Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
bbc.com550 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 14 hours ago
550 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 14 hours ago
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.
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.
One of my in-laws who immigrated from Italy with a big family has a "command center" with a computer he trades stocks on and a few TVs and it drives me nuts when he watches Fox News and they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration" which is exactly what his family did to great success.
YouTube is all over the place. You really can get great stuff but are you always a few clicks from blackpill hell: "men suck", "women suck", "famous consumer brands that have lost their way", "it all sucks", ...
25 years ago, my italian grandmother was the same way. No command center, but still wildly anti-immigration; probably stoked by the news. She immigrated as a child, technically naturalized twice (she was naturalized through her fathers naturalization, but married an italian citizen in Italy and renaturalized through his naturalization... because the citizenship of a married woman was determined by her husband's citizenship back then), but definitely in favor of pulling the ladder up.
"They should follow the rules, like I did"
Never mind the rules were a hell of a lot easier to follow back then. I've seen the paperwork, it wasn't much; if you were from an acceptable country, it was pretty close to show up, get a job and be stable for a year or so, then you can naturalize. Nearly impossible if you came from the wrong country though.
Even 'chain migration' for most relationships takes a lot longer than that, and you have to wait for your visa priority date to come up. If you're from an impacted country, some of the waits are quite long. If you don't have qualified family, and you don't have qualified employment, there's a very small visa allocation for lucky people.
The historic reason attitudes towards immigration changes is because of scale. This [1] page has a nice graph of the foreign born US population. Towards the end of the 19th century it hit 14.8% which led to significant pushback that culminated in various laws and acts against immigration. That's precisely where the paperwork started to form.
Following those acts and laws, immigration declined to a valley of 4.7% foreign born in 1970. Then it began rising again with more permissive/enabling acts playing a significant role in driving such, like IRCA under Reagan. In any case we're now up to 15.8% with no end in sight, and history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...
> history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself
Every time in US history that there's been an influx of immigrants, there were people spouting essentially identical arguments to the ones they're spouting now (stealing jobs, lack of assimilation, etc.), and every time it's turned out to be basically a non-issue in the long run. I've long had the opinion that most of the people vehemently "against illegal immigration" would probably have basically the same opinion if the numbers were identical but everyone followed the processes they claimed to support, and seeing how the current administration is trying to deport refugees of color while expanding the programs for only white South Africans feels like a pretty transparent confirmation of that.
What would you say to somebody who simply feels their quality of life has been lowered (vs. somebody “spouting essentially identical arguments”)?
> and every time it's turned out to be basically a non-issue in the long run
Except for countries like Yugoslavia collapsing altogether. Eventually these subgroups' differences become irreconcilable. "No issues here" if cultural erasure and ethnic conflict are the desired outcomes.
The Talmud documents that Sancheriv's conquest in 722 BCE destroyed the distinct ethnic identities of various nations, including Amalek and the Kutim (Samaritans), through mass deportation and intermixing. If Jewish lore is to be believed, even the Egyptians aren't indigenous as a result of this shuffling of demographics. This mixing is cited as the reason why specific tribal or national origins can no longer be definitively identified in the Jewish people today-- the diaspora diluted them out of existence. Your argument suggests Jewish erasure was a "non-issue in the long run."
Mass migration drives Balkanization and directly destroyed the Jewish identity itself once before. Here you are celebrating similar sociopolitical warfare tactics effected upon us all while trying to convince us it's a humanitarian imperative. It just doesn't sound like a good idea, but what do I know. Berakhot 28a directly implicates open-borders policy, replacement migration, and a financial motive for chaos migration:
> Sennacherib already came and, through his policy of population transfer, scrambled all the nations and settled other nations in place of Ammon. Consequently, the current residents of Ammon and Moab are not ethnic Ammonites and Moabites, as it is stated in reference to Sennacherib: “I have removed the bounds of the peoples, and have robbed their treasures, and have brought down as one mighty the inhabitants” (Isaiah 10:13).
The Great Replacement isn't conspiracy theory; it's Jewish history.
Ironically, Sancheriv fed your same rhetoric to the Jews so that they would self-exile willingly ("You're being pogrommed and exiled to Africa, but here's why that's a good thing"):
> Rabbi Yoḥanan says: For what reason was that wicked person privileged to be named “the great and noble Asenappar”? It was due to the fact that he did not speak [sipper] in disparagement of Eretz Yisrael, as it is stated: “Until I come and take you to a land like your own” (II Kings 18:32), and he did not say that he was taking them to a superior land.
> Rav and Shmuel disagreed with regard to that statement of Sennacherib: One says he was a clever king and one says he was a foolish king. According to the one who says he was a clever king, he said that he is taking them to a land like their own, as he thought: If I say to them: I am taking you to a land that is superior to your land, they will say: You are lying. And as for the one who says he was a foolish king, he explains: If so, if he said that he is not taking them to a superior land, what is his greatness and how would they be convinced to go into exile?
History does indeed plagiarize itself, and is full of liars willing to murder with deception to repeat its outcomes.
> trying to deport refugees of color while expanding the programs for only white South Africans
Removing the whites from Africa returns the continent to its ancestral stakeholders. They do not belong there. Colonization was a mistake. So we are sending everybody home.
Israel has been deporting its African "refugees" since 2021; you're insisting we need more of them. Jews have unique experience of being on the receiving end of weaponized migration. What do they know that you're not telling us?
People aren’t, and will not, have as many kids going forward. We are seeing this in rich countries and poor countries.
Right before the baby boomers are fully retired is a heckuva time America decided it wants to contract its population by prioritizing keeping the working adult out.
