| ▲ | nostrademons 4 days ago |
| I actually made plenty of friends commenting, in the early days of the Internet, but it wasn't just commenting. It was that a comment on a message board would lead to following them on LiveJournal, which would lead to AIM chats, which would lead to volunteer positions and real-life meetups and being invited to their weddings and a job referral to Google in the late-00s. I've got plenty of friends now. Most are not the ones I met online; that was a phase of our life that has largely passed us by, though I keep up with a couple. I still comment on things, but it leads to more shallow relationships if any, but perhaps that's because I'm not really looking for friends anymore. But I think that the bigger reason I'm reconsidering commenting online is: I can never be sure if the other person is real anymore. And even if they are, it often doesn't feel like they're debating in good faith. A lot of recent Reddit comment threads have really felt like I'm arguing with an AI or Russian troll farm. Social media now feels like a propaganda cesspool rather than something where people come together to share disparate views. |
|
| ▲ | jchw 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| The entire Internet now is a giant confirmation bias machine, which is impressive considering it also exposes you to unlimited conflicting viewpoints no matter how crazy they are. I think this is just a natural consequence of structuring everything around engagement. Even when you're seeing multiple viewpoints, it's rarely going to be in a positive light. |
| |
| ▲ | _mu 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > I think this is just a natural consequence of structuring everything around engagement. Agree - for me this leads to the conclusion that some services should not be run for-profit, or at least they should be run for public benefit. Similar to how governments in some countries own part of the railway. | | |
| ▲ | rusk 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I’m not against for profit so much as the monetisation of engagement. The web has always had a revenue problem. For a time this was solved by “advertising” and that was massively successful and what we see here is the result of that. There has historically been a reluctance to ask people for money - handling money brings a whole host of other unglamorous problems. As we saw with Steam the last few weeks. | | |
| ▲ | Kye 4 days ago | parent [-] | | The people who have always had trouble finding platforms and payment processors also always had trouble finding advertisers. Random demonetization on YouTube is a huge problem, for example. | | |
| ▲ | jchw 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Porn, piracy and other questionable sites have always had a lot of fun when it comes to finding advertisers, but it does seem like it's gotten worse over time, encompassing many more sites. It also seems like whether an advertiser is concerned about where exactly their algorithmic ads appear is pretty inconsistent, too. What I think is interesting is that it seems like Japan is less affected by this. I know I've seen major Japanese companies advertising on sites like Pixiv and Misskey, which have both had some trouble with American payment processors. Heck, I'm pretty sure I've seen Ubiquiti ads when browsing Misskey. I guess the anglosphere Internet is somewhat impacted by the presence of more "puritan" influence than some other global packets of the Internet. Not 100% sure what to make of that. |
|
| |
| ▲ | carlosjobim 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | HN threads usually have a comment demanding socialization and government control of whatever issue is discussed. Usually first or second comment. This time it took until the third comment for somebody to make the demand. If you want government organized discussion, look no further than listening to the sessions of parliament. | |
| ▲ | socalgal2 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Doesn't help - even those are heavily biased | | |
| |
| ▲ | shjfbs 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The entire Internet now is a giant confirmation bias machine Then why does it seem that millennials share more opinions worldwide than any prior generation? Also, doesn’t anyone find it odd that we’re commenting on a post about stopping commenting, without addressing that? | | |
| ▲ | jchw 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Then why does it seem that millennials share more opinions worldwide than any prior generation? That seems sort of tangential to me. > Also, doesn’t anyone find it odd that we’re commenting on a post about stopping commenting, without addressing that? Not at all. I used to comment in a variety of different places across the Internet: discussion forums, image boards, random blogs, Reddit, Digg, etc. The vast majority of places I used to comment have deteriorated significantly or are simply significantly less amenable to actual discourse than they used to be. Hacker News is weird because it feels like an exception. Not the only exception remaining, perhaps not even the best depending on your tastes, but certainly one of them. | | | |
| ▲ | opan 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >Then why does it seem that millennials share more opinions worldwide than any prior generation Do you mean "share" as in they're in agreement with each other more often, or share as in they post their opinions online more? I assumed the former initially, but as I read other replies I started to question it. | |
| ▲ | dehrmann 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > why does it seem that millennials share more opinions worldwide than any prior generation? Not to doubt you, but is this actually the case? | | |
| ▲ | thepryz 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I’m old enough to remember BBSes and the early Internet. I’d argue that while there were fewer people on the internet, those that were online shared way more than what most are willing to today. There was a certain level of naivety looking back with hindsight. |
