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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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?