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Social media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel insecure, you leverage your emotions

Social media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel insecure, you leverage your emotions for someone else's aims. Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation. It's long past time to leave it permanently. And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

xnx 4mo ago
Additionally, "social media" is as inaccurate a name "ride sharing". A better name would be "targeted ad scroll media".
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austin-cheney 4mo ago
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. I am thrilled you pointed this out. I also get tired of seeing that.
- ctdinjeu4 4mo ago
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- yifanl 4mo ago
  We keep saying it, because it's what it is. There's some black box (that can _sometimes_ be reached via dang) that determines what you see on HN's front page, and this place is just as susceptible to trends and rabbit holes as any short form video app, it just doesn't have the funny sound effects.
  - appplication 4mo ago
    > just as susceptible It’s really not though. There is no personalized algorithm, which is 98% of the issue with social media. It may seem pedantic, but it’s like saying a horse and a car are essentially the same thing, the car just has an engine.
    - NewsaHackO 4mo ago
      The personalized algorithm is not the root issue though. The root issue is that social media sites live by increasing engagement of its viewers. Because of this, they all get away from the original stated purpose of bringing people together, and go all in on maximizing engagement by increasingly shady ways. Of course, the personalized algorithm is a huge one, but there are also things like "Show HN" controlling what is on the front page, selectively taking down flagged material. Remember, HN has advertisements as well, and will regularly post job ads for positions in startups. They know that outright going in the direction of 'personalized algorithm' would alienate their viewerbase, so they avoid it, but still do all of the other practices that social media sites do.
      - mcmoor 4mo ago
        I think it can be argued that, because human interests are so different and fractal, there's only so much damage that can be done with non-personalized algorithm. Ads for a certain demographic will just alienate the other demographic. But with personalized algorithm, the poison can be customized for each person and be more fatal.
        trumpdong 4mo ago
        We can imagine 100 different websites each with different non-personalized algorithms - another algorithm decides which one is best for you and directs you to that site. That's effectively a personalized algorithm with extra steps. That's where we are. HN is one of those sites.
        4mo ago
malfist 4mo ago
Your theory about cable television is fascinating. I never really watched TV growing up, but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time. Social media is totally that today too. I quit facebook in 2016 and reddit in 2023 over similar fears. Back then I said facebook was bad for my mental health, and I quit reddit when they made it harder for me to prevent what I called amygdala-bait. But it's totally the same thing. These days I love to watch nuanced explanations on youtube of complex issues, but youtube's algorithm desperately wants to feed me stuff like How Money Works and other channels where it's dressed up as nuanced explanations of the world, but every single episode is how X is screwing you over or how the Y is going to blow up the economy any second now.
- UltraSane 4mo ago
  "one of them always has a 24 hour news going " Why didn't you say which one? I bet it is Fox.
  - walthamstow 4mo ago
    It doesn't matter which one. My mother mainlines BBC News which is state-owned, establishment-centrist, has no adverts or profits, but has the same effect of dialing up the viewer's fear of the outside world.
    - Quarrelsome 4mo ago
      sadly forces in the BBC also value "engagement". Idk how we got here, it never used to be like this. This is why cultural stories now are higher than before on the main site. It used to be the case that news was _just_ news. Politics, crime, economics, health, environment, etc. Now culture stories, like puff pieces about the royals or entertainment end up on the front page.
      - red_admiral 4mo ago
titzer 4mo ago
Ads became the default business model of the web. When people started to get sick of blaring in-your-face blinking banners, it mutated into search ads and placement. The same thing happened to mobile apps and games, YouTube, Facebook, instagram, even Tik Tok. When it becomes too blatant then it embeds itself one level deeper as placements and endorsements. It will never stop because the parasitic ads are the only thing holding up the edifice anymore. It's crazy to me because ultimately what holds up the economy is money changing hands for services, and ads aren't that. So ads are fundamentally driving people to spend money elsewhere. I just don't understand how the system holds up a multi-hundred billion dollar advertising parasite...everything would be cheaper if there were no ads.
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  According to Cory Doctorow, Proctor&Gamble - one of those giant corporations that each owns 20% of the food supply but doesn't use their own name as branding - cancelled $200m of online ad spend and saw no change in sales. If more companies realise this, what happens?
close04 4mo ago
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. For an arbitrary definition of "normal"? The last remark is unwarranted and can only have a chilling effect on the conversation. Or outrage bait, a typical sign on social media. Why is it not social media? It exhibits the same signs as seen on any social media platform. Can you define social media so we can all follow the same play sheet? I see the same opinions here as I see on Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, or X even from the same people here as there. The topics that reach the front page are the most popular, or divisive, or "addictive". A lot of people post for the karma, there's a lot of pandering to popular opinion. There's an opaque algorithm that decides which topic stays on the front page and for how long, which comment stays on top and for how long, when a post or comment gets flagged or reappears, etc. that dictates how the conversation can be carried and on which topics. There are a lot of political topics where some voices or opinions are buried while others are pinned to the top. Some people spend hours and days posting here. There's a lot of astroturfing. The parallels can go on. The main difference is scale and at this small scale it can maintain a higher level of quality... most times. But quality isn't what defines social media, is it? Many on HN see themselves as better than the "simpletons" who fall for "normal" social media, and any view that challenges that is tiresome. But your dismissal of whether HN is social media holds water like a sieve.
- chownie 4mo ago
  Is it not clear at this point that the real issue is how lacking the term "social media" even is? We have people here arguing that BBSs were social media, it will not be long until email is considered social media. At this point it's a vague term meaning "a place where you talk to another person online" and nothing more than that. I'm solidly of the opinion especially after seeing so many arguments of this form on HN that the whole world has accidentally forgotten the term "social network" at some point, because "social media" means nothing.
