What the US government really wants is all your public online accounts.
They used the broad and not fully defined definition of the word to their advantage.
What a social media site is, is something I think we are all collectively defining. It's too new to be really set in stone.
Also, even though words have broad meanings, it doesn't make it right to use it that way, since social customs would make the person using such definitions unintelligible. For example, if I said in my introduction at a party to a woman "I'm gay", she will likely take it to mean 'I'm homosexual', not 'I'm happy'. Both are completely valid dictionary uses. Only one has a valid use in any modern context.
Social media is generally defined as media where the primary intent is socializing. For me, that means it is more about communicating with friends and family in a manner that is directed to furthering my understanding of them, and their understanding of me. These sites would be like facebook, twitter, instagram, etc
Sites like HN, webmasterworld, blackhatworld, etc... are more about advancing knowlledge in a specific area. Socializing is a secondary consequence. These could be considered 'quasi' social media accounts.
Based on the current definition of social media, even comments on a news site or blog, 'could' qualify. But then again we run into the issue that if you use words in non-standard ways you can become unintelligible to your fellow humans, undermining the whole purpose and concept of language. If I said 'I read a comment on social media' and really meant 'I read a comment on cnn.com' people would not understand what I'm saying. It would be odd and awkward.
So would you say that Reddit isn't a social network? I would have agreed at inception, but not anymore. I'd say the lines have blurred enough to look at any site where commenting is one of the primary functions as "social".
HN isn't a social network. It's centered around topics (articles, Show/Ask HN, ...) rather than individuals. There's no way for me to follow or contact a particular user.
It's not the same as following in the traditional "use the follow to populate a timeline or feed" sense. I don't come to HN wondering "what did my peeps comment today?", rather I come to glance at particular stories, and perhaps read the comments.
The "engagement" aspect of HN is in the quality of items that make it to the front page, and in the comments. It's not in the slow drip-drip-drip of near-real-time notification regarding the activities of specific users.
Who are my friends then? You've got access to my profile, if this is a social network you should be able to find out who my friends are, right?
This website contains no meaningful information about my relationships with other people. And more to the point, the way I use this site is not abnormal; people who leave lots of information about their social relationships on HN seem to be in a minority. You might claim that comments such as these, between you and I, are social interactions. I would counter by saying these are not meaningful social interactions. Don't take this personally but I don't know you and I don't plan on ever knowing you.
The main difference between a 'social media' forum and a topical forum is that in a topical forum there's some expectation of staying more or less, you know, on topic. There is some functional overlap, but more limited domain.
is it? i mean there were online boards and forums that had this comments/replies structure, joel on software anyone?. well minus the points. but those were never called social networks...
I wouldn't have called it a social network - there's really no graph of user connections, unless you want to consider a graph of directional has-replied-to or has-upvoted links, but that's pushing it.
But if another technology added an embedded HN clone, they would call it "social networking features", probably...
Although I would definitely consider HN to be a social network, the number of comments here disagreeing made me look into it a bit more. According to Wikipedia both Hacker News and Reddit are "social news websites".
I spend more time on HN than all other social media (reddit, facebook, instagram, whatever) combined. Isn't user engagement what matters from a consumer perspective?
$13/month does feel like an odd price point to me. I imagine people would compare to what they pay for Netflix, HULU, etc, and wonder why this is so high.