Many 1st gen immigrants have the pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you attitude. My grandparents (also Italian) certainly did. Everyone wants to imagine they did it the "right way" and that their struggle is the most unique and deserving one.
Which made it even funnier when I discovered that they never actually legally naturalized.
Many such cases.
I think people are pretty ignorant of what the rules are and what the situation on the ground is (just try shipping homeless people from LA to pick fruit on farms in the central valley and see what happens)
On the other hand the "follow the rules" thing is pretty strong and you cannot fight it and win.
I got pretty mad riding the subway in NYC paying the toll and seeing turnstile jumpers hold the emergency door open to let people in.
There are all these rules you have to follow big and small that you don't agree with that you either follow resentfully or you disobey while taking some real or imagined risk.
To take one stupid example I've been through multiple toilets in one bathroom and haven't found one that flushes reliably. It's easy to blame the regulation in New York State that a toilet has a maximum flush volume and you'd better believe I am thinking about going down to PA to get a toilet and see if I have better luck. We all have these things that we could be resentful about and one thing that keeps it in check is knowing that other people are subject to this too: when we see people who seem to be "cutting the line" it makes our blood boil.
Now you can say it is not what people think, like really the chicken houses that hire 600 illegal immigrants wouldn't want to hire legal workers because then they'd have some protections, and that's all true. But the iron law of political psychology applies and if you want to change attitudes it would be a big help to move immigrant workers out of the shadows or to cut back on rules that make people resentful with little benefit.
Absolutely. It's a very thin line to go from "just pointing out a problem" to "everything is a problem" to "everything is broken" to "nothing I can do will change anything" and then people disengage in the process and politics and everything else becomes the domain of whoever can shout the loudest with volume, rhetoric, or money.
To quote Mon Mothma in Andor:
I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This Chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza. What took place yesterday… what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide! Yes! Genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest? The monster we’ve helped create? The monster who will come for us all soon enough is Emperor Palpatine!
I think the "nothing I can do will change anything" is actually a predominant theme that's emerged over the past decade. I don't know if you've watched any of Adam Curtis' documentaries, but his documentary HyperNormalisation explores this in great detail (most of this documentaries have a similar theme I've found).
Edit: Apologies, I think I mean his documentary: Can't Get You Out of My Head. Essentially it asserts that all revolutions fail, because the people who attempt to overthrow simply become the new guard.
Night Watch (2002), by Terry Pratchett.
> People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
Additional context: The city is being (mis-)ruled by a paranoid dictator, whose brutal secret police don't care too much about if you're innocent. The cynical protagonist is frustrated that some of the resistance is also extremist or at least overly-optimistic about what's going to happen next.
My favorite quote from any novel comes from that book as well;
"Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes."
Adam Curtis docs are wonderful. I've grown so accustomed to when people suggest a doc, its some youtuber that posts a doc once a week and utilizes the youtube documentary style to disguise how poorly executed it is. Adam Curtis is certainly not that, for anyone considering this suggestion.
> they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration" which is exactly what his family did to great success
Where is the contradiction here?
One is people's lived experience: "Hard-working families immigrate to a land of better opportunity and build a life for themselves, integrating as upstanding members of the community."
The other is nativist propaganda: "Hordes of scary 'aliens' are coming to take your jobs and destroy your way of life, bringing their drugs and crime and turning your neighborhood into a trash heap. They might even eat your pets!"
People have difficulty noticing that the second story is supposed to be a description of what they or their ancestors personally lived as the first story; people compartmentalize and sometimes believe the propaganda version even though it directly contradicts their lived experience.
Well they did it and got prosperous by successfully contributing to the economy and improving it for all of us.
In Binghamton there are Turkish immigrants who run Middle Eastern restaurants which our extended family love to go which are so much like the Italian restaurants that Italians still run and I'll see a teenager hanging out there who seems so much like an Italian teenager.
A person seeing that similarity could (and should) have a sense of "these people are going to come here and contribute and pay taxes and grow the economy to help support me" which is what the outcome is most of the time.
I used to only rarely look at Youtube (repairs, cooking, the odd live concert) but since I started looking at it more often (for guitar and piano tutorials), I’ve found its UI to be too distracting. I added the following custom uBlock filters to make it less annoying:
! Remove the "Up next" sidebar (the #secondary container) so that the main content area (#primary) takes up the full width.
youtube.com##ytd-watch-flexy #secondary:remove()
! Ensure the video takes up the full width when playing full screen.
youtube.com###panels-full-bleed-container:remove()I'm probably a heavier user of reddit than most but I recently deleted the reddit app on my phone because it's just too much. I still use the site though, but now I use an iPad with old.reddit to make using it as difficult as possible.
Reddit is fun for a while but there is a strong “lowest common denominator” problem that plagues almost every subreddit.
There's a very strong hive mind there. It takes very little to grassroots a subreddit. Just like at the biking subreddits and tire recommendations. It's almost always the GP 5000 that is recommended. Which, don't get me wrong, it's a great tire. But it isn't always the best, and there are tires out there that beat it. The community has just latched on to the one true tire and that's all you'll ever see recommended.
Most subreddits that do any sort of product recommendation have the same problem. For a while, the pilot metro was the fountain pen de jure, or Stronglifts the default recommendation for weightlifting (and now it's never recommended).