|
| |
| ▲ | awesome_dude 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It could also be that, that's the kind of world we really live in. Most of the discourse that we see is where groups of people are intersecting that wouldn't really meet in the real world because of the echo chambers we keep. The Americans are often saying that they only see that crank uncle, or their liberal nephew or niece, at thanksgiving, and, honestly, it's the same for the rest of us around the world - we're normally only exposed to the very different viewpoints at family gatherings. IRL we try to avoid conflict, and try not to associate with people that hold views that are vastly different to our own, so much so it's considered "unprofessional" to have the discussions at work that would show how different everyone's (political) viewpoints are in the workplace. | | |
| ▲ | jchw 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Social media exposes us to more viewpoints than we would normally see, but I think there is actually a such thing as too much. Online communities have the same kind of issue, they really need to strike a balance between being too much of a "circle jerk", and being too fractured and conflict-ridden to have productive discussion. What I think is interesting, though, is that due to the way social media platforms work, you can actually have both a massive circle jerk amongst people that agree with each-other, and constant, unending, vile conflict between people who do not, due to algorithmic feeds. (If anything, they both wind up feeding into each-other.) IRL I think people are often more empathetic and sympathetic, and I think that this environment leads to less polarized opinions even when our exposure to viewpoints is relatively limited. That said, lately, IRL socialization has become quite limited, especially after the COVID-19 lockdowns. Online interactions are just not really the same... especially not limited to text, over heavily manipulated platforms like Twitter/Facebook/etc. Seems a bit contradictory I'm sure, but if the problems of socializing on the Internet were simple and easy to understand, we wouldn't have to talk about it so much :) | | |
| ▲ | awesome_dude 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > IRL I think people are often more empathetic and sympathetic, and I think that this environment leads to less polarized opinions even when our exposure to viewpoints is relatively limited. I mean, I hear what you're saying, but the only real difference between IRL and online discussions is that online people can get heated at each other without any fear of physical violence. That limiting factor for IRL prevents people from being more frank about their position on whatever. Speaking as someone that has been public on various political positions in the past, I've seen the polarised views forever. I mean, history is littered with stories about polarised sections of societies inflicting actual violence with one another - American examples might be the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the Vietnam war, Drug use (and it's policing alleged as being a way to break up communities that oppose the ruling community) Oh, I should also point out, people like Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher, Trump, etc, don't come into power in a vacuum, they have vast communities of supporters that believe that they are right, and the communities that they oppose are wrong (same goes for the communities that they oppose, vast groups of people that believe they are right and the community that they oppose is wrong) | | |
| ▲ | jchw 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think that it's actually not an IRL vs Internet discussion dichotomy FWIW, that oversimplifies things a bit too much. For example, I think sympathy and empathy increases as you go from public interaction in major social platform -> 1-on-1 direct message -> audio call -> video call -> IRL private conversation. Many reasons really. Public interactions have public scrutiny, it often is more of a performance than an authentic social interaction. Text conversations are low bandwidth. All internet conversation carries the burden that things you say may be recorded and used against you. And of course, seeing and hearing a human on the other end just naturally will increase empathy. I hear what you're saying, but I think you are looking at this wrong. I'm not suggesting that IRL social interactions are perfect and Internet ones are hopelessly broken. We have plenty of history to show how IRL social interactions can break down, in small groups or big. What I'm saying is that IRL interactions are better on average than Internet interactions, largely due to the modality and venue that most Internet interactions occur. Edit: also, it is worth noting that there are definitely robust studies that can back up some of these ideas, which may be a good data point to add into this discussion. That said, I am honestly too lazy to go cite sources right now, to be completely honest with you. (And I know HN is rightly a bit skeptical of psychology studies, since you can pretty much find something to validate anything you want, but there are some actually good and interesting ones.) | | |
| ▲ | awesome_dude 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I think that we're going to have to agree to disagree here. I've definitely had online discussions that were orders of magnitude more productive than the best IRL conversations on similar subjects, because people felt more free to contribute. It's so much more productive online that I look for communities that discuss those subjects (eg. Twitter when it was good, or Reddit). I avoid that IRL because it's so poor. | | |