  - close04 4mo ago
    > Is it not clear at this point that the real issue is how lacking the term "social media" even is? It's very clear. Empirically a common sign across all social media is basing very strong opinions on very vague personal interpretation of something that that will forever stay unwritten so it can't be challenged. Anyone can just cement their claim to eternal correctness by ending a personal opinion with some outrage bait like "anyone who doesn't agree with me is tiresome".
nancyminusone 4mo ago
I really forgot how stupid cable tv was 20 years ago. In my area, that old stuff is now getting broadcast over the air, which is the only kind of tv I get. It's not the history channel's Ancient Aliens exactly, but it is all the 2nd tier offshoot stuff that didn't air on the big cable channels. About half of them are "about" Hitler, and the topics are treated so unseriously you get things like "Dude, look! This door has an H on it! This must have been where he went!" It's so stupid you almost can't help watching, but I'll be dammed if they didn't get me to. Wild times.
ctdinjeu4 4mo ago
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ctdinjeu2 4mo ago
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jmye 4mo ago
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. That it's less destructive than Meta doesn't make it less "social media" - and I'd argue that it's style (links fall off the page quickly and discussion becomes impossible after a relatively short period of time, solely to foster a sense of "missing out") is part of what defines current "social media". It's a noisy attention sink, whatever high-mindedness people want to pretend it has.
reactordev 4mo ago
I love me some knowledge forums and sites like HN that allow for general discourse. I’m afraid an entire generation doesn’t know what that is like.
shimman 4mo ago
I always delineated the two as one being corporate social media, I do wonder if there is a better word/phrase for it but IME if you use the phrase two describe it as such to those that were online pre-2008 they immediately grasp the difference; but these people are likely a minority.
amelius 4mo ago
> It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation. What baffles me is that they call this manipulation "influencing" and they consider this a positive word.
- djeastm 4mo ago
  Similar is when people refer to themselves or others as "content creators" Not filmmakers or artists or writers... "content creators". Like they exist just to produce a continual stream of this amorphous "content" for consumption. Now, perhaps that's all that art/writing, etc ever was. But to just abandon even the pretense is another in a long line of surrenders we've made to commoditization.
  - reg_dunlop 4mo ago
    Was there ever a time when any of the classical/fine arts were used as propaganda or promotional material, prior to the medium elevating to loftier aims? Is this history repeating itself? The idea that content creators could be considered artists is one I may have considered before, but only tangentially. What I'm also curious about...is how this commoditization and consumption via "influencers" has altered any individuals attitudes towards blatant manipulation. Free will seemed to be a much more guarded value. Now, the willing surrender of our free will seems to be the norm...
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/
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ThrowawayTestr 4mo ago
I must be using social media wrong because all I see on my timeline are funny pics and niche porn.
- KellyCriterion 4mo ago
  Are you on the correct site/app?? :-P
  - IAmBroom 4mo ago
    Rule 34, bro.
geophph 4mo ago
(Pedantry erupts below)
grvdrm 4mo ago
HN has plenty of social media components. Think a better version is: HN is not an advertising-controlled social media website. That specific version makes most sense to me.
- tekla 4mo ago
  HN is literally an ad.
  - grvdrm 4mo ago
    I don't think of Show HN as quite the same. Nor Ask HN. I know that otherwise there is plenty of "advertising" within posts/comments/etc. Where I think the argument that it's not social falls down is aligned with some of your comments. The feeds, upvotes, downvotes, etc. Let's not forget the spam. Those mechanisms are pervasive across many social platforms, so why are they so different here? Don't think they are.
    - trumpdong 4mo ago
      HN is literally an ad for Y Combinator.
Kiro 4mo ago
It's not tiresome. It's spot on. Nothing is as addictive as HN.
- throw-the-towel 4mo ago
  Wikipedia is.
KellyCriterion 4mo ago
- And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. - Thats right in that sense - but in a sense of doom scrolling, it is for me: Very often Im clicking through dozends auf pages, fortunately I have to activly do a click to get to the next site, so this dampens a little bit :-D
- everforward 4mo ago
  There’s also an end to the feed. I forget the limit, but at one point I think I hit the maximum number of pages at like 50 (quality drops pretty dramatically, by like page 10 there was almost nothing interesting or notable).
Tangurena2 4mo ago
Social media was first (that I know of) weaponized in 2016 by Cambridge Analytica to manipulate Facebook users to vote for Brexit & Trump. I'm surprised that the article left those totally out. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
- hedora 4mo ago
  That incident was definitely ahead of its time, but before that, targeted ads for scams were propping the industry up. For instance, Experian used to spend $$$ to funnel people into credit card scams -- one year, they stole our CC#, and I called our top 5 US bank to dispute the charges. The bank fraud department rep said Experian drove most of their case load, to the point where they had a special flow to block just Experian affiliates because physically reissuing stolen cards was too expensive. You can back estimate how many predatory ad dollars that involved. Of course, there was also a long tail of smaller companies that wanted to sell supplements, useless other useless services, etc. Before that, you could pay for placement on all the major search engines except early Google, which basically just broke search. (Google does similar stuff now, in the same way they "don't" sell personal information or read your gmail, but somehow make lots of money off it anyway, and target things only mentioned in private correspondence). LLMs will be next. The only solution is to refuse to pay for access with your attention. That means no copilot, gemini, alexa or siri, since those are all ad supported or adjacent now. ChatGPT and Claude are on borrowed time. I suspect the open weight models will be the last ones to fall.
- intended 4mo ago
  Social media was weaponized from the days of PHP forums. I remember Palantir shilling sock puppet management technology at a time where most people didn’t even know what a moderator was. AFAIK, Russia’s Internet Research Agency was the first organization to weaponize social media and the internet.
bryanlarsen 4mo ago
> HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The article's main claim is that traditional social media is not social media any more. That Facebook et al are now junk entertainment. So IMO HN hews much closer to the traditional role of social media than Facebook et al do.
- eszed 4mo ago
