It may fit some older definition of "social media," but the definition that it would fit as "social media" is so broad as to cover most of the internet anymore,

It may fit some older definition of "social media," but the definition that it would fit as "social media" is so broad as to cover most of the internet anymore, including blogs with comment sections and forums. The line I draw, personally, to distinguish "harmful social media" from the rest of the web, is per-user algorithmic feeds optimized, by default, for "engagement." That's the mark of a surveillance capitalism extraction beast, and that sort of thing is well demonstrated to be absolute poison to humans. Hacker News (and to an extent reddit, though they're trying to get away from this as far as I can tell, and the algorithmic front page certainly doesn't qualify) have a single consistent "global state." If I'm logged in to HN, I see the same global state as other people do, and as a logged out user sees (subject to a few tweaks like seeing dead/flagged content, which I can't do logged out - but again, I believe everyone with that setting turned on sees the same thing). It's not trying to reorder the front page to engage me - it's simply a global state that can be modified by the bulk aggregate of user interaction, or moderator interaction, and that's reflected to all users. It also lacks the "bottomless bowl" endless scrolling style interface that encourages endless scrolling looking for something interesting. You can see other pages, but the standard view is top 30, and then you have to take a concrete action to see other stuff, not just scroll. It encourages a quick skim of the top stuff to see what's interesting, and then going to do something else because it's not going to change that rapidly. In terms of UI design, that's quite respectful to user attention, and is consistent with "HN tries to be useful, not to extract all the behavioral surplus it possibly can from as many users as possible." It is what it is, take it or leave it. The upvote/downvote system is prone to some harms, but HN tries to avoid most of that by keeping the vote views invisible to everyone else - you have to evaluate the comments by their text, not by what other people think of them (though the more insightful stuff tends to filter to the top, as it should). I would like an option to hide your own responses in the settings (similar to the "I need to work" delay option), but there's a small Chrome extension that does that - Hacker News Demetricifier or something along those lines. So while you can argue that it's "social media" by some definition, it's absolutely nowhere near the same design or motivations as the human-toxic systems we also call "social media." YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter being the worst. I understand TikTok is pretty bad as well, but I'm not in any way familiar with that system.