| ▲ | jchw 4 days ago | parent [-] | | On an individual level, there's always going to be people whose experiences don't match the average, but I really do believe most Internet conversation isn't particularly productive. I'm not saying I don't have productive Internet conversation, though. Anyway, it seems like we're at an impasse, but I may as well link some references that back up what I'm trying to say. There was this fascinating experiment posted recently to HN, "30 minutes with a stranger": https://pudding.cool/2025/06/hello-stranger/ - conversation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45124003 Publications regarding how people are exposed to opposing viewpoints online and how that influences polarization: "How digital media drive affective polarization through
partisan sorting" https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2207159119 "How Many People Live in Political Bubbles on Social Media?" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244019832705 "Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06297-w | | |
| ▲ | awesome_dude 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > On an individual level, there's always going to be people whose experiences don't match the average, but I really do believe most Internet conversation isn't particularly productive. I'm not saying I don't have productive Internet conversation, though. Just wanted to say, as soon as I saw this I clapped my forehead - I'd provided an anecdote as data :( | | |
| ▲ | verisimi 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Tangential, but any individual only knows their 'anecdotal experience'. It is one's golden source. No one knows 'the average'. One can read a science paper or watch a video that purports to present the average opinion, but even then all one knows it's what the paper or video states, as that is the limit of one's personal experience. |
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | mejutoco 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > the only real difference between IRL and online discussions is that online people can get heated at each other Another difference, and a very important one imo, is that online there can be many bots pretending to be real people when in reality they represent a single interest. This can fool many people into thinking some fringe opinion is more normal than it is. | | |
| ▲ | jchw 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You know what, though? I kind of think you don't even need bots for the "majority opinion" to get widely skewed. For example, you can find an absolute ballistic lunatic take on Twitter that has 10,000 retweets basically trivially. Of course, some of that is bots. Maybe someone paid for engagements. It's easy to do so, so it's naturally what a lot of people assume. Even if it wasn't mostly bots... 10,000 people? It feels like a lot, enough to make us feel like that opinion is at least somewhat validated socially. But in reality, it's just a number. Would we even care who agreed if we knew what types of people they were? But even if we did still care, all this really tells us is that 10,000 people hit a button. Why? A lot of big creators could say virtually anything and immediately get social validation in return, I strongly doubt that the majority of people interacting really have an actual strong conviction about whatever position is being expressed. But even if they all really did hold a strong conviction... how many people is 10,000 really? Twitter has several hundred million users. Around 100,000,000 active U.S. users each month. It is still kind of impressive in a sense that 10,000 people saw a post and decided to click a button I guess, but I think our intuition is really broken when it comes to large enough numbers of people; it does not suggest that most people, or even a large minority of people, actually agree with it. But what about the posts we don't see? The average Twitter user has 770 followers, but that number is highly skewed by very large accounts... One metric I found online, though I couldn't find a good source, suggests that 0.06% of users have over 1,000 followers. There are accounts with millions of followers. Needless to say, the posts that find the most visibility on Twitter are largely curated by a very elite group of users... naturally, the majority of "popular" posts you're going to see are not just random posts that happened to catch on. They're mostly posts that a large account boosted! Naturally this is going to cause all sorts of problems. You could go on and on and on. The social media Internet is basically a giant false plurality machine. There doesn't need to be bots. There doesn't need to be troll farms. There doesn't need to even be bad actors, malice, disinformation campaigns. And it's silly, because our brains are obsessed with what "most people" think, and I think there are some rational, logical reasons to care about this, but I don't believe in earnest that this is mostly coming from a rational place. People desperately want to feel belonging, and to feel validated in their opinions. How many people here on Hacker News reply then come back a few minutes later to check and see if the post got upvoted or downvoted? Who doesn't have at least a little bit of a "dopamine rush" when they have a post that gets hugely upvoted on Reddit or Hacker News, or reposted a lot on Twitter/Mastodon/etc.? Yet, even though we know about this, we don't then earnestly take this into account when we see "popular" opinions. You ever notice how obsessed the social media Internet has become with condemning social taboos? Seems pretty straight-forward to me, it's an easy way to get that "people agree with me" dopamine hit. I'm not even saying that people intentionally do this, either. People unknowingly shape their behavior around what they think will get them that positive attention. I sincerely doubt I am immune from it, I'm sure all of my Hacker News posts wreak of HN-specific self-censorship and intricate codeswitching even though I really try not to do that sort of thing. Hell, scrutinize this paragraph: "Oh, 'social taboos'? Afraid to just say the one we're all thinking of?" Social media isn't even alone, false pluralities absolutely spread in the real world, too, I just think that social media is really good at doing it faster and more intense than ever before. Honestly, I just think we care too much about what "everyone" thinks. Imagine