5 ms·

>which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it I know this was a throwaway parenthetical, but I agree 100%. I don't know

by viccis 9mo ago

>which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it I know this was a throwaway parenthetical, but I agree 100%. I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall for any online forum like reddit, but one result of this semantic shift is that it takes attention away from the fact that the former type is all but obliterated now.

ianburrell 9mo ago
The social networks have all added public media and algorithms. I read explanation that because friends don't produce enough content to keep engaged so they added public feeds. I'm disappointed that there isn't a private Bluesky/Mastodon. I also want an algorithm that shows the best of what following posted since last checked so I can keep up.
LexiMax 9mo ago
> the former type is all but obliterated now. Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it. While it stinks that it is controlled by one big company, it's quite nice that its communities are invite-only by default and largely moderated by actual flesh-and-blood users. There's no single public shared social space, which means there's no one shared social feed to get hooked on. Pretty much all of my former IRC/Forum buddies have migrated to Discord, and when the site goes south (not if, it's going to go public eventually, we all know how this story plays out), we expect that we'll be using an alternative that is shaped very much like it, such as Matrix.
- dartharva 9mo ago
  I'd say WhatsApp is a better example
  - Ekaros 9mo ago
    WhatsApp really feels to me more like group chat. Not really breaking barrier of social media. But then again I am not in any mass chats. Discord is many things. Private chat groups, medium communities and then larger communities with tens of thousands of users.
    - nottorp 9mo ago
      > WhatsApp really feels to me more like group chat. So what's wrong with that?
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
  > Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it. The "former type" had to do with online socializing with people you know IRL. I have never seen anything on Discord that matches this description.
  - LexiMax 9mo ago
    I'm in multiple Discord servers with people I know IRL. In fact, I'd say it's probably the easiest way to bootstrap a community around a friend-group.
    - gwd 9mo ago
      Is this a generational thing? All my groups of this type are on WhatsApp (unfortunately).
      - midius 9mo ago
        might be a regional thing instead, i don't know many americans with whatsapp -- all of my friends are on discord.
      - SirHumphrey 9mo ago
        Maybe, but at least in my circles it’s a structure thing- until the group actually can be organised in a single chat sanely something else will be used- but as soon as multiple chats are required the thing is moved on discord.
      - wongarsu 9mo ago
        Discord's initial core demographic was online gaming. From there it has radiated outwards due to being the best group messaging (and voice chat) solution out there. The more overlap your friend group has with gaming and adjacent groups the more likely they are to use Discord
        9mo ago
- alex1138 9mo ago
  900 lb. Gorillas don't weigh 9000 lbs
roywiggins 9mo ago
It's even worse than that, TikTok & Instagram are labeled "social media" despite, I'd wager, most users never actually posting anything anymore. Nobody really socializes on short form video platforms any more than they do YouTube. It's just media. At least forums are social, sort of.
munificent 9mo ago
> "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" "Social media" never meant that. We've forgotten already, but the original term was "social network" and the way sites worked back then is that everyone was contributing more or less original content. It would then be shared automatically to your network of friends. It was like texting but automatically broadcast to your contact list. Then Facebook and others pivoted towards "resharing" content and it became less "what are my friends doing" and more "I want to watch random media" and your friends sharing it just became an input into the popularity algorithm. At that point, it became "social media". HN is neither since there's no way to friend people or broadcast comments. It's just a forum where most threads are links, like Reddit.
- hnbad 9mo ago
  I think most people only recall becoming aware of Facebook when it was already so widespread that people talked about it as "the site you go to to find out what extended family members and people you haven't spoken to in years are up to". Let's remember that the original idea was to connect with people in your college/university. I faintly recall this time period because I tried to sign up for it only to find out that while there had been an announcement that it was opened up internationally, it still only let you sign up with a dot EDU email address, which none of the universities in my country had. In the early years "social media" was a lot more about having a place to express yourself or share your ideas and opinions so other people you know could check up on them. Many remember the GIF anarchy and crimes against HTML of Geocities but that aesthetic also carried over to MySpace while sites like Live Journal or Tumblr more heavily emphasized prose. This was all also in the context of a more open "blogosphere" where (mostly) tech nerds would run their own blogs and connect intentionally much like "webrings" did in the earlier days for private homepages and such before search engine indexing mostly obliterated their main use. Facebook pretty much created modern "social media" by creating the global "timeline", forcing users to compete with each other (and corporate brands) for each other's attention while also focusing the experience more on consumption and "reaction" than creation and self-expression. This in turn resulted in more "engagement" which eventually led to algorithmic timelines trying to optimize for engagement and ad placement / "suggested content". HN actually follows the "link aggregator" or "news aggregator" lineage of sites like Reddit, Digg, Fark, etc (there were also "bookmark aggregators" like stumbleupon but most of those died out to). In terms of social interactions it's more like e.g. the Slashdot comment section even though the "feed" is somewhat "engagement driven" like on social media sites. But as you said, it lacks all the features that would normally be expected like the ability to "curate" your timeline (or in fact, having a personalized view of the timeline at all) or being able to "follow" specific people. You can't even block people.
flomo 9mo ago
You know Meta, the "social media company" came out and said their users spend less than 10% of the time interacting with people they actually know? "Social Media" had become a euphemism for 'scrolling entertainment, ragebait and cats' and has nothing to do 'being social'. There is NO difference between modern reddit and facebook in that sense. (Less than 5% of users are on old.reddit, the majority is subject to the algorithm.)
- alex1138 9mo ago
  It would be nice if the social media company actually showed their posts in the feed
  - dpkirchner 9mo ago
    I'm hopeful that one day engineers at Meta will crack the chronological sort code. It's a tough algorithm but I bet Llama can help 'em out. Better back button handling and fixing the location bugs in event creation may well be entirely beyond Llama, sadly.
- theshrike79 9mo ago
  I don't go to Meta properties to interact with anyone anymore. Our extended family has a WhatsApp group, but that's about it. I'm not convincing a bunch of 60+ year olds to switch to a new platform they're not used to. Instagram has been read-only for me for half a decade, I still poke my head on FB now and then to spy on people I used to know.
bandrami 9mo ago
I'll come clean and say I've still never tried Discord and I feel like I must not be understanding the concept. It really looks like it's IRC but hosted by some commercial company and requiring their client to use and with extremely tenuous privacy guarantees. I figure I must be missing something because I can't understand why that's so popular when IRC is still there.
- krawcu 9mo ago
  it's very easy to make a friend server that has all you basically need: sending messages, images/files and being able to talk with voice channels. you can also invite a music bot or host your own that will join the voice channel with a song that you requested
  - bandrami 9mo ago
    Right.... how is that different from IRC other than being controlled by a big company with no exit ability and (again) extremely tenuous privacy promises?
    - trinix912 9mo ago
      For the text chat, it's different in the way that it lets one make their own 'servers' without having to run the actual hardware server 24/7, free of charge, no need to battle with NATs and weird nonstandard ways of sending images, etc. The big thing is the voice/videoconferencing channels which are actually optimized insanely well, Discord calls work fine even on crappy connections that Teams and Zoom struggle with. Simply put it's Skype x MSN Messenger with a global user directory, but with gamers in mind.
    - petu 9mo ago
      IRC doesn't offer voice/video, which is unimaginable for Discord alternative. When we get to alternative proposals with functioning calls I'd say having them as voice channels that just exist 24/7 is a big thing too. It's a tiny thing from technical perspective, but makes something like Teams unsuitable alternative for Discord. In Teams you start a call and everyone phone rings, you distract everyone from whatever they were doing -- you better have a good reason for doing so. In Discord you just join empty voice channel (on your private server with friends) w/o any particular reason and go on with your day. Maybe someone sees that you're there and joins, maybe not. No need to think of anyone's schedule, you don't annoy people that don't have time right now.
PurpleRamen 9mo ago
> I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall 5 minutes after the first social network became famous. It never really has been just about knowing people IRL, that was only in the beginning, until people started connecting with everyone and their mother. Now it's about people and them connecting and socializing. If there are persons, then it's social. HN has profiles where you can "follow" people, thus, it's social on a minimal level. Though, we could dispute whether it's just media or a mature network. Because there obviously are notable differences in terms of social-related features between HN or Facebook.

by viccis 9mo ago

ianburrell 9mo ago

The social networks have all added public media and algorithms. I read explanation that because friends don't produce enough content to keep engaged so they added public feeds. I'm disappointed that there isn't a private Bluesky/Mastodon. I also want an algorithm that shows the best of what following posted since last checked so I can keep up.

