Social media can only survive because of safe harbor provisions. If sites become responsible for the content they host, social media as we know would instantly die out.
Although it's impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, social media has had a net negative effect on a LOT of people. There's people that have had a big positive effect to. So, it's not obvious where it ends up on net if that even matters.
But, yeah. There's a lot of people that would be better off not on social media. But it's so addictive that they can't help themselves.
I, for one, have stopped using social media (unless you consider HN social). And I've had a lot less friends because of it. But it's been a huge improvement in my mood and outlook on life.
Yeah, that's why I only somewhat included it. It's tougher to follow specific people. But it is possible if you keep a list yourself of interesting accounts and check in later on what they've posted.
But the dynamic is definitely different and seems a lot more anonymous unless you are a really high profile account like antirez, patio11, drewdevault, or a CEO of some well known company or startup.
Perhaps it would be easier to enumerate the things that aren't social networks. Does the postal system constitute a social network, at least in the literal sense of those words? Maybe! It's a network that facilitates social interactions after all.
I think one place HN falls short of what I think of as social media is that there's no following of individual accounts, that creation of networks and personalized feeds feels like part of the core of what separates social media from simpler forums. Reddit was closer to just forums as well but subreddits allowed you to more directly curate and associate between groups, now every user basically has their own little subreddit they can post on and people can follow and join.
We probably need a more detailed vocabulary for describing various types of social media. In my opinion, the most insidious forms of social media share three attributes:
* Broad reach - they are accessible to and used by a population broadly for public communication rather than a specific subset of the population or private communication.
* Optimized for engagement - Content is personalized and optimized for individual engagement. Compare this to a stream of content organized by time (email inbox) or basically time with minimal voting/decaying (HN)
* Feedback is quantifiable and visible - Likes, retweets, upvotes (ie, engagement metrics) are countable and displayed to users. I think this gets at something deep in the human psyche and encourages users to chase those metrics.
It turns out that in systems with all three (FB, Twitter), you create enormous echo chambers that only occasionally flare up into outrage when they inevitably leak to a broader audience. This is great for engagement but pretty self evidently bad for society.
Lots of sites fit somewhere on this spectrum (including HN and Stack Exchange) but have basic safeguards to prevent the worst types of behavior. But this is usually because they aren't profit motivated to slide all the way to one side on the three factors above.
I don't want to be dismissive, if you have some kind of distinction you're trying to get at, I'm open to hearing it. But I personally don't see a big conceptual difference between Reddit and a forum, other than that one of them happened to get bigger. And I'm pretty skeptical of using size as a criteria here, because it would force us to say that Google+ and MySpace stopped being social media at some point when they dipped in popularity.
The distinction I was going for was things that predate the classification terminology. I guess there's no particular reason not to apply such classification retroactively, but it feels a bit weird considering that in the heyday of these technologies, few if any people referred to them as social media. Seems a bit like saying "let's stream some music" as you're loading up a CD player. Technically yes there is a stream of bits but it just seems silly to speak in such terms.
I think it would be great and I pretty much long for it. It's so obvious that even if it may be an overreach, there is such malpractice going on from all major social media players.
Youtube: Censors youtubers, documented in so many cases. It also gives "authoritarian news" a heavier weight in the algorithm. Removes comments with "communist bandits" in Chinese.
Twitter: Seriously bans people if they say the wrong pronoun
Reddit: A few people controls the majority of big subreddits, bans people with conservative views outright. Bans people that upvote stuff that they don't like. The have removed, banned hundreds of subreddits and users in the last few months. While they have chinese owners.
Facebook: Surprisingly the best of the bunch when it comes to serving every viewpoint imo. But they have had huge privacy implications just so many times.
But even so, I am very torn on the subject. The best thing would probably to force these companies not to censor/ban/remove people based on opinions. But the best thing for the world would most likely for these social media sites to not exist in the first place.
Personally I think social media sucks but I think most people are not ready to live without it either.