  That's what I took away from it, too. Facebook circa 2008 was great: your friends talked what were up to; everyone posted their pictures from that party last night; you didn't see anything from anyone who wasn't at most a second-degree connection. There were problems - people were jerks, and worse, and some people got pulled into chasing clout, and promoted bullshit - but they were human-scale problems, and you could largely scrub your feed from things / people like that. Unfortunately for the entire world, that sort of use wasn't profitable enough.
  - Gigachad 4mo ago
    The problem for Facebook is there is a limit to how much your friends would post. You could check Facebook for 15 minutes and then you had seen everything your friends had posted and had to come back tomorrow for more. New Facebook/instagram can trap users in hours of scrolling video in a zombie like state.
- Gigachad 4mo ago
  HN is more like a forum where strangers discuss ideas. Old school social media was a place you posted life updates to your friends and family. New social media is content creator short form video while the majority of users are entirely passive consumers.
willXare 4mo ago
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addybojangles 4mo ago
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stephenhuey 4mo ago
When a professor at Rice walked us through Don Tapscott's book Growing up Digital in 2001, we had such an optimistic view of the future. Don highlighted how with broadcast media in the 20th century, the viewer had little choice on what to watch. Now that the internet was available to the masses, he explained how much new generations would benefit from what he called interactive media which enabled someone to explore and learn anything of interest instead of being forced to consume whatever was being fed through the television. When we'd say there was "nothing on" we felt bored, and maybe we did endure some manipulation by commercials, but I agree that contemporary social media is far worse. In the 20th century, boredom from channel surfing at least encouraged some to get off the couch and go read a book or shoot some hoops or play a board game with friends. Allow me the stereotype (exaggeration?) for a moment to note that we had the ultimate nerdy kid who wanted to be cool, and all he could think of with gazillions of dollars at his disposal was to make a thing that turned everyone into anti-social nerds by staying glued to their screens instead of interacting IRL with fellow humans. Who would have accepted that fictional plot as believable? https://dontapscott.com/books/growing-digital/ https://dontapscott.com/books/growing-digital/
lfuller 4mo ago
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. This is claimed by users of Reddit regularly as well and I think most people here would consider Reddit to be a typical example of social media.
- Gigachad 4mo ago
  You could argue back in the day reddit was a forum rather than a social media. But after the new UI and several years of changes, particularly when they started to ignore your subscribed subreddits and just showing whatever in the home feed, it’s now fully social media.
RC_ITR 4mo ago
>And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. The amount of times I've read a very thoughtful article only for the comments to be political drivel (the worst was peak-COVID SF discourse) weakens your argument quite a bit. It's even more foolish to think outside forces aren't using bots/tech to sway the discourse. Just because it's not engineered for the mainstream's dopamine addiction doesn't mean it doesn't do the same thing.
alphazard 4mo ago
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. Whatever you want to call it, HN has followed a similar trend. It's rare to see the authors of small, but interesting/innovative, projects show up in the comments, surprised to see their work on the front page. That used to be common, even the default, if you look far enough back. Now the front page is current events and marketing campaigns. I don't think I've seen a single software project here in the last year that wasn't already extremely popular, or being pushed by a company with a marketing budget. In theory AI should have helped. I know people are still making cool stuff, faster now with AI, but it's harder and harder to find it.
- grey-area 4mo ago
  > In theory AI should have helped. Why would generative AI help stop enshittification? If anything AI has made low-effort slop far more common on the front page and sometimes it gets voted up because of a snappy headline and few people attempting to read it, particularly if long-form and initially convincing.
  - alphazard 4mo ago
    I agree with everything you said. Most open source projects are limited by contributor labor. Generative AI does help with that problem, but it introduces a sea of vibe coded slop as a side effect. Truly a Genie/Jinn.
    - intended 4mo ago
      This was always going to be the case, no genie situation at all. Information sharing networks with humans in it can only track so many things, or spend limited time on consumption. The more stuff on the network, the harder it is for things to be seen. The stuff that gets seen is content that is evolved to gain attention, or is resourced to gain attention. This is as inevitable as sunrise.
Gud 4mo ago
HN is not and never has been “social media”. It’s a threaded discussion forum.
Aurornis 4mo ago
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. I came here after reading the comment section for the "Dopamine Fracking" story right below this one. In that comment section there are arguments that Hacker News isn't social media because it doesn't have social features like friending people you know. The argument is that it's a place to discover cool content and comment on it. Which is precisely the argument being made in this BBC article: That traditional social media is becoming less about communicating with friends and more about discovering content and commenting on it. Which is the exact purpose of sites like Hacker News and Reddit. > "I spend a lot of time scrolling through videos made by content-creators," says Lucie, also 16. "They're more interesting than the posts of people I know." > "What we're seeing is social media splitting in two," says social media consultant Matt Navarra, author of the Geekout Newsletter. "Big platforms like Instagram and TikTok are becoming more about entertainment and discovery. WhatsApp is becoming the place people go to actually be social. EDIT: I had to use Wayback Machine to find this: > 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features > Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero. That's from https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinato... That has been erased from the internet, but it was widely understood that sites like Reddit and HN could were social and had addictive properties for people without strong self control.
- post-it 4mo ago
  The content here is very different. I can kill maybe an hour a day reading HN, which is a lot, but the feed does end. Most days, I don't want to spend an hour here, because the feed is designed to push popular content to the top, and a lot of it is content I don't care about. Other sites have infinite feeds designed to keep me personally hooked as long as possible.
haunter 4mo ago
> HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word Hard disagree. The upvote/downvote system and the algorithmic front page makes it a social media to me.
jandrese 4mo ago