LexiMax 9mo ago

> the former type is all but obliterated now. Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it. While it stinks that it is controlled by one big company, it's quite nice that its communities are invite-only by default and largely moderated by actual flesh-and-blood users. There's no single public shared social space, which means there's no one shared social feed to get hooked on. Pretty much all of my former IRC/Forum buddies have migrated to Discord, and when the site goes south (not if, it's going to go public eventually, we all know how this story plays out), we expect that we'll be using an alternative that is shaped very much like it, such as Matrix.

dartharva 9mo ago
I'd say WhatsApp is a better example
- Ekaros 9mo ago
  WhatsApp really feels to me more like group chat. Not really breaking barrier of social media. But then again I am not in any mass chats. Discord is many things. Private chat groups, medium communities and then larger communities with tens of thousands of users.
  - nottorp 9mo ago
    > WhatsApp really feels to me more like group chat. So what's wrong with that?
PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
> Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it. The "former type" had to do with online socializing with people you know IRL. I have never seen anything on Discord that matches this description.
- LexiMax 9mo ago
  I'm in multiple Discord servers with people I know IRL. In fact, I'd say it's probably the easiest way to bootstrap a community around a friend-group.
  - gwd 9mo ago
    Is this a generational thing? All my groups of this type are on WhatsApp (unfortunately).
    - midius 9mo ago
      might be a regional thing instead, i don't know many americans with whatsapp -- all of my friends are on discord.
    - SirHumphrey 9mo ago
      Maybe, but at least in my circles it’s a structure thing- until the group actually can be organised in a single chat sanely something else will be used- but as soon as multiple chats are required the thing is moved on discord.
    - wongarsu 9mo ago
      Discord's initial core demographic was online gaming. From there it has radiated outwards due to being the best group messaging (and voice chat) solution out there. The more overlap your friend group has with gaming and adjacent groups the more likely they are to use Discord
      - 9mo ago
alex1138 9mo ago
900 lb. Gorillas don't weigh 9000 lbs

roywiggins 9mo ago

It's even worse than that, TikTok & Instagram are labeled "social media" despite, I'd wager, most users never actually posting anything anymore. Nobody really socializes on short form video platforms any more than they do YouTube. It's just media. At least forums are social, sort of.

munificent 9mo ago

> "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" "Social media" never meant that. We've forgotten already, but the original term was "social network" and the way sites worked back then is that everyone was contributing more or less original content. It would then be shared automatically to your network of friends. It was like texting but automatically broadcast to your contact list. Then Facebook and others pivoted towards "resharing" content and it became less "what are my friends doing" and more "I want to watch random media" and your friends sharing it just became an input into the popularity algorithm. At that point, it became "social media". HN is neither since there's no way to friend people or broadcast comments. It's just a forum where most threads are links, like Reddit.

