[chudi]

If You have 10000 posts that You have to sort it in some way and the user just going to see 20 of those, the sorting is the recommendation system, people are just used to think of products, movies and songs, but in those platforms the users are the products

[notriddle]

This hardly seems like a reasonable way to characterize Netflix, which has a personal recommendation system, especially compared to HN, which is ad supported yet gives the same recommendations to everyone.

[samhw]

My reading of their comments is that they are trying to say that social media and news media can be characterised as having recommendation systems too, not just song and movie platforms (I don't know who exactly they're arguing against – I've never heard anyone say that recommendation systems can only be for songs and movies).

I don't think they're really paying much attention to the dimension you're splitting it along, i.e. whether the recommendations are personalised for each user. The huge important idea they have in their head is that recommendations can apply to user-generated social media content too.

[OrderlyTiamat]

Is HN solely (or mostly) ad supported? I have to imagine a significant subset of its userbase run adblockers, I'm not sure if enough is left.