IMHO both of these problems stem from the same source: Engagement. Anything that attempts to maximize engagement will inevitably optimize for outrage, anger, and disgust. You will end up handing the platform over to trolls and propagandists. Platforms need to optimize instead of quality and sanity, but unfortunately that is expensive will never get as many views and advertiser dollars as cheap outrage content. It's a big reason why our current media landscape is so hellish, the other main reason being the continual takeover of more and more media outlets by billionaire aligned interests.
rockskon 4mo ago
HN has its own share of enticement/manipulation - most recently with regards to AI. Plenty of variants of "people who don't use AI will be left behind" are sprinkled around various threads about AI. It's an attempt to both manipulate via fear as well as sell.
jimt1234 4mo ago
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icepush 4mo ago
This is so different from my personal experience that I feel like one of those kids being told chickens used to be dinosaurs. I have an account on facebook, on which I am pretty active. If I attend some infrequent event (Which I do fairly often) I will take a picture of it and post it there, with a description of what it's about. That's pretty much the extent of what I put on facebook. Sometimes I see similar posts from people in my friends list, or videos about whatever facebook thinks I am interested in this month (Right now it's showing me lots of people taking apart pumps and motors). What sites are you using, and what exactly are they showing you ?
- wuliwong 4mo ago
  So you infrequently post on FB, that is exactly in line with the article. You didn't mention whether or not the content you see in your feed is from people that you know in real life or not, so I can't evaluate if your experience is inline with the article. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - icepush 4mo ago
    I did say my feed is a mixture of content from people I know, and people I don't. My comment wasn't that long.
da_chicken 4mo ago
Not just television. Also the supermarket checkout aisle magazines. Not just tabloids, although that, too. Also the "glossy" magazines. Vogue, People, Us, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, McCall's, Seventeen, etc. The commercialization of the engines of culture continues.
red-iron-pine 4mo ago
HN is absolutely social media in all senses of the word and meets your definition of cable TV pretty well -- it's a news blog run by a startup incubator as a way to increase discussion and submarine in their concept and products. "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" and that is just as true here as anywhere.
- zuzululu 4mo ago
  I agree half way. While recent years HN seems to have imported much of Reddit, it still has an anti-establishment undertone and decent moderation to keep it from sprawling
  - red-iron-pine 4mo ago
    that's fair. despite the mountains of hype about AI and BTC, HN always kept it real. we'll see if that continues; bots are just as prominent here as anywhere
- nunez 4mo ago
  Not in the sense that's disucssed in the article. Social media like a forum (which is "old school" social media IMO) instead of like Instagram (short video clips, reactions, designed for max engagement and dopamine hits). Yes, HN is a front for YC. However, HN is still very much about longform submissions and nuanced discussion. There aren't very many places like that anymore, and those that still exist are dying, with some exceptions (mostly car forums, for some reason). (Instagram wasn't always this way! It was originally an alternative to Flickr, but focusing on sharing images and discussion instead of photography. It gradually became the psychological gateway drug that it is now, though even that was a response to threats like Vine and Quibi that unlocked short-form video at scale.)
cautiouscat 4mo ago
I agree but there’s definitely room for nuance. I follow a lot of artists because I genuinely like seeing their work. I follow a lot of miniature painters for their tips and tricks. I follow my close friends to see what they’re up to. I think the folks you’re talking about are influencers. Which I wholeheartedly agree with your take in that case.
- ambicapter 4mo ago
  That’s just advertising. Yes, mom and pop stores can advertise “just like” the multinational corporations can. Guess who gets the lion’s share of airtime and guess who has armies of men+machines crafting the most convincing messaging.
  - cautiouscat 4mo ago
    How is someone showing a 3D render with no products or services to buy from advertising to me? In addition, why does that matter if I enjoy the content? It’s not “just” advertising. Again this is nuanced.
pessimizer 4mo ago
> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. What's probably tiresome is trying to come up with a proof that it is not. Your frustration and the insult "pedantry" will not suffice. If you had a real proof, you would simply include it, instead of performing emotion about being so lowered to even have to discuss HN being social media. The idea that people shouldn't argue with you because it might injure or tire you to be argued with is so 2022. If you have something specific to say about the actual actions that are taken in what you call social media (but does not include HN), there's plenty to discuss - in fact the difference which you insult as pedantic is the most important thing to talk about. Why is one mediated talking to people good, and the other mediated talking to people bad? And if we try to make it an argument about something other than vocabulary, or even worse the vague-assed "changes in technology," it might accomplish something. It's insane how this is enough to begin a thread on HN. Vague negative handwaving and insults (nerd-sniping, I guess?). That's not going to hurt whoever you think is doing evil, that's going to help them. "Social Media" isn't a thing. It's a bag of techniques for mediating communication between people who are usually not asking for a mediator. Talking about those specific techniques and their applications is always going to be more useful than arguing about the referent of some term that you have no obligation to sign onto unless you find it useful. But god if you're so tired could you just not participate?
jimbo808 4mo ago
It's worse in many ways but also better in one way, which is that buried in all the propaganda and manipulation is usually the truth somewhere in there. Before, the truth was simply not available.
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bluesounddirect 4mo ago
I completely get the cable tv bit. Grew up without cable just OTA tv and Radio . I remembered how i would feel left out of the cable tv connection / conversations . Then I eventually moved on to living in the city and not really watching TV except simpons reruns and the news hour on pbs for many years . The parallels reveal how we just need to go out to social place outside of our homes . The pool, a restaurant, bar , library, a club a religious place and be involved. But more importantly we all need our own opinions again, and not to be so offended when you disagree.
TulliusCicero 4mo ago
I miss the early days of FB where people just wrote thoughts about what they were feeling or doing. I wish we had something like that where there was no reposting/resharing, and links & photos were allowed but deemphasized in the UI. Also, no like button, that just encourages empty engagement.
snthd 4mo ago
The product is you? https://youtube.com/watch?v=FQbW31Fa4SM https://youtube.com/watch?v=FQbW31Fa4SM
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xnx 4mo ago

