> How are you defining "tech" exactly?

The better question may be: How are you defining an interaction?

This may be a hot take, but I don't consider HN to be personal interaction. We post content individually. We read it individually. Replies are about the content, not about the person. I am replying to something you wrote, but know nothing about you as a person, so it is hard to claim we have a personal interaction together just because of this comment.

I never claimed we had a personal interaction, I only claimed you interacted with me, a person. I define it the same way any dictionary defines it: you acted and it has an effect on me.

I agree that personal interactions are hard to come by online, but this is different to interacting with people at a surface level online.

User ID you're responding to is not the same user ID you first responded to.

This is what most interactions are like.

I've seen on many long-term forums, or even sub-reddits on Reddit, people really get to know each other.

Maybe they meant to interact with people they know*

Not quite.

I have 2 accounts that anyone could argue are social media and this is one of them. The other is so specialized that I'm fairly sure no one here uses it and I mainly use it for reference. An account was needed to search. Since I have an account, I will occasionally provide an answer to someone that has a question that I've had in the past, but even that's rare.

Otherwise, I use Teams at work, but that's not social media.

I never said I never interact with people, but it's definitely much, much less than I interact with data and really, it's incidental and not the point of me and the tech.