Heh true, I did actually use Sidebery before switching to the built-in vertical tabs, which is what I was referring to - but yes, extensions can add tree-style tabs.
Calling this out as the primary reason HN is not social media. Forums existed for years before social media was ever a thing. HN is indistinguishable from a forum in the early 2000s.
Forums of the early 2000s were almost always sorted by recency, not upvote count. They also typically weren't dominated by vendor press releases and news stories, whereas domains such as anthropic.com, blog.google, openai.com, along with outlets such as techcrunch.com and arstechnica.com, are probably among the most popular URLs of the past year.
But I don't think it's a meaningful distinction to begin with. Usenet was an endless time sink to get angry at things that didn't matter and argue with strangers who might not even be real people. It wasn't monetized, but it still made it easy to waste years of your life.
The fact that they intentionally include a rightthing/wrongthink button and keep score is a fundamental difference between modern "social media" and legacy BBSes and forums where there was no score keeping. Perhaps keeping score of rightthink is not enough to make HN social media, but it's certainly enough to not put it in the same bucket as forums and BBSes
Having some sort of recommendation algorithm seems to also be a defining feature of modern social media, which is something old school forums didn’t have.
Perhaps knowing a human with talent worked on it, putting some small part of themselves and their lived experience into the music has value to them? If so, then their actions make complete sense.
Human created music might have value to them, but it doesn't mean that the AI song was valueless. They admit they enjoyed it. So it doesn't make sense in terms of it not having value.
I wouldn't say it's asinine though. People reject creative output out of personal protest against the creator. Someone might love a movie only to refuse to ever watch it again because they found out the director was accused of something horrible.
Some people just don't want to support anything to do with AI. Although in this case the OP admits to also using AI directly so there's some inconsistency there, which is consistent with the state of confusion and uncertainty OP is expressing.
True, asinine was too strong a critique. I am just not in favor of emotional decision making where it can be helped. I can despise Tom Cruise as a person while still enjoying many of his movies. I know that some can't do that. I have always detached the creators from the art and that makes AI slot right in for me.
I hope you're right but I think you're dead wrong. Social media has not only affected the mental health of millions of people negatively, it has brought about social, political and economic harms that will affect the planet for generations.
Right, the thing it reminds me of is the long-term impact of reading to your kids at a young age, it has measurable effects equivalent to expensive professional education choices you could make later on in life, although I forget the exact comparison.
But also it doesn't have to exactly reproduce the harms of smoking. It could be that the effects are primarily present tense and completely gone if you stop the habit, and nevertheless, amount to a cumulative social harm that makes it a worthy analogy to smoking. Social media also doesn't cause secondhand smoke or stained teeth, or unpleasurable odors on your person or home or furniture. It doesn't leave butts or debris on the ground. There's probably a lot more I'm not thinking of either, but you can see how nitpicky that starts to feel.
Neuroplasticity wanes as people become adults. I'm not saying it's impossible, but changing ingrained patterns of thinking as an adult can be difficult or require deliberate effort and perhaps help of trained therapists.
In the absence of any evidence, it is really unclear why anyone needs to catastrophize about generations of harms.
Is there any reason to believe that "social media existing" is a worse and more enduring harm than tens of millions of people dying in the Second World War, the trauma of the survivors, the vast destruction of infrastructure,or the start of the risk of nuclear war?
Yet the post war baby boom seems to have led a remarkably fortunate life, overall.
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