Additionally, "social media" is as inaccurate a name "ride sharing". A better name would be "targeted ad scroll media".

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austin-cheney 4mo ago

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. I am thrilled you pointed this out. I also get tired of seeing that.

ctdinjeu4 4mo ago
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yifanl 4mo ago
We keep saying it, because it's what it is. There's some black box (that can _sometimes_ be reached via dang) that determines what you see on HN's front page, and this place is just as susceptible to trends and rabbit holes as any short form video app, it just doesn't have the funny sound effects.
- appplication 4mo ago
  > just as susceptible It’s really not though. There is no personalized algorithm, which is 98% of the issue with social media. It may seem pedantic, but it’s like saying a horse and a car are essentially the same thing, the car just has an engine.
  - NewsaHackO 4mo ago
    The personalized algorithm is not the root issue though. The root issue is that social media sites live by increasing engagement of its viewers. Because of this, they all get away from the original stated purpose of bringing people together, and go all in on maximizing engagement by increasingly shady ways. Of course, the personalized algorithm is a huge one, but there are also things like "Show HN" controlling what is on the front page, selectively taking down flagged material. Remember, HN has advertisements as well, and will regularly post job ads for positions in startups. They know that outright going in the direction of 'personalized algorithm' would alienate their viewerbase, so they avoid it, but still do all of the other practices that social media sites do.
    - mcmoor 4mo ago
      I think it can be argued that, because human interests are so different and fractal, there's only so much damage that can be done with non-personalized algorithm. Ads for a certain demographic will just alienate the other demographic. But with personalized algorithm, the poison can be customized for each person and be more fatal.
      - trumpdong 4mo ago
        We can imagine 100 different websites each with different non-personalized algorithms - another algorithm decides which one is best for you and directs you to that site. That's effectively a personalized algorithm with extra steps. That's where we are. HN is one of those sites.
        4mo ago

malfist 4mo ago

Your theory about cable television is fascinating. I never really watched TV growing up, but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time. Social media is totally that today too. I quit facebook in 2016 and reddit in 2023 over similar fears. Back then I said facebook was bad for my mental health, and I quit reddit when they made it harder for me to prevent what I called amygdala-bait. But it's totally the same thing. These days I love to watch nuanced explanations on youtube of complex issues, but youtube's algorithm desperately wants to feed me stuff like How Money Works and other channels where it's dressed up as nuanced explanations of the world, but every single episode is how X is screwing you over or how the Y is going to blow up the economy any second now.

UltraSane 4mo ago
"one of them always has a 24 hour news going " Why didn't you say which one? I bet it is Fox.
- walthamstow 4mo ago
  It doesn't matter which one. My mother mainlines BBC News which is state-owned, establishment-centrist, has no adverts or profits, but has the same effect of dialing up the viewer's fear of the outside world.
  - Quarrelsome 4mo ago
    sadly forces in the BBC also value "engagement". Idk how we got here, it never used to be like this. This is why cultural stories now are higher than before on the main site. It used to be the case that news was _just_ news. Politics, crime, economics, health, environment, etc. Now culture stories, like puff pieces about the royals or entertainment end up on the front page.
    - red_admiral 4mo ago

titzer 4mo ago

Ads became the default business model of the web. When people started to get sick of blaring in-your-face blinking banners, it mutated into search ads and placement. The same thing happened to mobile apps and games, YouTube, Facebook, instagram, even Tik Tok. When it becomes too blatant then it embeds itself one level deeper as placements and endorsements. It will never stop because the parasitic ads are the only thing holding up the edifice anymore. It's crazy to me because ultimately what holds up the economy is money changing hands for services, and ads aren't that. So ads are fundamentally driving people to spend money elsewhere. I just don't understand how the system holds up a multi-hundred billion dollar advertising parasite...everything would be cheaper if there were no ads.

trumpdong 4mo ago
According to Cory Doctorow, Proctor&Gamble - one of those giant corporations that each owns 20% of the food supply but doesn't use their own name as branding - cancelled $200m of online ad spend and saw no change in sales. If more companies realise this, what happens?

close04 4mo ago

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. For an arbitrary definition of "normal"? The last remark is unwarranted and can only have a chilling effect on the conversation. Or outrage bait, a typical sign on social media. Why is it not social media? It exhibits the same signs as seen on any social media platform. Can you define social media so we can all follow the same play sheet? I see the same opinions here as I see on Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, or X even from the same people here as there. The topics that reach the front page are the most popular, or divisive, or "addictive". A lot of people post for the karma, there's a lot of pandering to popular opinion. There's an opaque algorithm that decides which topic stays on the front page and for how long, which comment stays on top and for how long, when a post or comment gets flagged or reappears, etc. that dictates how the conversation can be carried and on which topics. There are a lot of political topics where some voices or opinions are buried while others are pinned to the top. Some people spend hours and days posting here. There's a lot of astroturfing. The parallels can go on. The main difference is scale and at this small scale it can maintain a higher level of quality... most times. But quality isn't what defines social media, is it? Many on HN see themselves as better than the "simpletons" who fall for "normal" social media, and any view that challenges that is tiresome. But your dismissal of whether HN is social media holds water like a sieve.

chownie 4mo ago
Is it not clear at this point that the real issue is how lacking the term "social media" even is? We have people here arguing that BBSs were social media, it will not be long until email is considered social media. At this point it's a vague term meaning "a place where you talk to another person online" and nothing more than that. I'm solidly of the opinion especially after seeing so many arguments of this form on HN that the whole world has accidentally forgotten the term "social network" at some point, because "social media" means nothing.
- close04 4mo ago
  > Is it not clear at this point that the real issue is how lacking the term "social media" even is? It's very clear. Empirically a common sign across all social media is basing very strong opinions on very vague personal interpretation of something that that will forever stay unwritten so it can't be challenged. Anyone can just cement their claim to eternal correctness by ending a personal opinion with some outrage bait like "anyone who doesn't agree with me is tiresome".

