Comment by Karrot_Kream

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.