If they hive mind rallies around products like this, it also rallys around other ideas, policies and whatnot. Just look at the politics subreddit and see nonstop "Israel bad" "Chuck Schumer is feckless" or "jews control the funding of the democrats" everywhere. Even where it doesn't make sense. You can have one of those muckraking websites that run an article like "Schumer didn't vote against [insert house bill]" and it gets to the top and the narrative is relentless against schumer, even though he literally can't vote against a house measure since he's in the senate. Is he feckless? Absolutely. Does that mean everything he does or doesn't do is a sign of his fecklessness? Absolutely not.
In the hivemind, there's no room for nuance, it's all "look at that bitch eating crackers"
Reddit is a pretty extreme example, though, where mods are basically subreddit dictators. For whatever reason, Reddit gave enormous amount of censorship and conversation-shaping power to mods, to the point where a handful of like-minded mods can enforce in great detail what is allowed to be discussed and what isn't.
Pretty sure if you unmasked the subreddit mods, the reason for the "circling around a particular brand recommendation" observation would become clear.
> For whatever reason, Reddit gave enormous amount of censorship and conversation-shaping power to mods
It's been "bad" since the 2010s, but censorship went into overdrive once OpenAI struck a deal with Reddit a few years ago (2021?). The mods do the dirty work of aggressively sanitizing all future training data for "safety" so the entire site is curated to align with ChatGPT now.
I'm actually pretty thankful that the GP 5000 is a solid consensus recommendation for general road racing. I see some others being mentioned though, I think Pirelli Zeros?
Contrast that with gravel tires, where there is zero consensus. The conditions vary and the sport is evolving quite a bit over time as well, so it's understandable. But it's a huge time suck to try and puzzle out a near-optimal decision. I wish there was a "good-enough" consensus.
What you are describing is not hivemind, but rather paid participants. Companies pay for these "grassroots" recommendations, and Iran pays for those Jews posts.
It used to be more subtle with real people paid to post, but AI has made the quantity of it skyrocket, to the point where you can start to notice it, if you pay attention.
For example you'll see some comment about Jews, and very rapidly a bunch of upvotes. And you'll see a very similar comment elsewhere, with the same upvote pattern.
I've cut back quite a bit my participation in these types of sites once I realized just how many of the "people" I'm talking to are actually bots.
This talks about a company doing it: https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/bots-targeting-the-r-ga...
This talks about Iran doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz8whKktkQg
I don't know. I don't think it takes too many paid participants to sway a large group of non-paid participants who perpetuate the paid position.
Especially for product reviews, at the end of the day, the best product is the one you bought since most of them work well enough. I buy a new tire for my bike and buy the one reddit recommended and the next ride, buoyed by excitement for the new tire, go out and ride 1-2 mph faster than before, now all of a sudden I'm a convert. It's the best tire ever and I recommend it to all my friends.
Nevermind I don't have anything to compare it too.
This is super common in astrophotography community. You ask people what's the best camera or best mount and because they're so expensive most people only have had one, or maybe two and so everyone comes along to recommend their particular item because clearly it's better than the rest, when in fact, it's all about equal but nobody has compared. Part of that makes sense too, right? I buy a mount for my telescope from Software Bisque that's $14k and I decide to add another pier to my backyard observatory, $14k is a lot to gamble on and I know I'm happy with the mount I currently have, I'm just going to buy it again. I never tried iOptron's $7k alternative because if I hated it, I've wasted $7k
>see nonstop "Israel bad" "Chuck Schumer is feckless" or "jews control
9 times out of 10 somebody who perceives a huge amount of anti Semitism online wrapped up in criticism of israel will absolutely categorically refuse to condemn the genocide.
When they refuse, this is how you can tell that it is simply projection and disguised islamophobia.
Israel is also pretty open about funding bots to spread that kind of message both offline and online.
Exactly right. It's a good place to gather information, but it's not a good place for discussion or for community. It's very useful; but it's not a place to spend time.
I follow dozens of subs through RSS and that’s pretty good. You just need a reader which has features to filter out certain users and words (like Newsblur what I use)
Yep, if you haven't lost the will to put a bit of curation work upfront, RSS never stopped being the right answer. Substack has been a pretty good addition to the landscape, bringing lots of people into blogging (without calling it that). But for the skimming/reading interface, RSS beats the app.
> 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.
Don Henley wrote a song about that kind of news:
"We got the bubble headed bleached blonde
Comes on at five
She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye
It's interesting when people die
Give us dirty laundry"
Great song.
And long before that, Yellow Journalism:
Journalism historian Frank Luther Mott used five characteristics to identify yellow journalism:
1. scare headlines in huge print, often sensationalizing minor news
2. lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings
3. use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts
4. emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually with superficial articles and comics
5. dramatic sympathy with the "underdog" against the system.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism>.
The same or highly similar tactics apply equally in the 2020s as they did in the 1880s (and before).
What many people don't realise: the "prestigious" journalistic prize, the Pulizter, is named for one of the most infamous low-quality yellow journalism publishers, Joseph Pulitzer. This is an early example of successful greenwashing of a reputation.
Upvoted your comment but my inner pedant can’t help but point out that’s more an example of whitewashing rather than greenwashing (which itself is a derivative of whitewashing).
In defense of 'How money works' I don't think there's much in the way of positive anything to cover for his format/field, not for current times in particular
His most famous videos are on the topic of bullshit jobs, the movie Wolf of wallstreet, various X is collapsing and a Money Laundering Explanations
There's lots of positive things to cover. He made a video 2 weeks ago about tourism, his first ever as far as I can tell, and there's plenty of interesting things a general Youtube audience could learn about how money flows around in the context of tourism. But he chose to instead talk about "The End Of Budget Tourism", believing (perhaps accurately!) that a negative framing would help get people to click on his video.