the laws if they were based on what the majority of people think they should be. Imagine Wikipedia if the rule for resolving conflicts was a poll of what people think should go in the articles. Even if we really could know what the majority of people truly think, a lot of the time, I'm not sure we should do anything with that information. Do most people really think hard enough about problems to really have an informed opinion on most issues? I think, instead of focusing on what most people think, we should just simply always seek to do the right thing, and seek to be as "correct" as possible in a world without absolute objective truth. I'm not a politics person, but I think this sort of thing is exactly what abstractions like having representatives is good for... it's kind of unfortunate that in the real world, these systems can wind up being corrupted to the point of being a net negative. And I think that means we should just do our best to ditch websites like Twitter that are basically as unproductive as possible here. Maybe some Twitter alternatives can do a little better here, particularly ones that allow for smaller groups and communities to have their own spaces, but really I just think the entire "model" is not very good. For all of the faults of structured discussion forums like Hacker News, unstructured social media just doesn't seem to work very well for much other than soaking up attention and moving tons of advertising dollars. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | dehrmann 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > IRL we try to avoid conflict, and try not to associate with people that hold views that are vastly different to our own... This is what I love about the Iowa caucus system. It's messy, it's physical, it's real, and you might see social consequences for your stance. |
| |
| ▲ | afpx 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Everyone is A/B testing everything blind. KPIs without Human feedback leads to dystopia. | |
| ▲ | ggm 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I simultaneously think this is true and a massive contradiction. A right and a left winger posting on a thread about J6 would both come away convinced of their rectitude, despite actively disagreeing about everything. There is almost no boundary of agreement over facts or intent, just an active disagreement online. | | |
| ▲ | nostrademons 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Selection bias is the most powerful force known to man, or life for that matter. An Internet where every voice is represented is an Internet with billions and billions of ways for selection bias to make you happy. |
| |
| ▲ | bdangubic 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I disagree :) |
|
|
| ▲ | novok 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah I second this. You need a social media structure that follows this. HN doesn't build for it because there is no private message or comment reply notification infra. Other news websites and youtube comments are even worse. Reddit also is a bit like HN in that regard where the main unit of social media is the community / news post, but you could make it work to make internet friends because it has PMs and focused communities. Instagram, X, & old school forums etc lend themselves to it a bit more, but it's probably the chat / watering hole ones like discord and IRC that lend themselves the most to making internet friends. All the other ones you need to reach out specifically and it can be difficult. |
| |
| ▲ | PaulHoule 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Oh the last thing you want is DMs. On every platform I am on that has DMs whether that is Instagram or Mastodon or whatever, I get approached by people who say something like "Hey!" or "How are you doing today" and if I humor them they want to move the conversation on to Signal where there is less of a paper trail. So far as I could tell it is these people https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2025-02-08 Right now I am trying to deprogram a rather isolated friend who seems to be sucked into this, it is so frickin' hard to get through to a person who has been seduced, has a crush on somebody, and who has accepted a sob story. If it is not that, there are all the people who are maybe promoting their onlyfans profile or maybe they're just trying to click on a virus, but either way it is awful. I've been cataloging features that are "expressions of hostility" on BlueSky profiles and one of the most common is "No DM" and it is so common and the people who use it are relatively normal otherwise that we don't treat it as a red flag. If I was starting out a new platform I'd have a ground rule of never supporting DMs because they are a hotbed of fraud and trouble. | | |
| ▲ | novok 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Thats a spam problem and solvable by different means. FWIW I never get such experiences and made internet friends even on reddit via the DM system. For people to develop friendships with each other, they need to be able to have 1:1 or 1:small time with a ton of back and forth, and public comment sections don't lend themselves to 100 deep message threads. Chat rooms do, chat threads do, and DMs do. In real life it happens naturally as people split off into side conversations. | |
| ▲ | 1bpp 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | https://archive.is/yv7k4 Readable article |
| |
| ▲ | balder1991 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Instagram even change the incentives from connecting to friends to be more like a TikTok app, where you scroll mindlessly through reels, because the incentive is only engagement now. | |
