For some reason I don’t count youtube as social media - If I went to reddit and read comments without voting that would count, but youtube is just a video delivery platform (and I don’t read the comments). Not sure if that’s a real distinction I can make
Hackernews is a link-based message board, Ars is a article-based website
Both used to be just tech, but have started being a bit more general or tech-adjacent
Ars has specialist professional journalists, Hackernews links heavily favour tech industry professionals and deep dives
Lemmy + Hackernews + Arstechnica
What more is there to know?
The reason I would call reddit social media is that I don’t agree with any of those rules
The closest I would agree with is 2, and not based on lack of anonymity but instead on persistence of identity, and that being core to the experience
I was part of subreddits where users knew each other as distinct personalities, and could converse across different threads across time, and occasionally IRL from various meetups
When a website doesn’t have a lively and persistent ‘local’ community (maybe geographic, maybe subject etc) it can’t really be social