YouTube is ruthless in promoting clickbait headlines and thumbnails where it's someone's face with a shocked expression and an attention grabbing byline. You don't play by their rules the algorithm will bury you.
Content creators are a slave to the algorithm. It's so easy for Google to just not show put your video on the feed, even your subscribers. That's why every video looks the same now, if you refuse to play you don't get views.
I know this works on YouTube Premium, but I have my watch history turned off and use the desktop app with UnTrap for YouTube so that it turns off all of the distracting nonsense I don't use (Shorts and recommendations)
A bit of a tangent, but Google is doing everything they can to stash more "recommendations" everywhere. Even now, you need a browser filter to keep them out of the subscriptions view.
I do find it amusing how on the internet the X and Y can be governments or corporations, or the hosted platform itself. Seems like something a competent "we control everything" organization should be able to prevent. But as long as you do nothing but come back for another helping of rage, I guess they're fine with it.
Cuz the actual nuanced reality is that it’s structural. (Most) corporations don’t want to control the world but they do have their own self-interests, but because there are so many corporations there’s always some corporation controlling some facet.
For another example of a structural problem, California has been trying to add housing for the past few years but it has been one piecemeal solution after another. People who own homes don’t want their lives to change, cities like how they are laid out already, parking requirements exist to prevent developers from skimping at the time, environmental reviews are meant to protect the environment… at no point was anyone thinking “I want a housing problem that leads to job flight and homelessness” — everyone is just solving their own problem at the time but together it creates a major structural obstacle.
The people at YouTube don’t actually care about controlling the narrative. They just want to make money while removing problematic content, but they’re not exactly sure what problematic content is and Google tends to invest in algorithms more than support, but the end result is channels get randomly removed sometimes.
The world’s problems are hard because not because people are generally malicious, but because everyone is just doing their own thing. That’s why the only fixes are structural, but structural solutions are really hard.
I've noticed that I watch much less funny shit and much more "you should be afraid" but I really don't know how to change this.
Is it not also possible that you should be, at least figuratively speaking? I think it's fairly obvious that not only are we at an inflection point in society, but we're at numerous inflection points happening all simultaneously - geopolitics, economics, tech/social media/"AI", fertility/sustainability, and much more. We're even at presumably happy inflection points like with progress into space.
But the point of this is that in a relatively short period of time, the world is going to look far different than the overwhelming majority might ever expect. This is because most expect the status quo, in some form, to indefinitely persist, yet of course it never does. And it seems we're on the cusp of major shifts across many different domains, all at once.
anxiety is what creates uninformed consumerism, which drives the capitalism
News are for news worthy things - which are things that deviate from everyday life. Wars, disasters, crime, in short things of concern. As well as political struggles, economic struggles, and any kind of conflict.
So all is well in that aspect. That's how news have always been, since the first pyres were constructed to light fires to alert neighbouring communities of enemies arriving.
But the sickening aspect of cable news is the way the presenters talk. The voice they use to speak to the watcher is pure venom. It's an extremely angry and condescending voice, and the TV watcher is made to feel inferior to the broadcasters and therefore give attention to the "very important" things they are talking about. Weak minds are conditioned to feel respect and reverence to those who treat them with despise, and unfortunately also to feel the opposite to people who they believe themselves superior to.
It's completely deliberate, to make people addicted to it.
Consider if a well dressed person came to your house and started talking in the same voice as the TV anchors do. You would instantly think it was a dangerous psychopath on the loose, and try to find a weapon swiftly to ward them off. If somebody at a barbecue started talking like the TV anchors, you'd think they were on drugs and tell them to leave. People would call the police.
The next time you catch a TV news anchor, picture them being with you in your living room instead of in the TV studio. You will instantly conclude that the person is mentally and spiritually unwell to talk and act like that. You can practically smell the reptilian from them. Do the same thing with politicians and other leaders too. Many of them say things that on paper seem nice, but with a demeanour that you wonder when they're going to break out into "Who is the boss of you!? I am the boss of you!?"[1]
And I don't think they can see it in themselves or smell it on themselves, like everybody else with a mind can.
> The next time you catch a TV news anchor, picture them being with you in your living room instead of in the TV studio. You will instantly conclude that the person is mentally and spiritually unwell to talk and act like that.
They're two different scenarios so it's not exactly a surprise they sound different. Same goes for anyone giving a public speech, their cadence and tone would sound bizarre if they were just say in a room with you.
> The voice they use to speak to the watcher is pure venom. It's an extremely angry and condescending voice, and the TV watcher is made to feel inferior to the broadcasters and therefore give attention to the "very important" things they are talking about.
I can't say I identify with that at all. I do not hear "pure venom" when I listen to a newscaster. They're usually either trying too hard to be serious or trying too hard to be lighthearted and chummy. But neither is venomous.
IMO the biggest problem with cable news is that it runs constantly. News doesn't. So they have to fill endless dead time with hyperbole. One newscast in the evening ought to be enough for anyone, really.
Some are absolutely better than others when it comes to this. But I was shocked and instantly repulsed when hearing and seeing CNN at an airport after having been away from televisions for a few months.
> Same goes for anyone giving a public speech, their cadence and tone would sound bizarre if they were just say in a room with you.
Then imagine these newscasters giving a public speech in that same way. You'd think you had stepped into the quarterly meeting of psychotics planning a spree.
EDIT:
And most importantly in my living room example: That's where the TV is. If you wouldn't invite a person in the flesh and blood to your living room to behave like this, why would you invite them through your TV?
