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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
Lots and lots of single sentence replies makes me want to close the entire browser.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Every once in a while I have some experience or some a point of view that I don't see reflected anywhere else. One of the benefits of the pseudo-anonymization of sites like Hacker News is that I feel a bit more comfortable stating things that don't really have a place to say anywhere else.
The only thing I regret is when I get into pointless arguments, usually when I feel that my comment was misunderstood or misinterpreted. But even those arguments sometimes force me to consider how to express myself more clearly or to challenge how deeply I hold the belief (or how well I know the subject) that lead me to the comment in the first place.
There are some places where commenting is meaningful because you're a part of some closely-knit, stable community, and you can actually make a dent - actually influence people who matter to you. I know that we geeks are supposed to hate Facebook, but local neighborhood / hobby groups on FB are actually a good example of that.
There are places where it can be meaningful because you're helping others, even if they're complete strangers. This is Stack Exchange, small hobby subreddits, etc - although these communities sometimes devolve into hazing and gatekeeping, at which point, it's just putting others down to feel better about oneself.
But then, there are communities where you comment... just to comment. To scream into the void about politics or whatever. And it's easy to get totally hooked on that, but it accomplishes nothing in the long haul.
HN is an interesting mix of all this. A local group to some, a nerd interest forum for others, and a gatekeeping / venting venue for a minority.
I like that you try to learn from bad arguments, but don't forget, that many misunderstand on purpose, to "win" an argument. Or at least to score cheap karma points or virtual karma points from the audience. So there one can only learn to make arguments in a way that they are harder to be intentionally missunderstood, but those ain't truthfinding skills, they are debate technics.
But many people of the Internet are also unable to make a logic argument and explaining the conflict they just said leads nowhere. One of them often gets down voted to hell and half the time it's not the person who said the stupid thing.
I left reddit exactly because of this, but I also find that somewhat on HN. Most comments I start typing I actually discard and move on because I can smell it already.
If I'm still in the argument, it's not pointless.
If it's pointless, I am not arguing.
My FUTURE self might think it was pointless. But it can get stuffed...
A second goal of this comment is to add a point: That I also comment because sometimes saying something makes me feel like I am more than nothing and nobody. I want to feel more than nothing and nobody.
I used to have to talk more on Internet privacy.
Now I feel like enough people are talking about that one, that I usually don't have to.
In more recent years, it's been pointing out the latest wave of thievery in the techbro field -- sneaky lock-in and abuse, surveillance capitalism, growth investment scams, regulatory avoidance "it's an app, judge" scams, blockchain "it's not finance or currency or utterly obvious criminal scheme, judge" scams, and now "it's AI, judge" mass copyright violation.
There's not enough people -- who aren't on the exploitation bandwagon or coattails-riding -- who have the will to notice a problem, and speak up.
Though more speak up on that particular problem, after the window of opportunity closes, and the damage is done, and finally widely recognized. But then there's a new scam, and gotta get onboard the money train while you can.
That ticks me off, and I can type fast.
I think we are all pretty aware of how the up and down arrows are supposed to be used versus how they get used.
For content that doesn’t trigger an emotional response: the arrows are used appropriately, highlighting comments and silencing less useful discussion. HN is incredibly useful for discussion on non-controversial, almost mundane, topics.
However it all comes undone for any topic that carries emotional baggage. Where up and down arrows are clearly used as “like” and “dislike” buttons regardless of the facts or merit presented in each comment. Instead commenting becomes an exercise in PR. The first clue is the comment count. HN has some very predictable patterns in comment counts.
Platform operators may not be willing to change this as “hive mind” and “liked” content helps visitation, even if it doesn’t help discourse. The consequence of inaction however is that topic experts are pushed out by mobbing, because invariably not everything is sunshine and roses.
Like when your mom picks up the phone and it kicks you off the dial-up internet. Except these days, it's like 4 pancakes of getting kicked off since Cloudflare entered in the scene, 5 pancakes if you're in the EU, and sure, let's throw in Anubis the catgirl just to be extra safe with the computers.
— Mark Twain
Slashdot, the site, still lives as a fossil from 10-15 years ago. It must be popular enough to pay its bills.
