You do realize Hacker News is social media right? And that too owned and operated by YCombinator.
And unscrupulous data crawlers have been mining HN's datasets for years. Heck, there's a fairly robust live HN dataset on Hugging Face right now [0].
OP is right.
[0] - https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news
If I could subscribe to peoples feeds and such then it would be social media, but HN doesn't have that feature.
That's been true of discussion forums for longer than the Internet has been available to the public. I was on discussion forums over dialup in the 1980s. The term "social media" didn't even exist yet, nor did the business model of trying to monetize people's online data.
eg "Social media leads to addiction!" - ok take Facebook
Are you referring to
a) non-chronological feeds? Who knows what posts you'll actually find? You come back for more. You can't just log off for a week and come back and the most recent posts are there (you don't even see everything, the platforms regularly hides stuff). That's certainly addiction
b) fake notifications? That's fraud, and certainly addiction
c) the corollary of a), you don't know who's seen your posts so your mental model gets shaped. That's certainly addiction
d) forced Messenger and read receipts can be addiction especially given bullshit like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 so FB wants to subvert email
I'm fine with people railing against all this. I just want people to quantify it more
Social media requires social network effects, where a large part of the draw is the network effect, and that just isn’t a part of HN.
No, I don't. HN is a news and discussion site. It's not trying to monetize my data.
> unscrupulous data crawlers have been mining HN's datasets for years
They've been mining every byte of data that's visible on the web for years. That doesn't make every single website on the Internet social media.
Will non-monetized old school "forums" escape the wrath of "social media" bans for children? Will HN?
I haven't seen anyone trying to apply such bans to them. Have you?
> Will HN?
I guess we'd have to ask the HN moderators that question.
AFAIK it's had ads for practically its entire existence, and other than venture capital investments, ads have always been virtually its entire revenue.
