There isn't any clear definition out there of what "social media" is I'm aware of, but I'd say the basic criteria include some combination of: - User-submitted

There isn't any clear definition out there of what "social media" is I'm aware of, but I'd say the basic criteria include some combination of: - User-submitted content - Individualized experience based on algorithmic curation, follows/subscriptions, or both - Ability to directly interact with other users, whether publishing to some kind of profile or "wall" of theirs or sending direct messages - Users have some kind of durable persona (at minimum a human-readable, memorable account name, but usually a multimedia profile of some sort) Hacker News mostly has none of these things. A very small proportion of top-level content is user-created and there is algorithmic curation, but not individualized. This is really more of a newspaper without writers or editors. The stories come from other platforms instead and every reader's letter gets published automatically. Reddit isn't social media, either. It's a discussion board. There has to be something that made MySpace and Facebook different from phpBB and Usenet or why'd we come up with a new word at all? People seem to be using "social media" as a general derogatory name for any potentially addictive, high-noise, low-signal time sink that encourages mindless consumption of undifferentiated "content" and creates bad incentives to creators of such content to abandon truth and artistic integrity in favor of flashy gimmicks and trend surfing. But that describes virtually all of pop culture.