| ▲ | Imustaskforhelp 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think that I can also vouch for things like discord in the fact that it can bring internet friends. Though I think that two things that I hate is that information there isn't as structured in the sense that someone might come reading this comment after specifically searching for this topic of comment culture. But the same couldn't be said for things like online forums and as such I can't shake the feeling that if we all collectively stopped commenting on things, it can really move a lot of discourse away that might influence new generation. I myself have been inspired many times to try something new or think of some idea because of some idea just to try if that make sense. Or seeing someone post some idea that I like and then reading the comments to find nuanced opinion about and maybe I can chime in sometimes helping it. I feel like commenting system to definitely be one of treasures like wikipedia although I think that the noise:signal ratio is definitely higher in commenting systems (ie. they have more noise than signal) | |
| ▲ | bri3d 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think the ease of direct connection helps, but there's also a big difference in terms of permanence and frequency/volume. While on IRC people were frequently running bouncers or logging bots that eventually posted to the web, it still felt ephemeral and therefore more authentic. The same goes for Discord - much as the demise of the traditional web-indexed phpBB forum is lamented, I feel that people more frequently act like "themselves" in spaces that don't feel as permanent, regardless of if they actually are or not. Plus, most active IRC and now Discord users just post a lot more messages than, say, an average HN user, so there's a lot more socializing to be done. For whatever reason, public Discords just don't seem to work the same way as IRC did, though. I've had great luck seeding Discord servers with friends from elsewhere (real life, forums, shared activities, etc.) and making friends as the group grows, but I've never really jumped into a random Discord and made a friend the way I did on IRC. I can't really figure out what the difference is, but it's one of the little things I miss that I haven't been able to put a finger on. Overall though, I've made plenty of friends online, even in the last few years and even as I get older and the Internet changes. The original article really didn't resonate with me at all, which actually made it even more thought provoking for me - I can't imagine making 16 years worth of posts without a single direct connection. | |
| ▲ | Cthulhu_ 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The difficulty, I find, is to find yourself a "new" hole; I've been in the same online community for about 20 years now, and while I've dipped my toe into e.g. other Discord servers, it's a one off visit and then I just lose interest because there's people I don't know there. But this is RL too, if you're looking for a new community, it's easy to feel like an outsider. And it takes energy and / or conscious effort to get a feel for the community, and this can cause friction. After 20 years, where do I find the energy to invest in developing new relationships? How do I find enough interest in a possibly new subject to stick with it? |
|
|
| ▲ | mancerayder 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I mind less the trolling and argumentation, it's the personal attacks and especially the one-liner 'mic drop' replies that I see so much on Reddit that we see here sometimes as well. Lots and lots of single sentence replies makes me want to close the entire browser. |
| |
| ▲ | Cthulhu_ 4 days ago | parent [-] | | And the repetitive memes. I mean that's memes, but still, half of a Reddit comment section is predictable. | | |
| ▲ | hallole 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I really wonder why that's the case, because I only ever see it on Reddit. You're very right, and it annoys me to no end how repetitive, corny, and omnipresent the joking is. This is always the case whenever someone posts with a good question; good answers are inevitably buried at the bottom. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | PaulHoule 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Habermas wrote a ponderous two-volume book titled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Communicative_Ac... which seems to postulate that some kind of deliberative process by which "people come together to share disparate views" could solve many of the problems that he points out in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book) if we could just find the right process but in 2025 it seems dangerously naive today. That is, when people come together to share disparate views online they seem to relish attacking each other and reinforcing tribal identities. I have a lot of problems with this recent Nate Silver editorial https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-is-blueskyism particularly (i) it didn't start on BlueSky but really started on Twitter and Tumblr, and (ii) centrists like Matt Yglesias who pick fights with that kind of leftist or anyone who complains about being bullied by trans people is either doing it to get a rise or drive traffic to their blog. Even if he names it wrong, the phenomenon he's describing is a very real thing and it's particularly harmful to the causes and the individuals that those who participate in it claim to be advocating for. |
|
| ▲ | bri3d 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I agree with this overall, and I don't think it the notion of making friends online has died, for what it's worth: I've made a lot of friends online from various comment-media in the last 3-5 years. Forums are still the highest friendship to noise ratio, oddly, with Discord in a close second, but I also got my current job off of Hacker News and have made some friends here too. I also 100% agree that super-wide-scale social media feels like it's dying, though - Instagram, Twitter, and any Reddit with more than a few thousand users are definitely worse by the day, but I never really got a huge amount of value from those spaces anyway. My Twitter account (which in fairness, I think had 1FA with a password from 2008 or so) somehow got taken over by what appear to be drug dealers from Japan and I didn't particularly mourn the loss. Oddly the only online space I really _miss_ is, of all things, the early days of Xbox Live voice chat. Matchmaking seemed to really heavily favor ping and in turn I'd frequently encounter my neighbors in lobbies. Everyone used a microphone. It was still toxic in terms of various -isms, slurs, and so on, but the trash talking was generally more of an aside and you'd frequently get some genuine small talk and connections while you queued for matches. I've tried it a few times since and while I'm sure part of it is just me getting older, the signal isn't even really there (I think a lot of people are in private party chats in Discord, if they're talking at all) and if it is, the noise ratio is way higher than it used to be. |
