>For one: You can joke on TikTok ...

Choke not joke...big difference

If that was a joke you might be overestimating your skills :P

He has a point though, HN has a serious lack of dancing videos.

I think you're underestimating how user-specific the feed is. I recently uninstalled it, but I was getting 5% dancing videos at best (worst?). The vast majority of my feed was animal videos, comedy skits, video games, and anime clips.

Interesting observation. I grew up with shitty (but fun!) phpBB forums and the fancier vBulletin, but wouldn't categorize them as 'social media'. The first of those were probably cu2, MySpace, and eventually Facebook/Twitter/etc.

When I think about it, it seems like a somewhat arbitrary distinction to make. I suppose the main difference is that the forums were self-hosted and I could have different identities for each one. And while I generally reused the same username, the fact that it wasn't just a matter of 'clicking on my profile' to see all my activity was something I really liked.

Maybe to me the term "social media" has come to mean "social media /companies/"? That doesn't quite satisfy, but it really does feel like the primary difference is that on these forums I knew that they were generally not run for profit, and the 'gods' were just individuals who volunteered their time to host or moderate. It felt safer, and more personal.