Among other frustrations (including some really vile comments), I felt like the world was bursting with interesting tech news, and Slashdot was just not keeping up. The publish rate was too slow (maybe 10-13 stories a day), and the %age of stories I found interesting had dropped considerably from a few years previous.
I wasn't a fan of the redesign, but it was content that drove me to seek alternatives.
I have no idea if others had the same reason. I hear more about its user interface, but that change didn't bother me.
It all comes undone if people abandon the entity because of enshittification.
I unironically just closed this tab before submitting out of habit and reopened it to submit this
It may be a super low sample size but it's far from impossible. Especially Reddit has DMs/chat and it's way easier since you can contact someone without someone else impersonating the other party. Sometimes you gotta believe you are talking to just another human being. Love that the article in the OP mentions trolling. We all probably had moments where we did not act in the best way we could have.
To all those that act noble in the shroud of anonymity!
Update: The article also says it takes several hundreds of hours. That may be so, but I find the same time needs to be spent IRL to get to know someone. Usually a continuous effort can be just as much as linking a friend a good story and saying hi. People will engage conversation spontaneously when both parties want.
Fortunately, that seems to also have trained me to not write those comments in the first place. I also think much more about what I am trying to actually effect with a comment, not just about what feels good in the particular moment.
One thing that didn't change though is that probably most of my comments are edited at least once, often a few times, right after sending them. And even if it's just swapping out a word, or adding a missing comma. This one here is no exception at all, I just added this paragraph after doing some minor edits.
I was browsing some thread and someone referenced a meme typed out as :.|:;
The comment had a few replies who recognized the meme. I had no idea what it meant so I asked Claude
Well the AI knew what it was! It was the “loss” meme but the explanation it gave made no sense.
Turns out the meme needs a strike through tag. This turns :.|:; into a four-panel diagram of a web comic.
That’s when I realize that whatever trained Claude stripped out the formatting, and thus the entire meaning of the meme. And the comment I originally saw was a repost bot that also failed to retain the formatting when it reposted it.
And the replies that understood the reference were all reposted by bots.
So who even knows if we CAN make relationships on the internet anymore?
I can’t trust that any comment is actual human expression any more. Or is it just bullshit stripped of any context or meaning
Like, I didn't know about that form of the loss meme, but now that I know it's loss if you add strikethrough, I'm pretty sure I'd recognize it even without the strikethrough.
• : (one person standing) • :| (two people, one standing, one lying down) • :| (two people standing) • ; (one person standing, one lying down)
So I had to look up the meme, saw that the entire representation relies on a strike through. That’s how you get one person in 1 panel. That’s how you get four panels at all.
Sure, if you have seen the meme without formatting, you would recognize it. You probably have seen bots reposting without the right formatting it just like I did.
Or you didn’t. Who can say for sure? That’s my entire point. Comment sections are dead
I'm not sure anyone would recognize this as the loss meme to begin with, unless they got context-hints like "this is a popular meme", strikethrough or not. So, yes, that context is extremely fragile here, but that's because this was made to be barely viable in the first place, not because that's a general quality of any content in the digital realm...
That's not to go against your wider point (to which I have no opinion either way), I'm just not sure this is significant for that.
To convert the comic to :̶.̶|̶:̶;̶ is a very very distance, to remove the strikethrough is nothing.
Read it; it's only a few paragraphs. If I could, I would distill that warning into the guidelines of any serious forum.
Not just because it fits my lived experience. But because one of the people in thread who disagreed — a prolific developer who sought friends on the internet — later killed themselves because of the internet.
> This is also the fundamental mistake people make about the online world being a place where "discourse" can change anyone's internal landscape. It cannot, because it every discourse on the internet is by definition completely a subset of the ego of the single individual.
Discussion on the Internet absolutely can change someone's "internal landscape" - I have constantly learned new things and grown as a person just reading comments on HN... like the one you linked. :) Does it happen over night, or just reading a comment and a flip gets switched? Generally not. But you read things, you reflect on them, you grow over time.
But it's not work. Personal growth ("internal landscape") requires work; unfun human interaction oftentimes. Online discourse doesn't force this work; despite downvotes, flags, and angry text, it's all still in our heads and at our leisure. Whereas in-person or 1:1s force us to maintain empathy and listen— real work[1] that online spaces can only suggest, not enforce.