What about true crime and murder series on Netflix? Who would want to spend their evenings with a flesh and blood person in their bedroom who would go on into gory details for hours about murders and abductions? But still people invite these reptilians to their bedrooms through the TV.
> But still people invite these reptilians to their bedrooms through the TV.
You recognize that you're the outlier here... has it occurred to you that maybe your reaction is the unusual one, not everyone else's? There's literally a podcast called My Favorite Murder that has millions of subscribers. A lot of people go to live shows for it. They literally do invite people in flesh and blood to sit in front of them and talk about murders. It's not necessarily my kind of thing either but there's no doubt it's popular.
> has it occurred to you that maybe your reaction is the unusual one
I am very well aware of that, what would make you think otherwise?
> There's literally a podcast called My Favorite Murder that has millions of subscribers.
Millions of people are subscribed to meth or fentanyl as well, and a lot of other things.
I have no doubt that murder podcasts are popular, and that there are people who are so far gone that they would go to a live show. Something being popular doesn't mean that it is good for you.
If a person close to you had been the victim of a brutal murder, how would you feel that people took great pleasure in that kind of thing, calling it "their favorite murder"? It's dehumanizing.
I used to fall asleep to Forensic Files every night. Something about the host's voice on low volume puts me right to sleep.
The basic problem of CNN is that a person who tunes in at 5:30 pm has to get basically the same story as someone who tunes in at 7:30 pm so they have to repeat the same "news" over and over again. You could have a magazine format with lots of little documentaries about little different things that happen all over the world and you would be better "informed" in the sense of learning something but you wouldn't have as much shared experience with other viewers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bagdikian
is most famous for his book The Media Monopoly but his obscure 1971 book The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media was highly predictive of what news on the web was going to look like because he had worked for the RAND corporation and tried to sell a very unprogressive (in terms of business) media interest on the idea of online personalized news and they didn't want to make the investment.
That book has some of the most damning indictments of the concept of "news" from a McLuhanite perspective that ever been put to writing, most of all a description of how the editor of a small-town newspaper has about 6 seconds to look at a newswire story and decide if he wants to run it. It's a fundamental act of violence against the framework of reality to throw out 99.999% of it and the kind of "bias" that people get stuck on where people think we need an equal balance of stories that infuriate right-wingers and infuriate left-wingers.
Try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwgJgTL5JmE
I can say circa 1990 people in my pod noticed this phenomenon that "ruling class" people who get interviewed on TV as well as many TV performers (new anchors!) seem to show a kind of asymmetry of facial expression that you don't see so much in ordinary people.
Today we might blame the botox but it's widely thought that this is a sign of emotional suppression
https://www.jnforensics.com/post/chirality-a-look-at-emotion...
Though as much as we wish we could be observant and understand people like Cal Lightman in Lie to Me signs of deception are never completely reliable.
> But the sickening aspect of cable news is the way the presenters talk.
"Só para as pessoas perceberem lá em casa" is the standard phrase TV pundits use back in $home_country. Translates to something like "just so that you there sitting at home can understand". It's incredibly condescending, truly the gall of these mfs with zero credentials and maximal confidence, speaking assertively about every single topic always with the tone that implies everybody else is a moron.
I haven't watched actual TV for many years so this passes me by except on occasion, but when I see that there are people that watch hours of this garbage every day, part in the TV and part regurgitated on social media... By god it explains many things rotten with the world.
"one of them always has a 24 hour news going "
Why didn't you say which one? I bet it is Fox.
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.
While I'm not American, calling bbc centrist in 2026 is just objectively false. It was centrist in 2000s, but it hasn't been in at least a decade.
Whose interests does it serve now? That is the main thing to understand of you are to get anything out of news.
FWIW there's a new Director-general: Matt Brittin, whose CV includes Cambridge rowing team, MBA from LBS, McKinsey, Trinity Mirror (owner of The Daily Mirror) and 18 years at Google.
He was the Google boss who said in 2016 that he doesn't know his own salary.
Presumably he wants what's best for all of us.
Everyone can agree BBC has an agenda. But it usually looks like no one can agree what that agenda actually is.
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.
Because the BBC now has to justify its licence fee to the government, so they need engagement metrics and all the rest like what proportion of X demographic they're reaching.
Back in the day, both the BBC and universities were funded by the government without the stereotype of a fresh MBA graduate in charge. Back in the day before MOOCs, the BBC produced programmes for the Open University because that was the way to get video content out to the nation.
> puff pieces about the royals
have been on the front page of the tabloids since way before the internet.
> have been on the front page of the tabloids since way before the internet.
Yeah but not the BBC. There used to a be a line. :(
It matters very very much. Fox News is much much worse than most news channels. It was created specifically as GOP propaganda.
Remember when Fox was sued by the voting machine company for libel (or slander, can't remember which), after Fox supported and broadcast claims that the machines were rigged against Trump in 2020, and Fox argued that nobody should take what they say seriously, because they're merely entertainment.
Unfortunately, pointing this out is not fun. In general, everyone assumes that there is little actual difference between CNN and any Murdoch enterprise. The difficulty in disabusing this position in a few short sentences, is one of the reasons there is such a chasm in American politics.
I had a relative for which it was CNN. We even share the same political views, but watching that stuff or having it on in the background literally from 8 am until midnight is tiring.
when in a hotel on vacations we sometimes have a television and hence bbc or cnn... i used to nickname cnn "the fire squad": whatever the topic they're just shouting and hyperventilating... it is tiring indeed
It's actually CNN, but they flip to local news often too to hear about all the car wrecks and local murders and robberies and other things to make them afraid.