nancyminusone 4mo ago

I really forgot how stupid cable tv was 20 years ago. In my area, that old stuff is now getting broadcast over the air, which is the only kind of tv I get. It's not the history channel's Ancient Aliens exactly, but it is all the 2nd tier offshoot stuff that didn't air on the big cable channels. About half of them are "about" Hitler, and the topics are treated so unseriously you get things like "Dude, look! This door has an H on it! This must have been where he went!" It's so stupid you almost can't help watching, but I'll be dammed if they didn't get me to. Wild times.

ctdinjeu4 4mo ago

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jmye 4mo ago

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. That it's less destructive than Meta doesn't make it less "social media" - and I'd argue that it's style (links fall off the page quickly and discussion becomes impossible after a relatively short period of time, solely to foster a sense of "missing out") is part of what defines current "social media". It's a noisy attention sink, whatever high-mindedness people want to pretend it has.

reactordev 4mo ago

I love me some knowledge forums and sites like HN that allow for general discourse. I’m afraid an entire generation doesn’t know what that is like.

shimman 4mo ago

I always delineated the two as one being corporate social media, I do wonder if there is a better word/phrase for it but IME if you use the phrase two describe it as such to those that were online pre-2008 they immediately grasp the difference; but these people are likely a minority.

amelius 4mo ago

> It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation. What baffles me is that they call this manipulation "influencing" and they consider this a positive word.

djeastm 4mo ago
Similar is when people refer to themselves or others as "content creators" Not filmmakers or artists or writers... "content creators". Like they exist just to produce a continual stream of this amorphous "content" for consumption. Now, perhaps that's all that art/writing, etc ever was. But to just abandon even the pretense is another in a long line of surrenders we've made to commoditization.
- reg_dunlop 4mo ago
  Was there ever a time when any of the classical/fine arts were used as propaganda or promotional material, prior to the medium elevating to loftier aims? Is this history repeating itself? The idea that content creators could be considered artists is one I may have considered before, but only tangentially. What I'm also curious about...is how this commoditization and consumption via "influencers" has altered any individuals attitudes towards blatant manipulation. Free will seemed to be a much more guarded value. Now, the willing surrender of our free will seems to be the norm...
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/

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ThrowawayTestr 4mo ago

I must be using social media wrong because all I see on my timeline are funny pics and niche porn.

KellyCriterion 4mo ago
Are you on the correct site/app?? :-P
- IAmBroom 4mo ago
  Rule 34, bro.

geophph 4mo ago

(Pedantry erupts below)

grvdrm 4mo ago

HN has plenty of social media components. Think a better version is: HN is not an advertising-controlled social media website. That specific version makes most sense to me.

tekla 4mo ago
HN is literally an ad.
- grvdrm 4mo ago
  I don't think of Show HN as quite the same. Nor Ask HN. I know that otherwise there is plenty of "advertising" within posts/comments/etc. Where I think the argument that it's not social falls down is aligned with some of your comments. The feeds, upvotes, downvotes, etc. Let's not forget the spam. Those mechanisms are pervasive across many social platforms, so why are they so different here? Don't think they are.
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    HN is literally an ad for Y Combinator.

Kiro 4mo ago

It's not tiresome. It's spot on. Nothing is as addictive as HN.

throw-the-towel 4mo ago
Wikipedia is.

KellyCriterion 4mo ago

- And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. - Thats right in that sense - but in a sense of doom scrolling, it is for me: Very often Im clicking through dozends auf pages, fortunately I have to activly do a click to get to the next site, so this dampens a little bit :-D

everforward 4mo ago
There’s also an end to the feed. I forget the limit, but at one point I think I hit the maximum number of pages at like 50 (quality drops pretty dramatically, by like page 10 there was almost nothing interesting or notable).

Tangurena2 4mo ago

Social media was first (that I know of) weaponized in 2016 by Cambridge Analytica to manipulate Facebook users to vote for Brexit & Trump. I'm surprised that the article left those totally out. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

hedora 4mo ago
That incident was definitely ahead of its time, but before that, targeted ads for scams were propping the industry up. For instance, Experian used to spend $$$ to funnel people into credit card scams -- one year, they stole our CC#, and I called our top 5 US bank to dispute the charges. The bank fraud department rep said Experian drove most of their case load, to the point where they had a special flow to block just Experian affiliates because physically reissuing stolen cards was too expensive. You can back estimate how many predatory ad dollars that involved. Of course, there was also a long tail of smaller companies that wanted to sell supplements, useless other useless services, etc. Before that, you could pay for placement on all the major search engines except early Google, which basically just broke search. (Google does similar stuff now, in the same way they "don't" sell personal information or read your gmail, but somehow make lots of money off it anyway, and target things only mentioned in private correspondence). LLMs will be next. The only solution is to refuse to pay for access with your attention. That means no copilot, gemini, alexa or siri, since those are all ad supported or adjacent now. ChatGPT and Claude are on borrowed time. I suspect the open weight models will be the last ones to fall.
intended 4mo ago
Social media was weaponized from the days of PHP forums. I remember Palantir shilling sock puppet management technology at a time where most people didn’t even know what a moderator was. AFAIK, Russia’s Internet Research Agency was the first organization to weaponize social media and the internet.

bryanlarsen 4mo ago

> HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The article's main claim is that traditional social media is not social media any more. That Facebook et al are now junk entertainment. So IMO HN hews much closer to the traditional role of social media than Facebook et al do.