You could recreate that experience by researching, considering, reflecting and then interacting, but that's different work you impose on yourself. It's outside of the free online watercooler which has little power to change us beyond the ego we've invested in it.
The top commenter above, for example, used internet comments as the beginning of real-life friendships; they did the real work afterwards. Similarly, my original comment was looking more for like-minds, than to change minds; it summarizes an experience for those who've lived it but lack words for it. Though I believe my take is truth, I'm content to have my fun at one point, and do the work at another. Today, I felt like showing my work :)
[1] As a manager, this is a chunk of my job!
Of particular note: comment culture is how I managed to engage with local politics here in Chicagoland, through which I met a ton of my neighbors and got actively involved with campaigns and the local government itself. Those are all in-person relationships that were (and remain) heavily mediated by comments.
This might be me; I am older and have less time. The bar to novelty in my life was a lot lower in my late teens than it is now. But I can't shake the feeling that "something" has changed in the world around me. Every social medium, from the follower-only Mastodons to the heavily algorithmicized Twitter FYP is angry at something or dunking on someone.
(N.B. Sometimes I wonder if this is the nugget of truth behind the wisdom of having kids. That at some point humans become inflexible and recalcitrant but the act of having kids ties your own mood and outlook to the future of humanity as a whole rather than your own crotchety self.)
People who want to discuss things in good faith (which presumably includes you and I) and achieve consensus get bogged down in long and complicated discussions while those who have selfish motivations just do whatever they want largely without any cost. The overlap between people who are 'well-meaning' and 'successful' shrinks, leaving the well-meaning people angry and bitter - not generally at each other, but still sometimes unfortunately.
Has HN really helped people connect in this sort of way?
To me, HN has almost always felt anonymous, in the sense that I don't recognize (hardly) any of the users that post (aside from maybe dang). A lot of times, I don't even look at the username.
I think this is a combination of a lack of an avatar that nearly all other social media platforms have (except maybe Reddit, which also feels anonymous for the same reason, but I don't use it much/am not a member), as well as the low contrast username.
HN seems to intentionally deemphasize the author, and draw the focus on the content of the article and comments. Which results in a lack of connection (again, likely by design).
But I've been around for almost 15 years, and can't think of a single person I've connected with outside of HN, and could maybe name less than a handful of users by their username.
Again, not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. Just would be surprised if many people have made friends on HN (unless you're going out of your way/trying to build a network, which I guess some people likely do).
But, yes, the way the username is displayed matters as well, I rarely look at it.
You're #1 in karma on HN, so you are a kind of oddball: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Also, Chicago is 3rd most populous city in the United States, which likely helps, because your odds of "meeting" someone online who happens to live in your city is higher than people who live in less populous areas.
Conclusion: everyone should move to Chicago. Chicago is amazing!
I've been here over a year and seem to be fairly well recognized at this point, but I don't think I could even confidently name another user in the same city as me.
There’s also another category — people like you! I usually stop and read your posts in the same way my dad would a columnist in the paper years ago.
I think the author of the post was looking for something in the wrong place. Which is all good!
Anyway like the author I often wonder, why tf am I commenting? I don't recognize any of you, even though I've had very pleasant interactions and have learned some interesting things here and there from you (like yesterday I learned about claude sub-agents), but it isn't what draws me. It's some kind of compulsion. Dopamine hits from replies? I do love talking to people IRL as well, so maybe it's just that? My friends tried to get me back into world of warcraft and an hour after logging in all I'd done was sat in a capital city arguing with people in Trade chat. Bizarre compulsion.
I don't understand ROI thinking but what frequently breaks my addiction is remembering that my comments are adding value to some rich bastard's wallet at probably no return to me, maybe harm. At least on reddit and twitter. HN isn't so bad, I mostly have good interactions here, but I'm an addict so what is useful to some is to me, falling off the wagon. Which is what I'm doing right now :P
That said, there's another problem with comment culture that seems worth mentioning. I seem to have gotten good at expressing thoughts that fit in a comment. That gives me a false sense of competence; but when I need to write something longer, like a blog post several pages long, the structure just completely falls apart. And writing a book I can't even imagine. It seems writing at different lengths is essentially different skills, which need to be practiced separately. And if that's the case, then as Annie Dillard says, why not just write something long to begin with? I'm actually thinking of that now.