Fox and CNN are both bad, but different flavors of bad.
Fox is bad in a way far more fundamental than CNN. It was created specifically to lie to people.
HN is social media. Social media is a spectrum.
You can imagine HN like a documentary channel compared to Facebook’s reality TV, but even “documentaries” can be dopamine sinks that aren’t actually informative (or accurate).
(But personally, I see lots of short and pure opinion posts here, documentaries are long and at least pretend to contain facts; so I’d hesitate to compare it to a documentary channel even with the caveat.)
I've never appreciated the low-effort handwaves of claiming that HN, old-school Internet forums, USENET, etc. are "social media", simply because they aren't. HN's primary medium is text, often headlined by a link to some other site. That isn't social media. HN makes it quite difficult (technically impossible, but you can link out) to embed media such as videos and pictures, which makes it fundamentally different than "social media".
Many other Internet forums are similar--they might technically have the capability, but the prevailing culture might be that people rarely do it.
Adding to this is that HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't get attention. That makes it fundamentally different from other social media platforms today.
I'm going to guess you're young enough that you don't remember when HN first appeared?
For anyone that was an adult in the "web 2.0" days it's hard not to see HN as "social media". The first wave of social media sites where defined by community news aggregators that allowed commenting and, most important, up voting of comments and submissions. Digg, Reddit, HN, del.icio.us (though it lacked formal 'up voting') were all part of this first wave of social media.
The absolute key differentiator between HN and an old school internet forums, that absolutely makes it "social media", is that the community votes on your opinion and users have some way to score against each other. This is precisely the mechanism that is at the root of all problems in social media: you get a measurable reward for your content that pressures you towards saying things and sharing content that increases that reward.
Perhaps one of the best decisions HN ever made, which fights this somewhat, is removing the upvote count from being visible to other members of the community (this was not the case in the early days of HN). But for anyone that saw the rise of "social media" it's hard to imagine HN not fitting that description.
I'm very confused by this comment. The era you're talking about is also the era that Facebook was released and it didn't have a voting system, not even likes/reactions. But that's when the term "social networking" really took off, and it definitely referred to Facebook and not Digg or Reddit or Slashdot, to name another that has a comment voting system.
"Social media" as a term comes even later, to capture Twitter and the social features of YouTube and other stuff like that. But it's all sites where most users are people using real names and real faces, and users generally produce content themselves and follow each other's content.
There's clearly a cluster there and HN/Slashdot/Reddit/Digg are clearly outside it. An umbrella that covers both HN and Facebook is almost meaningless; it's "all websites with user-generated OR user-supplemented content."
There were many attempts at this time to figure out how to scale forums. The bottleneck on forums and chatrooms was always human moderation. But a forum could only get so many mods and mods eventually burned out because moderation just really sucks. Moreover quality between forums was quite variable. One forum on Beets might be good, but the forums on Fantasy novels was run terribly and full of flamewars. Having a large social site of good quality would be a lot easier to manage than 30 different sites of varying quality.
Gaia Online was famously a large forum with a huge moderation staff, and the sheer amount of effort that went to running Gaia Online was incredible, and despite that it was popularly thought of as being a pretty low quality forum.
Reddit tried the upvote and downvote. HN tried upvotes only. 4chan tried full anonymity (rather than the pseudonymity of forums/usenet.) Facebook tried real names. Tumblr had the reblog (which became quote tweets when Twitter took the feature and is widely thought of now as a fairly controversial feature due to toxicity it can produce.) Twitter tried hashtags for discovery. It was a period of experimenting with how to build social spaces.
> I'm going to guess you're young enough that you don't remember when HN first appeared?
FWIW this site has an older demographic and I doubt that's the reason. More likely most people weren't aware of HN until recently. It only started populating in Google search results recently. My guess is most people these days stumble upon HN by seeing a search result, or a Reddit or Twitter comment mentioning HN. A lot of people only got exposed through social media with things like Facebook and Twitter and never socialized on the internet before that.
Agree with you on everything else. It was obvious at the time that HN was part of a wave of social media along with Reddit, 4chan, Digg, Kuro5hin, etc. At that time moderation was seen as a crucial bottleneck on scaling a social site and upvotes were meant to be an innovation that helped scale these sites bigger than the forums and Usenet lists of yore. Turns out that the true revolution in scale didn't come until things like Facebook and Twitter.
HN has comments which are social media. I don’t get why people care, because social media isn’t intrinsically bad; I always say “mainstream social media” or “toxic social media” to clarify what I’m referring to.
> HN makes it quite difficult (technically impossible, but you can link out) to embed media such as videos and pictures, which makes it fundamentally different than "social media".
What’s the difference? Submissions usually include at least one picture, sometimes videos or interactive content.
> HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't get attention.
I’m sorry, but this isn’t true. HN has less AI than say Reddit, and many users try to combat, but I still frequently see top-voted (obvious) AI-generated articles and less frequently comments.
When something has lots of em-dashes and other https://tropes.fyi, I recommend checking on Pangram.
Comment threads are not “social media”, no matter how badly anyone wants to redefine that they are. They date back to the 1970s on USENET and mailing lists.
Why do people argue so hard on semantics? Its social media in some ways and its not in others
That might imply USENET and mailing lists to be forms or primitive forms of social media.
>HN has comments which are social media. I don’t get why people care
how can they participate in the daily "social media bad" two minute hate sessions demanding regulations and bans if they acknowledge that things they like are also "social media"?
hence the mental gymnastics.
The HN comments section certainly feels increasingly hostile, manipulative, manipulated, and jokey. It use to be a reprieve, but it’s feeling more and more like every other comment section online. To me anyways.