eszed 4mo ago
That's what I took away from it, too. Facebook circa 2008 was great: your friends talked what were up to; everyone posted their pictures from that party last night; you didn't see anything from anyone who wasn't at most a second-degree connection. There were problems - people were jerks, and worse, and some people got pulled into chasing clout, and promoted bullshit - but they were human-scale problems, and you could largely scrub your feed from things / people like that. Unfortunately for the entire world, that sort of use wasn't profitable enough.
- Gigachad 4mo ago
  The problem for Facebook is there is a limit to how much your friends would post. You could check Facebook for 15 minutes and then you had seen everything your friends had posted and had to come back tomorrow for more. New Facebook/instagram can trap users in hours of scrolling video in a zombie like state.
Gigachad 4mo ago
HN is more like a forum where strangers discuss ideas. Old school social media was a place you posted life updates to your friends and family. New social media is content creator short form video while the majority of users are entirely passive consumers.

willXare 4mo ago

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addybojangles 4mo ago

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stephenhuey 4mo ago

When a professor at Rice walked us through Don Tapscott's book Growing up Digital in 2001, we had such an optimistic view of the future. Don highlighted how with broadcast media in the 20th century, the viewer had little choice on what to watch. Now that the internet was available to the masses, he explained how much new generations would benefit from what he called interactive media which enabled someone to explore and learn anything of interest instead of being forced to consume whatever was being fed through the television. When we'd say there was "nothing on" we felt bored, and maybe we did endure some manipulation by commercials, but I agree that contemporary social media is far worse. In the 20th century, boredom from channel surfing at least encouraged some to get off the couch and go read a book or shoot some hoops or play a board game with friends. Allow me the stereotype (exaggeration?) for a moment to note that we had the ultimate nerdy kid who wanted to be cool, and all he could think of with gazillions of dollars at his disposal was to make a thing that turned everyone into anti-social nerds by staying glued to their screens instead of interacting IRL with fellow humans. Who would have accepted that fictional plot as believable? https://dontapscott.com/books/growing-digital/ https://dontapscott.com/books/growing-digital/

lfuller 4mo ago

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. This is claimed by users of Reddit regularly as well and I think most people here would consider Reddit to be a typical example of social media.

Gigachad 4mo ago
You could argue back in the day reddit was a forum rather than a social media. But after the new UI and several years of changes, particularly when they started to ignore your subscribed subreddits and just showing whatever in the home feed, it’s now fully social media.

RC_ITR 4mo ago

>And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. The amount of times I've read a very thoughtful article only for the comments to be political drivel (the worst was peak-COVID SF discourse) weakens your argument quite a bit. It's even more foolish to think outside forces aren't using bots/tech to sway the discourse. Just because it's not engineered for the mainstream's dopamine addiction doesn't mean it doesn't do the same thing.

alphazard 4mo ago

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. Whatever you want to call it, HN has followed a similar trend. It's rare to see the authors of small, but interesting/innovative, projects show up in the comments, surprised to see their work on the front page. That used to be common, even the default, if you look far enough back. Now the front page is current events and marketing campaigns. I don't think I've seen a single software project here in the last year that wasn't already extremely popular, or being pushed by a company with a marketing budget. In theory AI should have helped. I know people are still making cool stuff, faster now with AI, but it's harder and harder to find it.

grey-area 4mo ago
> In theory AI should have helped. Why would generative AI help stop enshittification? If anything AI has made low-effort slop far more common on the front page and sometimes it gets voted up because of a snappy headline and few people attempting to read it, particularly if long-form and initially convincing.
- alphazard 4mo ago
  I agree with everything you said. Most open source projects are limited by contributor labor. Generative AI does help with that problem, but it introduces a sea of vibe coded slop as a side effect. Truly a Genie/Jinn.
  - intended 4mo ago
    This was always going to be the case, no genie situation at all. Information sharing networks with humans in it can only track so many things, or spend limited time on consumption. The more stuff on the network, the harder it is for things to be seen. The stuff that gets seen is content that is evolved to gain attention, or is resourced to gain attention. This is as inevitable as sunrise.

Gud 4mo ago

HN is not and never has been “social media”. It’s a threaded discussion forum.

Aurornis 4mo ago

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. I came here after reading the comment section for the "Dopamine Fracking" story right below this one. In that comment section there are arguments that Hacker News isn't social media because it doesn't have social features like friending people you know. The argument is that it's a place to discover cool content and comment on it. Which is precisely the argument being made in this BBC article: That traditional social media is becoming less about communicating with friends and more about discovering content and commenting on it. Which is the exact purpose of sites like Hacker News and Reddit. > "I spend a lot of time scrolling through videos made by content-creators," says Lucie, also 16. "They're more interesting than the posts of people I know." > "What we're seeing is social media splitting in two," says social media consultant Matt Navarra, author of the Geekout Newsletter. "Big platforms like Instagram and TikTok are becoming more about entertainment and discovery. WhatsApp is becoming the place people go to actually be social. EDIT: I had to use Wayback Machine to find this: > 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features > Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero. That's from https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinato... That has been erased from the internet, but it was widely understood that sites like Reddit and HN could were social and had addictive properties for people without strong self control.

post-it 4mo ago
The content here is very different. I can kill maybe an hour a day reading HN, which is a lot, but the feed does end. Most days, I don't want to spend an hour here, because the feed is designed to push popular content to the top, and a lot of it is content I don't care about. Other sites have infinite feeds designed to keep me personally hooked as long as possible.

haunter 4mo ago

> HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word Hard disagree. The upvote/downvote system and the algorithmic front page makes it a social media to me.

jandrese 4mo ago

IMHO both of these problems stem from the same source: Engagement. Anything that attempts to maximize engagement will inevitably optimize for outrage, anger, and disgust. You will end up handing the platform over to trolls and propagandists. Platforms need to optimize instead of quality and sanity, but unfortunately that is expensive will never get as many views and advertiser dollars as cheap outrage content. It's a big reason why our current media landscape is so hellish, the other main reason being the continual takeover of more and more media outlets by billionaire aligned interests.

rockskon 4mo ago

HN has its own share of enticement/manipulation - most recently with regards to AI. Plenty of variants of "people who don't use AI will be left behind" are sprinkled around various threads about AI. It's an attempt to both manipulate via fear as well as sell.

