“typical” in the sense that there are lots of examples of it, yes. But “typical” in the sense that it’s something the majority of people do... absolutely not.

My social circle is full of people that deleted FB. But when I step outside that circle not being on FB is very rare.

> I argue that the "i deleted facebook" is a perfectly typical user of social media. Its trendy to tell that you quit Facebook. Instead "follow me on instagram".

I don't think a typical HN participant is deleting their FB account and then telling people to follow them on Instagram.

HN readers know that Instagram is owned by FB.

> HN is social media, and anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.

Another good bit of willful ignorance is that “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product not the customer” seems to not apply to HN.

We can quibble over the definition of social media, but HN is more like forums and usenet dating back to the 80s than it is like Twitter or Facebook. Aside from temporal ranking of submissions, which is both universal and transparent, it's the same.

The big problem with Facebook and Twitter is a potent mix of incentive for controversy, algorithmic amplification, and groupthink bubbles. These problems exist elsewhere as well, so it's not like it's all social media (eg. television news networks in an age of unlimited media choice), but I don't think HN is a useful example to understand any of the macro-dynamics of todays information culture and political landscape.

I disagree.

The forums that I used to use simply made the top shown comments/threads the most recent activity.

The default HN view is clearly based on some algorithm to calculate what is "worth" being on the front page. I read the high comment topics, and there is a ton of groupthink and pushing controversy.

This is also why the HN effect is even a concept. There are enough people here watching controversial topics to hug a modern website to death.

Sure there is groupthink, we're mostly software engineers. But it's a relatively small group, uniform presentation visible to anyone, and very limited reach. Contrast with what's going on in Twitter and Facebook: many orders of magnitude more reach, and it's almost impossible to have any idea what people are seeing or saying in aggregate, and what the many small groupthink bubbles are.