I have just finished writing a book. It took fifty-five months from its inception. Twenty-four months since I signed the contract, and I was thirteen months late. I have written books before, and this was a book on something that I am pretty much the only authority on (my own methods of working), but still it was a slog. This book is the last one. Never again. It's so overwhelming to me. I felt like some hermit building a church on an island.
I got the final proofs of the thing, today. It's a wonderful sense of accomplishment. But, no, never again!
I think what you described up to this point is a valuable form of socializing—exchanging information. So maybe “comment culture” isn’t absolutely valuable, but I guess that makes it no different than other forms of socialization; dependent on how useful the interaction is to the parties involved.
marginalia_nu put it well elsewhere
> It shouldn't be taken as a replacement for having a social life, but can be a very good complement if your social life isn't as intellectually stimulating as you would like.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45147454
And it looks like this is where the author of this blog post erred.
Your last part about long-form writing is interesting and one of the consequences of frequent commenting, microblogging and short-form communications in general that I can relate to. The two practices do feel separate. I figure they’re about as distinct from one another as a conversation is to a lecture.
I write many more comments that never get posted. The act of writing forces clarification of thought which I find very useful.
Comment culture died starting in 2016, as the internet as a whole became more polarized and making maliciously edgy is both commonplace and rewarded. Hacker News is an outlier in that aspect as it avoided that fate.
What hasn't worked out is the no-holds-barred mega-spaces.
It seemed to have worked quite well.
The mind loves to invent time regret in hindsight: "I should have cleaned the house instead of watching TV", "I should have spent more time with my kids instead of spending so much time at my job", things like that. Is that what you mean?
I'm on the train right now, I probably spent five minutes phrasing this comment (and if it feels like five it was likely ten) meanwhile I had a book I was going to try and finish and instead I squandered the ride on Internet junk food.
So to answer your question: yes, but no.
-- William S. Burroughs, "The Western Lands"
I could wander around town and strike up conversations with strangers and years would pass before I found somebody with the specific set of interests. But there in the depths I can find somebody else who is actually looking to talk about the same niche thing.
I don't know if friends is the right word, I only rarely meet them again later. But for a brief time we were a some kind of partner.
> It has made me a (mostly) better person.
> All of that social activity with zero ROI.
Sorry you didn't make friends from it, but "zero ROI" seems pretty at odds with the rest of your results.
We really don't need to assign ROI to every single thing we do.
And I don't think comment culture takes away from any of the activites that lead to more meaningful relationships. Like, how do you imagine this works - "I'm not going to comment on this tech blog post while I'm having my cofee this morning so that later this week I can meet with people at a local book club"? One has nothing to do with the other.
The returns aren't constant. There are periods where I no longer see the value and that's when I stop until I see the value again. But if you never find ROI, how does one find the motivation?
It shouldn't be taken as a replacement for having a social life, but can be a very good complement if your social life isn't as intellectually stimulating as you would like.
stop thinking about the nature of comments, the content, the responses you get. start thinking about the thoughts/emotions that come up when trying to make connections irl.
I have some pretty strongly held, but also probably divisive opinions, that I’m afraid would push people away from me if I voiced them to my irl people.
So the thought / emotion is feeling limited irl, and feeling less limited in an anonymous Internet forum. And even occasionally validated in an Internet forum when you find someone that agrees with you. (Or sometimes, when I’m proven wrong, I get something to think about for a little bit.)
Interesting thought exercise, thanks.
I miss phpBB as the dominant mode of internet socialization. Communities with norms, in-jokes, reputation. Take me back!
In the 90s and into the mid-aughts, we would give out our names, phone numbers, and addresses no problem. It's a world where cryptocurrency could sprout because it was built around chat rooms and forums with like-minded individuals, or individuals working/playing in particular niches. Today, most people seem to assume giving your address is something only an idiot would do, or that times have changed drastically so it was fine then but stupid now.
I think we live in a world now where people are conditioned to no longer speak to each other. This is a world where Jesus would be very strange indeed, even if we do find ourselves under a nominally Christian nationalist government. Imagine letting a stranger into your house, or even talking to a stranger in a parking lot. There will, for sure, be no kind of foot-washing.