You don't see pictures and videos directly on the site. It's text links and text comments and discussions. In the minimal sense of the word, even printed text is media, so it's technically true that HN is social media, but I think it's more like a news aggregator and discussion forum.
How does being text only make it not social media?
Good explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445343
Because the people who think HN is social media and avoid social media aren't going to see this and respond. It's a selection bias.
see IMO it isn't. HN is an online community. Same as forums, and BBSs were. I don't think they were social media really - they're online spaces that form around a shared interest, where Facebook etc were originally online spaces that augmented a real world community.
But we're a long way from that now.
> HN is an online community. Same as forums, and BBSs were.
That is the very definition of social media.
"Social media I like" vs. "Social media I don't like" isn't valid categorization.
if you think social media just means any space online with multiple people in it, then I guess we just disagree on what social media is.
Is the linux kernel mailing list social media? was usenet?
> if you think
What do you think social media is? What are the clear criteria that make something social media, or make it not social media?
If you know HN is not social media that you have a clear demarcation of what is.
Not that user but I don't think this is as difficult as you're making it out to be?
On Reddit, Instagram, Tiktok et al I can create a community on that platform. I can get find other people into Booktok, I can join the Rowing subreddit, I can get into Knittinggram or whatever. Posters expect roughly their micro-community to see their posts, users expect to see their micro-community's posts.
On hacker news I see the same community everyone else does. If HN was a vBulletin forum with threads posted for links it would function almost 1:1 the same, I guess all you'd need to change is a modification for making threads bump on vote behaviour instead of latest-post.
TL;DR. If you ask me, the essence of social media today is the algorithm and the "social curation". Is what I see dictated by some behind the scenes algorithm and by the mob (votes, views, engagement, flags, clicks)? It's social media.
But fair enough. Don't forums have subforums for different interests, topics and specific discussions and sub-communities? They have the option to follow other members or topics in a customized consumption experience. In my personal experience on large and small forums, including those I administered or moderated, most users lived their entire life in specific subforums. The user that only posted in the CPU subforum, or the Nikon subforum. The user who created the "photos of flowers" or "case modding" topic and only hung around there with kindred souls in their micro-community. Forums were really reddit at a smaller scale.
> I guess all you'd need to change is a modification for making threads bump on vote behaviour instead of latest-post.
This is downplaying the weight the hidden algorithm has on what you see on HN. Much like every other social media site and very much unlike classic forums, submissions and comments here live and die at the hand of an algorithm that decides whether today you get to read about the Israel/Gaza conflict, about Democrats/Republicans. This algorithm is driven on one hand by the social aspect (people deciding what's media and what isn't, hence the "social"), on the other hand by some obscure engagement rules that none of us can see or define.
I don't make it "seem" more complicated, it "is" more complicated because experts don't fully agree on exactly what social media is. Everyone tries to use their experience, preference, and common sense and these all vary.
P.S. The current top comment isn’t there because it’s the most recent, the only objectively correct one, or a mod pinned it. It’s there because the algorithm driven by social engagement decided it’s the media I should see first.
You're equating subreddits to forums but on forums people recognised other posters and the average subreddit poster will never read the same username twice, if they even notice they're there.
I see the argument you're making, but it's not convincing. These just aren't similar types of social engagement.
> The current top comment isn’t there because it’s the most recent, the only objectively correct one, or a mod pinned it. It’s there because the algorithm driven by social engagement decided it’s the media I should see first.
When people neglect to vote that they like the comment you posted, or they vote that they didn't like the thing you posted, this is algorithm driven by social engagement.
When the forum software which sorts by newest-posted-first bumps your thread off the front page because no one cared enough to reply that was also an algorithm driven by social engagement.
It seems a lot to me like the "hidden algorithm" part is the same? It is still the users indicating more/no more in the end.
I said so above. I think originally they were "online spaces that augmented a real world community". Even twitter, you mostly started by following people you knew or had heard of.
I get that this isn't at all where we are any more. And y'know, everyone's gonna use terms to mean whatever they want. I'm fine with that. I guess I just think its pointless if "social media" means "anything online where people can write messages"
>What are the clear criteria that make something social media
I have no idea why people are making some mysterious deep question out of this, wikipedia quite literally offers a definition[1]. Web 2.0 based platforms, user generated content, social networking including social mechanisms such as followers, groups and lists.
This doesn't apply to HN. You could randomly assign everyone a new name tomorrow and it wouldn't matter. Identity is virtually irrelevant here, there are no mechanisms to connect users to each other, there are no networks of people, users do not generate their own content and there is a criterion that what is discussed is of of public, not merely social or personal interest.
If some crash wiped out all HN users tomorrow and we'd all start over at zero almost nothing would change. If that happend on social media, like Instagram, the site would be dead. That's the social part.
> This doesn't apply to HN. You could randomly assign everyone a new name tomorrow and it wouldn't matter. Identity is virtually irrelevant here
This is wildly untrue. I follow specific people here and I recognize names all the time. It would be super confusing if some of the people I'm interested in hearing from completely different names. And comments are content. I read old threads all the time. If that all went away, a huge part of how I use this site would be gone.
That is not what they said. Strawman fallacy, and you still refuse to define the term.
Well, it's A definition, which is more than the opposing side has yet to offer.
I knew someone who described everything he didn't like in politics as "socialism". He literally couldn't define "socialism" when pressed; it was always a circular reference to the current irritant.