|
| ▲ | nirui 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > It was that a comment on a message board would lead to following them on LiveJournal... I remember "back in the days"™ many forum software allowed a feature called "signature", it allows you to attach custom pictures and links after each and every post you posted. Many people use this feature to advertise their sites/blogs for others to visit. Then the feature got weakened by both the social media platforms and forum software, to the point that it's gone and forgotten. But based on my experience, it was the best place in the old time to do advertisement and SEO. I learned and bookmarked many interesting blogs from those signatures. Now days, I'll just google it if I need anything, and never look back after I'm done. That's one reason today's Internet is dead to me. |
|
| ▲ | coffeecoders 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I feel the same way. Back in the day, I spent a lot of time on namepros and xda developer forums, and a few of the friendships I made there have lasted for years. I still talk to some of those folks weekly, and even meet a couple in person now and then. It does feel harder to build that kind of connection today. Maybe it’s the anonymity, maybe it’s the sheer volume of noise, or just the way platforms are designed now. The sense of community that used to form around niche forums seems a lot rarer. Maybe it was also my age. I was a teenager back then and more open to forming those connections. |
|
| ▲ | Telaneo 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The 'make friends on the internet' age as it was back then is probably largely over outside of select niches, but I still find fulfilment in commenting and discussing matters within more niche topics. Within those, it's still fairly likely that I'm not actually talking to a bot, and that they're not a complete knobhead who isn't discussing in good faith. Hacker News gets there sometimes, but it can still spill over into the bad discussions that have now flooded mainstream social media. |
| |
| ▲ | noosphr 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I've always treated comments as about me first and about other people second. If I can't defend my point of view from some online random then I haven't really thought it through. Online discussions are still quite good at ripping bad arguments apart, even if there's rather more vapid noise around than there used to be. | |
| ▲ | awesome_dude 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | There's still avenues for connections - I am making "friends" as we speak on reddit with like minded people (specifically politics, people who are sitting roughly in the same point in the spectrum as me) I've noticed that the demise of twitter has impacted my ability to connect with like minded people - I gave up on mastodon because the ability to stumble upon other people with similar tastes wasn't nearly what I wanted it to be. Here (HN) I have mostly found wonks and trolls replying directly to me, but I do see a lot of interesting discourse (which is what I'm looking for... right) which will likely lead to connections (eventually) | | |
| ▲ | D13Fd 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Are they people, or AI bots? And how can you be sure? | | |
|
|
|
| ▲ | datavirtue 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Dropping by reddit for 30 seconds is a great way to expend dignity talking to AI bots. |
|
| ▲ | t0lo 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| For me, this highlights that knowledge gating some things really does have benefits for community- even though the internet really should be accessible for all, it was experientially better for us when it was people like us. |
|
| ▲ | eawgewag 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Wow, I enjoyed your comment deeply and it reminded me of 15+ years ago on the internet, where your experience really matched mine. I still am friends to this day with the people I met 15+ years ago. I haven't made an internet friend in over 10 years though. I personally believe that part of this is due to the upvote/downvote culture of Reddit. We're all incentivized to say something that will attract upvotes. There's a positive side to this -- thanks to this I regularly read really funny, entertaining comments. Genuine genius in the comments section. On the other hand, its just to entertain. There's nothing really human or of substance there. Or, what's especially dangerous, to say something that bucks the trend, the status quo, admit an unpopular vulnerability outloud and suddenly you're hit with waves upon waves of downvotes. Not only that but I genuinely believe that the downvotes empowers angry debaters to come in and pick apart whatever it is that you said, just to enjoy the upvotes. I perceive it as a kind of bullying. At any rate, I don't think these spaces are designed for intimacy. They're designed for memes and funny jokes, not genuine conversations. |
| |
| ▲ | novok 4 days ago | parent [-] | | It's really the small communities on reddit where you get less of the upvote culture mattering much and the same regular few dozen to hundred people that are interesting. |
|
|
| ▲ | vivzkestrel 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| since we are on the topic, here is a tutorial on how to write internet comments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_QmvZRS85U |