I agree this is largely conditioning coming from the gamification of socializing brought on by social media and other websites to drive engagement. I don't think the average Internet user would be like this without conditioning by big technology companies. I think it can be beaten by recognizing it as a harmful addiction, and an addiction that can be pretty tough to beat. Government and tech companies aren't going to fix it; it's something you have to want to fix for yourself.
There's something different about social media culture and polarization, and it's not as much the polarization as something else.
I think it's the volume. Maybe I'm an elitist but there's something niche about agreeing to disagree. And building communities in other ways even when disagreeing.
The first is persona-centric rather than topic-centric spaces. The former emphasizes individual posters and attention to them; the latter, topics.
The second is upvoting and downvoting. As I've returned to traditional forums a bit, it's been refreshing to have the content of the posts be at the forefront, rather than the popularity. Reaction emoji usually suffice to me to fill the role of upvoting and downvoting.
Anonymity helps too, although I suspect it's mostly those other two things.
What were interesting ways to share interests, hobbies, projects and free knowledge degraded post-social media into a cesspool of engagement, with the exception being the AI generated jesus or cat pictures.
Pretty much everything else went to shit and is created to make you mad, because that's when you talk or click the most.
A couple years ago when I was targeted by APT28 the first time, I decided that the only healthy internet time is around twice a day for a couple minutes and that should be it. So I introduced the toilet rule: I only use social media on the toilet, and I don't even have the passwords on another device.
This way I guarantee the same level of content quality that social media expects me to have, without the emotional aftermath when the bots try to reinforce you in their absolutist beliefs of why killing someone is actually okay.
It's great, I can fully recommend it. I've never been more productive.
> All of that social activity with zero ROI.
Pick one
It wasn't always like this, and the I feel the whole "engagement" blame is misplaced.
You don't post comments for engagement, you post it for recognition. And people post selfies on social media not to farm engagement, but to attract attention.
The engagement part come after it. Someone welcomed the content you posted, it's positive feedback from there. The social media platforms wants to farm engagement for profit, you, or rather most people at least, don't.
The connection part on the other hand, is your own effort, it don't happen automatically. Platforms are just a place, a pub, for people to gather, you need to do the work to find friends.
As for the worst thing, I think it's that you can have "kittens playing" and "terrorist attack" posts right next to each other. That can't be a good way to view what's going on.
Maybe 20% of the time I don’t actually submit the comment because I read it and decide I have nothing substantial to say.
But the commenting is at least as formative and useful as the articles.
But now as my comments are likely being fed into AI for training for profit by specific individuals, it doesn't feel the same. I'm getting a stronger urge to keep my expertise to myself.
Also, the benefits of good writing aren't as great anymore. I still kind of benefit in terms of practicing my tough typing... It's valuable to be able to type AI prompts quickly.
But for every positive case there are just as many negative ones. I have an intrinsic need to answer questions and will often spend an inordinate amount of time doing so, when in fact I could have used that time far more productively.
One idea I have is to mimic Lincoln–Douglas debates where two people debate each other in a fixed format and with structured time for rebuttal. The hope being by slowing down rebuttal the response becomes more mindful.
In general though I think its the speed and low quality of response leading to dissatisfaction of comment platforms.
But seeing it as a bad ROI in terms of social interactions that don't create any social bond, that's quite true. You spend all this time "socializing", and yet gain no social connection from it.
Discord, unlike IRC, is killing forums. And is on the Deep Web, meaning that all the lore, all the knowledge is lost to anyone searching for it, including Internet Archive crawlers.
And in addition to that it's a platform, so people using it are collaborating with totalitarian extremists that are turning our countries into (uncool) cyberpunk dystopias.
I am not talking about reddit subs, maybe something more niche, even for hobbies outside computing.
The only place where I felt in company of real humans is a couple of niche IRC channels, where someone without fail always asks me how my day is going whenever I join, I am looking for places like that.
Given AI, bots, and desire to make Internet properties collect identification data of all users to make sure they're adults (even though their ISPs already do), I feel like your new, exciting and culture-driver Internet spaces of the future are going to be more like private clubs if trends continue.
They won't be accessible until you physically check in with the admin at a public place, or attending a "Meet-N-Greet" type function. This will make them local-first, and such clubs/forums will have to master the art of developing and networking with other local chapters.
Things operated like this before the Internet, and that's where the real people are probably going to end up back to, because the Internet is becoming as boring and tamed as the capital-intensive corporate-driven phone and TV networks of yesteryear.
