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How can you distinguish identity-based from topic-based social media? Doesn't your identity influence which topics you're interested in, and don't the topics wh
by rovolo 5y ago
How can you distinguish identity-based from topic-based social media? Doesn't your identity influence which topics you're interested in, and don't the topics which interest you form your identity? This forum says in the guidelines to submit "Anything that good hackers would find interesting." That reads to me like an identity-based forum.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- psyc 5y agoFacebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, are primarily networks of personal (or corporate) identities. The centerpiece is the user. HN and Reddit are primarily ranked lists of interesting URLs. I don’t know one user from another, apart from a handful of prolific users, and half the accounts start with “throwaway”. (It wasn’t so in the beginning, but even then there was no reason to go to someone’s user page.)
- danans 5y agoI think you are misunderstanding my use of the the phrase "identity-based". What I mean is that the primary entity around which conversation and content revolve on HN is the topic (from URLs or questions), not the individual user's identity. Topic based forums are a thing. I'm a member of a paid (gasp!) forum for high-performance building methods.