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I don’t consider Reddit, HN, etc. to be social media, at all. There might be media, but there is no social. Social requires a network of real people. You can’t

I don’t consider Reddit, HN, etc. to be social media, at all. There might be media, but there is no social. Social requires a network of real people. You can’t prove that anyone on these sites is a real person, other than yourself. Maybe I, and everyone else on here, is a bot. When everyone is anonymous, there is no network. And, not only is everyone anonymous, but there are no connections. To the best of my knowledge I have never read a post or comment from the same “person” twice. Every single interaction might as well be (and probably is) our first interaction on the site, ever. Complete strangers passing in the dark.

CapstanRoller 4y ago
Interesting argument. Can a site without discrete named accounts, where everyone is called 'Anonymous', claim that there's no way to verify whether the content is generated by humans? It's basically the 4chan model.
- wincy 4y ago
  Thank goodness teeangers will still be able to frequent 4chan just like I did when I was a teen.
- systoll 4y ago
  No need to even do that. The law defines 'social media platform' in terms of what account holders can do, and 'social media company' in terms of the number of account holders. It really goes out of its way to distinguish 'users' and 'account holders', and if there are no account holders, it’s not social media. Apparently.
  - tstrimple 4y ago
    So kids can visit 4chan, but not TikTok. Makes sense.
    - CapstanRoller 4y ago
      If we ignore the content associated with them, 4chan and other imageboards are actually a nice low-speed format for casual online interaction: the content is divided into threads, the board catalog can only hold some amount of active threads, threads have a finite lifespan measured by post count, threads are auto-pruned after a while, there's no secret sauce algorithm to game your attention span (catalog has simple rules for sorting by thread activity and such), visual content is limited, etc.
fullshark 4y ago
Reddit used to have an actual community, things like in person meetups and its own culture based on various in-jokes (bacon,narwhals, etc) and behavior expectations. It was pretty social I'd say, though now it's basically just an aggreator and not that different from google news for various interests.

CapstanRoller 4y ago

Interesting argument. Can a site without discrete named accounts, where everyone is called 'Anonymous', claim that there's no way to verify whether the content is generated by humans? It's basically the 4chan model.

wincy 4y ago
Thank goodness teeangers will still be able to frequent 4chan just like I did when I was a teen.
systoll 4y ago
No need to even do that. The law defines 'social media platform' in terms of what account holders can do, and 'social media company' in terms of the number of account holders. It really goes out of its way to distinguish 'users' and 'account holders', and if there are no account holders, it’s not social media. Apparently.
- tstrimple 4y ago
  So kids can visit 4chan, but not TikTok. Makes sense.
  - CapstanRoller 4y ago
    If we ignore the content associated with them, 4chan and other imageboards are actually a nice low-speed format for casual online interaction: the content is divided into threads, the board catalog can only hold some amount of active threads, threads have a finite lifespan measured by post count, threads are auto-pruned after a while, there's no secret sauce algorithm to game your attention span (catalog has simple rules for sorting by thread activity and such), visual content is limited, etc.

fullshark 4y ago

Reddit used to have an actual community, things like in person meetups and its own culture based on various in-jokes (bacon,narwhals, etc) and behavior expectations. It was pretty social I'd say, though now it's basically just an aggreator and not that different from google news for various interests.