I'm skeptical that posting on social networks will accomplish what you're hoping for. I've been fairly actively commenting on Hacker News for over 15 years and haven't met anyone this way. This is just recreational typing.

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nicbou 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I meet everyone this way. I reach out to people and people reach out to me.

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mannanj 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I wonder about that. Why is this one of the few communities, that despite being so high quality in a technical sense has so little in person community connection?

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xg15 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Won't say this is all, but I think there are some design decisions that actively push it away from that:

- No DMs

- A UI that strongly deemphasizes specific posters and emphasizes messages in an abstract "discussion tree"

- No persistent or "sticky" threads. Every discussion that takes place here will be off the front-page and essentially forgotten in a few days. There is no space where anything like "community lore" could develop. (*)

All that strongly encourages you to focus on links and messages, but not on the people behind it or on longer-form discussions.

(*) That's not quite true - if you're long enough here, you do see some patterns emerge, like reoccurring preferences or discussions emerge, and even "celebrities" whose pages get upvoted to the front page disproportionately often. But it's all implicit, observational stuff, there is not really a "water cooler" or "off topic" area for discussion. (Apart from the annual "Merry Christmas" thread maybe)

	▲	ghaff an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'd add that, in spite of a US and probably SV focus, it's very geographically distributed. Back in my BBS days, we actually had a core of local participants ho got together IRL from time to time.