There is no way to intentionally follow specific users or customize your view of the site depending on who is a part of your personal network. There is no perso

There is no way to intentionally follow specific users or customize your view of the site depending on who is a part of your personal network. There is no personal network at all. Those seem to me to be the defining features of social media. Hacker News is just a crowd-sourced link aggregator with comments that requires persistent accounts so the links and comments can't be easily spammed. Of course, so is Reddit, but I personally don't think Reddit should be considered social media, either. You can personalize your content view there, but the personalization is based on content topics, not the following of specific users.