Comment by fritzo

I think the distinction is pretty easy imo. HN is topic centered, Social Media is person-centered. Before MySpace there was a pretty big proliferation of forums and other topic centered discourse. The profile was such a minor part of those tools.

When MySpace came out, the profile was the home page for a lot of people, and the content orbited around that. Coupled with the mass movement to represent oneself faithfully online as in the real world, (maybe for banking, maybe for surveillance), I think social media sort of operates as a trap. On facebook, you are encouraged to upload your real photos of drunken night out, family vacation, or whatever IDs you in life. On LinkedIn this is mandatory, your "avatar" must mirror your physical self. I have a lot to say on this, but I think I'll just leave it at topic vs profile.

There's a somewhat silly sense of superiority on this site over itself along with a deeply held belief that social media is bad, which makes commenters here try IMO in vain to distinguish HN from other forms of social media. After all, if you are the bad thing, how can you not fall prey to the same problems of the bad thing?

I think in reality "social media" is a set of properties all of which lead to different effects in the discourse on the site. This site may not have individualized ranking algorithms but it has open registration and crowdsourced ranking which gives it a lot of the same benefits and failure modes of Reddit. Unlike Reddit, HN has a professional (meaning: paid) mod staff, which leads to different behaviors than Reddit.

It's all just a spectrum and I think it's more rigorous to think of these things as a spectrum rather than trying to play this silly intellectual game of defitinioneering to make the social media you don't like sound bad and the ones you like sound good. Focusing on cause and effect can be a more effective way to craft intentional social spaces rather than finger pointing.

That'd be the thing indeed.

hn is largely a technology oriented link aggregator with discussions, and probably some would also classify it as a forum. Or as social news site as goes on wikipedia among fark, slashdot and reddit. But beside a voting system, simple profiles there's nothing else - this is nearly an experience unlike anything large social network services offer.

A typical social media platform mainly exists around main stream/feed, sharing content and building profile or groups dedicated to particular topics or around known brands. That's of course the perfect unstained image because everything falls apart when we start getting into the details, such as algorithms in the work, content quality and moderation and so on.

I would say yes, that's a good way to make the distinction. It's even more than that: the feed is different for every single user.

With a site like HN, everyone sees the same front page at a given time. What makes it to the front page is primarily determined by all users voting up articles or moderating them. Yes, there's some algorithmic sauce behind it that weights votes and flags differently based on some other criteria, but the dominating factor is user votes and flags. And, again, everyone sees the same ordering of articles if they load the page at the same time.

HN is centered around topics and articles. Social media is centered around individuals and what they personally choose to post and promote.

A big difference is that its culture comes from shared public experience. Everyone sees the same front page not a curated one.

In social media the algorithm determines what you see. On forum boards, everyone sees the same set of posts. I do think it is an important distinction but I understand if others don't. At least we are all in the same reality on a forum board when we post. On a social media site, we see different sets of posts.

well moderation is ubiquitous , but yeah -- personalization/targeting/social graph are essentially the things that people expect out of a social media platform.

I do personally think the karma thing is an aspect , because it's gamed everywhere to huge advantage -- but the altruistic view is that its a branch of moderation, an effort to democratize the removal of obviously bad actors while still facilitating dissenting or contrary speech.

I also know that's a naive view.

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