Hacker News Reader

I've never used WeChat, but are signal/telegram/Whatsapp considered "social media" now? I thought they belonged to a separate category of "messaging apps", which consist of people messaging others that they already possibly know from a different channel.

View on HN

fair point. this is a matter of definition. i agree with the distinction, but this is not shared by everyone. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media so i find it useful to point it out.

case in point, in this wikipedia article wechat is clearly categorized as social media, even though it's messaging component is no different than whatsapp, telegram or signal, which are "maybe" social media.

in summary, some people call them social media, and some don't.

This is not the only use of those apps. There are plenty of large channels that are either broadcasting from a central source of a sort of forum sorted by new of people who don't know each other but share some type of interest, specially in countries and regions where those apps are dominant (which I believe is not the case of the US).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com