Comment by ryandrake

It's an interesting question: How do you define the line between a 'forum' (which most don't consider addictive or harmful), and 'social media' (where there is growing evidence of addiction and harm)? What are some attributes of social media that are missing on forums?

Opaque ranking algorithms?

Human curation / moderation?

Automated curation / moderation?

Voting / flagging?

Infinite scroll?

Images and/or auto-playing video?

Advertising inline with posts?

Profit motive to get users to do certain things?

I don't know where you draw the line, and what makes Facebook harmful but Hacker News not harmful.