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icepush 4mo ago

This is so different from my personal experience that I feel like one of those kids being told chickens used to be dinosaurs. I have an account on facebook, on which I am pretty active. If I attend some infrequent event (Which I do fairly often) I will take a picture of it and post it there, with a description of what it's about. That's pretty much the extent of what I put on facebook. Sometimes I see similar posts from people in my friends list, or videos about whatever facebook thinks I am interested in this month (Right now it's showing me lots of people taking apart pumps and motors). What sites are you using, and what exactly are they showing you ?

wuliwong 4mo ago
So you infrequently post on FB, that is exactly in line with the article. You didn't mention whether or not the content you see in your feed is from people that you know in real life or not, so I can't evaluate if your experience is inline with the article. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- icepush 4mo ago
  I did say my feed is a mixture of content from people I know, and people I don't. My comment wasn't that long.

da_chicken 4mo ago

Not just television. Also the supermarket checkout aisle magazines. Not just tabloids, although that, too. Also the "glossy" magazines. Vogue, People, Us, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, McCall's, Seventeen, etc. The commercialization of the engines of culture continues.

red-iron-pine 4mo ago

HN is absolutely social media in all senses of the word and meets your definition of cable TV pretty well -- it's a news blog run by a startup incubator as a way to increase discussion and submarine in their concept and products. "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" and that is just as true here as anywhere.

zuzululu 4mo ago
I agree half way. While recent years HN seems to have imported much of Reddit, it still has an anti-establishment undertone and decent moderation to keep it from sprawling
- red-iron-pine 4mo ago
  that's fair. despite the mountains of hype about AI and BTC, HN always kept it real. we'll see if that continues; bots are just as prominent here as anywhere
nunez 4mo ago
Not in the sense that's disucssed in the article. Social media like a forum (which is "old school" social media IMO) instead of like Instagram (short video clips, reactions, designed for max engagement and dopamine hits). Yes, HN is a front for YC. However, HN is still very much about longform submissions and nuanced discussion. There aren't very many places like that anymore, and those that still exist are dying, with some exceptions (mostly car forums, for some reason). (Instagram wasn't always this way! It was originally an alternative to Flickr, but focusing on sharing images and discussion instead of photography. It gradually became the psychological gateway drug that it is now, though even that was a response to threats like Vine and Quibi that unlocked short-form video at scale.)

cautiouscat 4mo ago

I agree but there’s definitely room for nuance. I follow a lot of artists because I genuinely like seeing their work. I follow a lot of miniature painters for their tips and tricks. I follow my close friends to see what they’re up to. I think the folks you’re talking about are influencers. Which I wholeheartedly agree with your take in that case.

ambicapter 4mo ago
That’s just advertising. Yes, mom and pop stores can advertise “just like” the multinational corporations can. Guess who gets the lion’s share of airtime and guess who has armies of men+machines crafting the most convincing messaging.
- cautiouscat 4mo ago
  How is someone showing a 3D render with no products or services to buy from advertising to me? In addition, why does that matter if I enjoy the content? It’s not “just” advertising. Again this is nuanced.

pessimizer 4mo ago

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. What's probably tiresome is trying to come up with a proof that it is not. Your frustration and the insult "pedantry" will not suffice. If you had a real proof, you would simply include it, instead of performing emotion about being so lowered to even have to discuss HN being social media. The idea that people shouldn't argue with you because it might injure or tire you to be argued with is so 2022. If you have something specific to say about the actual actions that are taken in what you call social media (but does not include HN), there's plenty to discuss - in fact the difference which you insult as pedantic is the most important thing to talk about. Why is one mediated talking to people good, and the other mediated talking to people bad? And if we try to make it an argument about something other than vocabulary, or even worse the vague-assed "changes in technology," it might accomplish something. It's insane how this is enough to begin a thread on HN. Vague negative handwaving and insults (nerd-sniping, I guess?). That's not going to hurt whoever you think is doing evil, that's going to help them. "Social Media" isn't a thing. It's a bag of techniques for mediating communication between people who are usually not asking for a mediator. Talking about those specific techniques and their applications is always going to be more useful than arguing about the referent of some term that you have no obligation to sign onto unless you find it useful. But god if you're so tired could you just not participate?

jimbo808 4mo ago

It's worse in many ways but also better in one way, which is that buried in all the propaganda and manipulation is usually the truth somewhere in there. Before, the truth was simply not available.

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bluesounddirect 4mo ago

I completely get the cable tv bit. Grew up without cable just OTA tv and Radio . I remembered how i would feel left out of the cable tv connection / conversations . Then I eventually moved on to living in the city and not really watching TV except simpons reruns and the news hour on pbs for many years . The parallels reveal how we just need to go out to social place outside of our homes . The pool, a restaurant, bar , library, a club a religious place and be involved. But more importantly we all need our own opinions again, and not to be so offended when you disagree.

TulliusCicero 4mo ago

I miss the early days of FB where people just wrote thoughts about what they were feeling or doing. I wish we had something like that where there was no reposting/resharing, and links & photos were allowed but deemphasized in the UI. Also, no like button, that just encourages empty engagement.

snthd 4mo ago

The product is you? https://youtube.com/watch?v=FQbW31Fa4SM https://youtube.com/watch?v=FQbW31Fa4SM

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