I hope they can come to some sort of agreement or find a way to acquihire the Apollo developer (though that might kill the app with crappy features as well).
Using it as just a news source seems really valid.
And it feels different from other social media platforms because of the focus on full discussions. But surely this still counts as social media?
Genuinely asking because I see you made your account just to post this comment - why did you do that? It's not a bad thing (I'm here too), I'm just curious why you felt it was important to do?
Yes, the obstructive popup when you visit reddit on a mobile browser to force you into installing the app. Other than that only if you want to do more than read.
But, without a social graph, I wouldn't call it a social network, so it does not suffer a lot of the problems social networks have (e.g. echo chambers, ostracizing members, showing off, influencers, and many others).
Social media has problems, social networks have problems, and social media which leverages a social graph has a whole different class of problems. Ironically, the relative primitiveness of HN protects it from at least some of the worst elements of the internet.
Reddits main function as a porn facilitator will really hamper its desire to make lots of money as a publicly-traded business.
Especially with modern tech, very few pieces of technology act as a single purpose; my phone can be just a phone, just a camera, just a chat application, or any combination of the above. Whether it's a toy or a work tool or a social media device changes depending on how its being used.
HackerNews is the same, in that you can just use it as a link aggregator, maybe you like it as a "classic" forum, maybe you use it for advertising. (HN-ready articles that are basically advertisements are quite common and popular even)
I think before anyone can really answer if something is social media or not, it needs to be better defined what it actually encompasses now as oppose to when the term was coined. Like, is a Glade AirFreshner a social media device just because you can tweet from it?
0 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8064945/pdf/cyb... I guess this says it originated in 1990? But it doesn't seem well defined.
I think this site will get a flood of new users from Reddit once the axe drops. I think this will cause the quality of discussions to go down.
I suppose time will tell.