> HN is social media
I haven't posted any personal pics, or stories about things that I've done in my life or am currently doing, so how can it be social in the same way that social media is? To me, there's a clear distinction between a news aggregator and discussion forum like HN, and a social media site. Sure, I can post something that I'm working on or a blog post that I've written, but it's still framed as news to be discussed, not a social interaction.
HN is public forum (one of the last), it's a bit different thing
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 forum in the early 2000s.
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.
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.
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
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.
Reddit is a forum, is it not social media?
This comes up often, particularly on Reddit, and I don't think we're doing us any favors by counting it as social media. It has a few substantial differences to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, et al:
- The focus isn't on connecting. It has a "friends" feature (I believe?), but the social graph is extremely weak.
- You are not expected to use your real name. On the contrary, it comes off as weird unless you're a celebrity.
- There is no algorithm maximizing engagement, or at least not a hyper personalized algorithm that analyzes your scrolling speed and every sensor under the sun feeding into a machine learning system designed by professional psychologists to keep you hooked.
- Individuality isn't as encouraged. The user name is small, and there are no avatars, or at least used to be (I don't use the new interface very much). The focus is on the content instead.
I suppose you can find a definition of "social media" that includes Reddit, and surely the differences are fluid, especially since we can recognize some efforts by Reddit to become more like the real social media sites, but I vote for putting it in a different category for the sake of discussion.
Reddit absolutely has algorithmic feeds since it ipo'ed (maybe earlier but I used third party apps so I wasn't subjected to them). 90% of my home page is bullshit I didn't ask for.
IMO, the old reddit UI wasn't, but the new one is, since they started the algo home page and showing stuff outside of your subreddits.
Forums came before social media. It's a forum.
Forums don’t have algorithmic front page and upvote/downvote system
You can’t bump a thread to the top of HN so everyone sees it
No, people just keep reposting the same shit over and over instead. But the end effect is very similar, dang even links to old posts almost every time.
by this standard, isn't a public bulletin board even included in the term "social media"?
Social media started in the early 1500s if we squint with this logic.
Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses were the OG forum post that went viral, and required a printing press.
> 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.
Why is nobody here defining social media, put down the clear criteria? "I say this, I am tired of people saying that" isn't productive if everyone has their own interpretation of what's being discussed.
Social media is any website whose purpose is socialization i.e. “small-talk” style discussion, with many (50+) members.
If it’s a larger site that contains socialization, like blog comments, the blog itself may not be social media but the comments can be. I define TikTok, Twitch, and part of YouTube as social media because the videos themselves are casual and therefore quality as small-talk (if you only visit YouTube for large videos or videos without commentary, you’re not visiting the social media part).
A 1-on-1 or small group chat isn’t social media, but a large group chat, Discord, or other invite-only platform is. Because when these get large enough, they have the parasocialization, shock, and constant activity of open social medias (even some self-promotion, but it’s more authentic and IMO not an issue).
Some people argue text doesn’t count because it’s not “media”, but I don’t think it matters, because in practice people share media on text forums and I don’t think there’s much difference anyways (e.g. name dropping a movie, is that sharing media?).
I define Stack Exchange as not social media, because it actively strongly discourages socialization. Video game lobbies are social media iff users heavily socialize in the chat (the clans in Warcraft, Eve, and Clash of Clans may qualify; large Minecraft server chats may quality).
Ultimately, I define social media based on parasocialization, with tendency to promote and consistently provide high-dopamine text and other media. Someone else can define it as “a parasocial dopamine sink with notifications and ‘friends’” like Twitter, or “a parasocial dopamine sink that encourages your real name” like Facebook”. I include sites like HN because I think, while they’re significantly better, they’re still “social” in a way regular communication isn’t, and can still have most of the negative effects (you can engage positively with HN, but you can engage positively even with TikTok and Facebook, if you use it selectively productively).
In my case, I don't think most people who claim HN is social media are making a serious argument. They are taking two different things which have a few points of inter-comparison and using that as a basis to claim those two things are actually equivalent. This is done as a retort (eg, "you say you hate social media, but you're on social media _right now_") rather than in service of a larger argument.
I'm making it as a very serious argument.
HN is social, it has an algorithmic feed, people upvote and downvote your content, hell it has a social credit score. The idea that HN somehow isn't "social media" is hard to take serious. This is Reddit for a niche audience.
The main difference is that HN has a small and relatively high quality community, plus the traffic is low enough that it gets a fair amount of manual moderation. It's still social media and if there were enough people here, we'd eventually read stories of kids who offed themselves over downvotes. But we're thousands, not billions, so the law of large numbers doesn't apply.
If your FB feed or Youtube feed is garbage, spend some time curating it. HN is mostly curated for you, which appears to be creating unrealistic expectations of the broader world.
I agree that HN is "social media", but I'm starting to wonder if Facebook/Twitter/TikTok/Reddit/YouTube aren't "social media", but instead a new category of media tangentially related as OP posted to cable news. Something like "attention media" where your attention is the point of it.
HN, on the other hand, your attention matters less. They aren't paying for this platform using our "attention" necessarily. I'm sure it is a way to curate an audience of tech-enthusiasts where they can exploit our knowledge and push their investments in front of our eyes.
I like HN for that reason, I don't feel like I'm the product as much as with other attention-seeking platforms.
I suspect a big part of the reason you feel this way is that you don't see advertising on HN. Because HN itself is one gigantic advertisement.
That isn't true, because I don't see ads on YouTube either, but I know their algorithms keep leading me to staying on it as much as possible.
HN doesn't feel the need to keep my attention 24/7.
Genuine question - how many times a day do you load HN? Is it already getting enormous amounts of your attention?