hnbad 9mo ago
I think most people only recall becoming aware of Facebook when it was already so widespread that people talked about it as "the site you go to to find out what extended family members and people you haven't spoken to in years are up to". Let's remember that the original idea was to connect with people in your college/university. I faintly recall this time period because I tried to sign up for it only to find out that while there had been an announcement that it was opened up internationally, it still only let you sign up with a dot EDU email address, which none of the universities in my country had. In the early years "social media" was a lot more about having a place to express yourself or share your ideas and opinions so other people you know could check up on them. Many remember the GIF anarchy and crimes against HTML of Geocities but that aesthetic also carried over to MySpace while sites like Live Journal or Tumblr more heavily emphasized prose. This was all also in the context of a more open "blogosphere" where (mostly) tech nerds would run their own blogs and connect intentionally much like "webrings" did in the earlier days for private homepages and such before search engine indexing mostly obliterated their main use. Facebook pretty much created modern "social media" by creating the global "timeline", forcing users to compete with each other (and corporate brands) for each other's attention while also focusing the experience more on consumption and "reaction" than creation and self-expression. This in turn resulted in more "engagement" which eventually led to algorithmic timelines trying to optimize for engagement and ad placement / "suggested content". HN actually follows the "link aggregator" or "news aggregator" lineage of sites like Reddit, Digg, Fark, etc (there were also "bookmark aggregators" like stumbleupon but most of those died out to). In terms of social interactions it's more like e.g. the Slashdot comment section even though the "feed" is somewhat "engagement driven" like on social media sites. But as you said, it lacks all the features that would normally be expected like the ability to "curate" your timeline (or in fact, having a personalized view of the timeline at all) or being able to "follow" specific people. You can't even block people.

flomo 9mo ago

You know Meta, the "social media company" came out and said their users spend less than 10% of the time interacting with people they actually know? "Social Media" had become a euphemism for 'scrolling entertainment, ragebait and cats' and has nothing to do 'being social'. There is NO difference between modern reddit and facebook in that sense. (Less than 5% of users are on old.reddit, the majority is subject to the algorithm.)

alex1138 9mo ago
It would be nice if the social media company actually showed their posts in the feed
- dpkirchner 9mo ago
  I'm hopeful that one day engineers at Meta will crack the chronological sort code. It's a tough algorithm but I bet Llama can help 'em out. Better back button handling and fixing the location bugs in event creation may well be entirely beyond Llama, sadly.
theshrike79 9mo ago
I don't go to Meta properties to interact with anyone anymore. Our extended family has a WhatsApp group, but that's about it. I'm not convincing a bunch of 60+ year olds to switch to a new platform they're not used to. Instagram has been read-only for me for half a decade, I still poke my head on FB now and then to spy on people I used to know.

bandrami 9mo ago

I'll come clean and say I've still never tried Discord and I feel like I must not be understanding the concept. It really looks like it's IRC but hosted by some commercial company and requiring their client to use and with extremely tenuous privacy guarantees. I figure I must be missing something because I can't understand why that's so popular when IRC is still there.

krawcu 9mo ago
it's very easy to make a friend server that has all you basically need: sending messages, images/files and being able to talk with voice channels. you can also invite a music bot or host your own that will join the voice channel with a song that you requested
- bandrami 9mo ago
  Right.... how is that different from IRC other than being controlled by a big company with no exit ability and (again) extremely tenuous privacy promises?
  - trinix912 9mo ago
    For the text chat, it's different in the way that it lets one make their own 'servers' without having to run the actual hardware server 24/7, free of charge, no need to battle with NATs and weird nonstandard ways of sending images, etc. The big thing is the voice/videoconferencing channels which are actually optimized insanely well, Discord calls work fine even on crappy connections that Teams and Zoom struggle with. Simply put it's Skype x MSN Messenger with a global user directory, but with gamers in mind.
  - petu 9mo ago
    IRC doesn't offer voice/video, which is unimaginable for Discord alternative. When we get to alternative proposals with functioning calls I'd say having them as voice channels that just exist 24/7 is a big thing too. It's a tiny thing from technical perspective, but makes something like Teams unsuitable alternative for Discord. In Teams you start a call and everyone phone rings, you distract everyone from whatever they were doing -- you better have a good reason for doing so. In Discord you just join empty voice channel (on your private server with friends) w/o any particular reason and go on with your day. Maybe someone sees that you're there and joins, maybe not. No need to think of anyone's schedule, you don't annoy people that don't have time right now.

PurpleRamen 9mo ago

> I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall 5 minutes after the first social network became famous. It never really has been just about knowing people IRL, that was only in the beginning, until people started connecting with everyone and their mother. Now it's about people and them connecting and socializing. If there are persons, then it's social. HN has profiles where you can "follow" people, thus, it's social on a minimal level. Though, we could dispute whether it's just media or a mature network. Because there obviously are notable differences in terms of social-related features between HN or Facebook.