency.
Reddit still does, bit also injects ads that look like recent posts and actually aren't which is misleading.
And HN doesn't choose to show you targeted, inflammatory content based on your history. That's a huge difference from Facebook.
Most people on HN who advocate regulating social media don't only want to prevent those platforms from showing targeted inflammatory content, they want to make all algorithmic feeds other than strictly chronological illegal, as well as moderation of any legal content.
From that point of view, Hacker News is little different than Facebook. One could even argue that HN's karma system is a dark pattern designed to breed addiction and influence conversation in much the same way as other social media platforms, albeit not to the same degree.
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