zlacker

Probably any media aggregator where you can submit content and vote on it qualifies as social media. So yes, HN is social media, and has some of the negatives that social media engenders (e.g. outrage-driven comments, low-quality discussion, people optimizing their lives around accruing pointless karma).

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.