7 ms·

Calling this out as the primary reason HN is not social media. Forums existed for years before social media was ever a thing. HN is indistinguishable from a for

• cucumber3732842 3mo ago
  The fact that they intentionally include a rightthing/wrongthink button and keep score is a fundamental difference between modern "social media" and legacy BBSes and forums where there was no score keeping. Perhaps keeping score of rightthink is not enough to make HN social media, but it's certainly enough to not put it in the same bucket as forums and BBSes
  • al_borland 3mo ago
    Having some sort of recommendation algorithm seems to also be a defining feature of modern social media, which is something old school forums didn’t have.
  • aoshifo 3mo ago
    Of course old forums had score keeping, maybe not on upvote but number of posts, but still
• zerobees 3mo ago
  Forums of the early 2000s were almost always sorted by recency, not upvote count. They also typically weren't dominated by vendor press releases and news stories, whereas domains such as anthropic.com, blog.google, openai.com, along with outlets such as techcrunch.com and arstechnica.com, are probably among the most popular URLs of the past year. But I don't think it's a meaningful distinction to begin with. Usenet was an endless time sink to get angry at things that didn't matter and argue with strangers who might not even be real people. It wasn't monetized, but it still made it easy to waste years of your life.
• tekla 3mo ago
  Hell no, the forums of the 2000s were "topic that had the last post gets pushed to the top", and pretty much nothing else. HN has an algorithm that manipulates what you see, and we do not know at all how it works.