We should not pretend that message boards are not subject to many of the same pitfalls as more conventional social media. At the same time, we should not be so overbroad as to lump message boards and social media into the same category.
On a message board, 1) I don't have a profile that's rich with personal information, 2) I don't have a dedicated wall for my musings, 3) I don't have an individually-curated timeline, and 4) I don't have first-class social connections embedded in the platform.
Point 1 means that there is much less ability to identify me for the purposes of advertising, which avoids much of the perverse incentive that comes with monetizing social media users.
Point 2 means that I have much less personal attachment to this place as an outlet for creative self-expression, which helps to defuse both a sense of toxic entitlement that I might feel on behalf of the platform providers, as well as the sunk-cost fallacy that might keep me active here even if I no longer experienced pleasure from being here.
Point 3 keeps filter bubbles from fractally proliferating; there is still one bubble, but it's the bubble that everyone else on the platform inhabits.
Point 4 provides a mixture of all of the above benefits.
Again, this isn't to say that message boards are perfect or that social media must be inherently bad, but IMO the differences are important.
> we should not be so overbroad as to lump message boards and social media into the same category
The details you list seem incidental to the social media of today. Reddit fits much of what you say but most people would classify Reddit as clearly social media even though Reddit is closer to HN than FB by this divvying of conceptual boundaries. Perhaps the social media of tomorrow involves no wall and meetings in Oculus land. Then we would be talking about how social media is psychologically or socially problematic because of 3D immersion.
IMO the easiest bright line between social media and "something else" media is that social media is populated with content by amateurs or indie producers. If FB became 100% business then it would lose its credentials as "social" media and simply become "traditional" media, notwithstanding any timeline, wall, bubble or heuristic curation. If YouTube became all professionals then it would just become HBO, regardless of whether there are subscriptions, notifications, or channels.
In recent history Reddit has added things like profiles and walls in an attempt to pivot towards conventional social media, which serves to illustrate the difference. I'm not saying the line is perfectly clear, but I am saying that using "social media" to encompass both Facebook and HN dilutes the phrase beyond the point of meaning. Different platforms have different advantages and disadvantages, and after a certain point labels cease to have descriptive power if they get applied overbroadly. We should focus on precise features of each platform rather than get bogged down in the usual "is social media bad" -> "is this platform social media" -> "is this platform bad by the transitive property".
As for the "indie producer" aspect, that's certainly one useful property to consider, but I don't think it's sufficient since pre-internet we had things like 'zine culture which were the bastion of indies, and I would find it a stretch to call zines a form of social media, rather than just indie media.
HN is a specialty forum. Facebook in some cases is where everyday life is negotiated. In Iceland, for instance, all the unofficial rent/"garage sale" sort of economy lives on Facebook as far as I'm aware. It's not quite WeChat levels (you could still rent through official channels and buy stuff from retailers instead of other individuals), but it's uncomfortably close.
Like HN bans, Facebook/Google bans wouldn't really be too much of a problem if they weren't _the_ platform in their respective domains. As much as I advocate for alternative platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube, them being a viable alternative is a future I hope to see, not the present reality.
HN is like a party in a big room, where there are clusters of people having conversations. People mingle between the groups, dipping into and out of the conversations. There are no "connections" between people, and the site (thank God) doesn't "suggest" or promote anything to you based on some algorithmic analysis of your past expressions.
So long as the site acts only as the big room in which the party happens, it's benign. Once the room becomes an active participant and manipulator it becomes what is now a modern "social networking" site, and should be regarded as poison. At that point, leave for your own sake.
> Once the room becomes an active participant and manipulator it becomes what is now a modern "social networking" site, and should be regarded as poison.
Hacker News is one of the most aggressively moderated forums you'll ever come across, the room is very much an active participant and always has been.
And the entire purpose of the karma system (particularly the censorship of downvoted items) is to suggest and promote some content over others. That HN doesn't use machine learning is just a quibble about complexity.
You're right -- I failed to mention the indeed biased bouncers. There was a real purge it seems, in fact, over the past few months, as a lot of names are now silent; and, the tone is now much more 'consistent' (echo chamber-ish).
Flagging/purging content is to me more acceptable than manipulation via suggesting/promoting, though, especially if the moderators are members. Maybe making this distinction is hair-splitting, though.
Shadow banning, on the other hand, is a disgusting technique. That seems like more a childish prank than a means of moderation, and only invites negativity (which is what was trying to be avoided, right?).
Overall, it's a pretty reliable source of links to good articles -- and some discussions.
Shadow banning is a very useful tool for moderation. It is extremely frustrating as a moderator dealing with users that persistently shit up the place and crank out new accounts to continue the abuse as soon as you ban them. Shadowbans greatly relieve the moderation workload in cases like this because the abusive users keep themselves occupied, potentially for weeks. As someone who has previously moderated a large phpbb, I don't lose any sleep over wasting the time of abusive users since they are happy to waste my time as a moderator by deliberately and repeatedly breaking the rules.
I never really thought about it, but your description made me fear some well-meaning persons will "revamp" HN and turn it into something "fresh and modern" and introduce new features that allow us to "engage".
This has been discussed a few times here on hacker news. The argument I prefer (that I can’t find anymore, sorry) is that hacker news is different from social media because it gives every user the same feed. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc give each user a custom feed based on perceived preferences. This has been argued to lead to users being isolated within their own echo chambers. Hacker news seems to suffer less from that problem because it continually exposes users to new topics and points of view they might not have sought out.
At some point drift in language will change the definition of "social media" from the former definition of trying to profit off users self-generated content, to the modern "in practice" definition of a for-profit heavily politically censored propaganda channel.
So, no, under the old def HN was never about becoming trillionaires by selling our accts to google or whatever. And under the new definition HN has intense political leanings but is still primarily technical in nature and doesn't censor as much as Reddit or other fundamentalist or inquisition like as sites.
"I grew fed up of being stuck in this e-commerce framework – having to work with its hyper-normalised MySQL database (the EAV model)"
2011? Had to be Magento. Not a great fit with what they were trying to accomplish. Not that they seemed to have a clear understanding of how to accomplish what they wanted, which was to throw spaghetti at a wall and hope something made them rich.
Technically, no, and then they would probably terminate the employee.
Maybe this is better stated as "If you resign from a hugely visible platform, because it's bad, but you don't tell anyone, have you really maximized the impact of your resignation for good?"