Should surveillance increase, I can even see the typical social function of the Internet being nothing more than an events calendar and payment processor, and no other real chat or interaction happening within it.
I dislike that that's my reasoning.
I would look for local( like in your state/city instead of global) or small userbases (so it's unlikely most are bots).
But I think I've aged and the internet has changed too. Today, I have the friends I need in real life, and I don't make friends online. Not sure if it's me or the world has changed, or both. Probably mostly me.
I often watch YouTube live streamed sports watchalongs and have become familiar with the regular super chat contributors that are read out. Similarly on Twitch there are many regular streamers with small communities and regular chatters.
But it's shallow and self-aggrandizing, because I comment, hit post, and... never look at it again because what if I'm actually held to account on what I just said?
But also, nobody's ever read a comment and thought "whoa I need to get to know this person better!" and reached out - but that's normal because I never read a comment and have that thought.
Publishing my opinion is great, that's why so many people have blogs and twitter and such as well, it's their own soapbox. But conversing over comments, not so much.
HN's issue is that you don't get notifications if someone replied to you. Someone may reply to you, you may reply to them again, but who knows if they read it and reply again? Reddit's issue is that I ignore notifications.
Forums were great 15-20 years ago, I'd go there several times a day, go through ALL the unread posts, read everything, reply, and there would be actual conversations going. But also usually not one to one, so you'd rarely stand alone in any discussions.
But for me, that time has passed. I haven't been to these forums in ages (and I run them, lol), I just don't read long posts, especially from people I know who write long posts, the personal conversations have mostly died out and moved to Discord or private chats - because over time, people shared too much, were too trusting, and got hurt because of it.
TL;DR, I'm still on the internet but it's a husk of the mid 2000s - or at least my experience thereof is, the generation following will probably say the same in 20 years time. It matters more what time in your life you are than the online communities themselves I think.
It actually doesn't anymore. LLMs can transform you into Diogenes in a mech suit.
You can minimize your expended energy, maintain emotional cool-ness (vital to being perceived as 'winning' to the audience), and ultimately turn every discussion into a war of attrition. If your opponent is getting emotional heated and burnt out, they eventually drop out.
If you get off on winning online arguments, it turns comment culture into an asymmetric warfare. We're going to I expect this to destroy forums. Ideologies and untreated anti-social personality disorders cannot, at scale, co-exist with the commons.
The point of commenting is not being social or a socialite. The best comments are questions - asking others, questioning yourself.
Looking back at some of my comments, some were clearly toxic and I know why: it was time when things weren't going my way at work (cause most of my comment activity is in tech-related forums). It reminds me when I was bullied at school, which made me at times not the nicest brother. Took me too long to notice I had this tendency.
But their reasoning then becomes unsound: "All of that social activity with zero ROI." They throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It seems that the author belong to the same regeneration as mine, so they might be in that period of their life - the "forties blues" or "middle age crisis" (1). This doesn't "invalidate" this post, except for the false dichotomy between Internet acquaintances and IRL friends. It is a warning to be heard, at a time when we see more and more smartphone zombies in the streets.
(1) it becomes really ironic when you been looking at teens and their identity crisis with a patronizing eye in your thirties-forties and then you experience it a second time yourself.
Everyone comes to online social space looking for some kind of connection, friendship or otherwise.
Even more if it's a discussion forum, instead of wall of temporal comments.
HN doesn't qualify for either, but there probably exist active places that qualify.
I struggle with comments, where I try to be succinct and to the point. I’ve been soft-banned on HN – to the mods credit they worked with me to restore my account, and had good intentions.
Commenters and moderators tend to favor vague, long-winded language and double-entendre over direct & succinct comments.
Hence my frequent downvotes and soft-bans.
I can't tell if Hacker News is less affected by this, or if it lends itself to parasocial relationships, but I've started to recognize a few other users who seem to frequently read and comment on the same topics that I do.
I don't think these will blossom into friendships, but many friendships of mine have started with frequenting the same location or event until you see who else is usually there, and then introducing yourself.
If this kind of comment-acquaintance is common on HN though, it probably comes back (as always) to the self-selecting user base, the text-only interface, and of course, the moderation. Because I certainly haven't experienced it on Reddit, Twitter, or Meta platforms.
