7 ms·

The weirdos are all still out there. Something has definitely changed though, the internet communities of the past used to be very VERY tight-knit. There just

by hodwik 11y ago

The weirdos are all still out there. Something has definitely changed though, the internet communities of the past used to be very VERY tight-knit. There just wasn't that many of us, so you'd talk to people unlike you. I knew my bbs friends all by their first and last names, had photos of them, would talk to the better ones on the phone, they were some of my best friends despite them usually being completely different from myself. These days, I don't know a single person on the internet, and I rarely interact with people on the internet who are different from me, so I never get into the depth of conversation I once did. That's something lost. The internet used to be like a dive-bar in an ivy-league college town, full of geniuses and weirdo townies. These days it's more like the city of New York -- no one knows you, and no one cares to.

beamatronic 11y ago
In the BBS days, the bar was higher to getting online. Some technical knowledge was required, and there were extra costs. I'd like to know the modern day equivalent. I would be interested in seeing some sort of mesh network become popular, completely separate from "The Internet", with completely different protocols and paradigms, that you could access and participate in, just by sticking an antenna on your roof, plugging in some kind of adapter, and running some software. Or perhaps you could utilize existing Wifi hardware and run a completely different set of protocols on it.
- pachydermic 11y ago
  You're pretty much exactly describing HAM radio. Well you need to pass a test to transmit, but still...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - blackbeard 11y ago
    You should pass a test to transmit but there's a ton of pirate activity out there. I have some respect for rule breakers on that front because the barrier to breaking the rules is pretty high. If I had the inclination I'd build a QRP station and learn Morse. My days of burning fingers on a soldering iron and climbing up trees is gone now.
- tricolon 11y ago
  I'm not saying it's a modern day equivalent, but MetaFilter has kept its relatively high bar of a $5 one-time membership fee: http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi I find that enlightening discussions happen there with a surprisingly high frequency, even today.
hucker 11y ago
That was kind of the original beauty of the internet, friendships across nationality, age, sex, religion, etcetera. {An,Pseud}onymous or not. Now we're back to hanging out with the same people on the internet as we do in real life.
- luso_brazilian 11y ago
  Not really. The general population maybe, the latecomers and the new generations of the Internet (specially the 65+ Crowd that just got their first smartphone with FB and email apps). However there are still plenty of people congregating both anonymously (see 4chsn and other specialist forums) or pseudonymously (see HN, slashdot, reddit, many IRC channels and many other places), even in greater numbers than in the good old BBS/Usenet days. It just feels they it's disappearing because it is the exception now instead of the rule but places to share (sometimes weird) interests where nobody knows you're a dog are plenty and varied.
  - hucker 11y ago
    While I see your point, I frequent most of the places you mentioned, and somehow they don't give me the same feeling of comradery as the IRC channels of yore. There are probably many reasons for this, but part of it is the numbers -- there is simply too many people on HN/most subreddits/chans etc. for me (may be different for other people obviously) to see people as anything but statistics. Also I think the {up,down}vote mechanic are good for aggregation sites, but toxic to communities in general. It rewards groupthink and noncontroversial content so much that for any, say, subreddit, with more than some certain amount of users it becomes incredibly uninteresting.
    - hucker 11y ago
      hodwik: It seems we've exhausted the max depth of the comments, so I'll reply here. I think you're a bit older than me, I never really experienced the BBS-days for example. Nonetheless, I agree completely. I remember especially a gaming forum in my language that I used to hang out on for years, where I knew 80% of posters, knew who was the trolls and who was the pros and we'd meet up for pizza every now and then etcetera. I miss those days. I see the forum is still up, but at some point it was overrun with users and the old sense of some kind of fellowship died out.
Swizec 11y ago
There is a solution. You live in a filter bubble. Start clicking like on things that challenge instead of gratify you. Upvote things that are different. Get off HackerNews and go hang out at a sceptics' message board. Or go hang out at an artist's community. They exist. They don't care about tech and startups as much. The internet is still out there. It's still interesting. It's still fun. But the big data/community silos are afraid of offending you because most people really really don't want to be challenged. It's up to you. You have to go find the challenge. Just like always. Step out of your comfort zone. The internet isn't boring because the internet has changed. The internet is boring because you got older and don't enjoy a good flamewar anymore. Or just don't have the time and energy to consistently challenge yourself with new ideas and communities. It happened to me too. And it sucks.
- nosuchthing 11y ago
  The internet has grown, and people have gravitated towards the slick sanitary UI of and larger user base of the social media capital cities. If there's anything to learn from Ello, it's that there's a large mass of social internet users who are willing to migrate to new services that arn't as shady and advertisement infested as the current juggernauts are, it's critical to offer an easy to use service like the juggernauts do or else it's not quiet worth it. If you care to do some exploring, there's plenty of communities out in the boonies but you would never know if you never went searching.
trhway 11y ago
may be just age? I think the youth do have their tight-knit communities of friends, game teams, etc... We are gen X, we're about technology and thus all the thrills of discovery of the capabilities during the early Internet (and that time has of course passed since then), the next generations just take it as matter of fact, as electricity from wall socket, and their excitement and life in the Net is in different plane, not that visible to us. It just we who moved into (and make up) the suburbia while new cool kids on the block are living their urban life.
danneu 11y ago
> These days, I don't know a single person on the internet Getting to know people is a function of spending time with them. As you get older, you spend less time socializing on the internet. The internet, especially a forum, is a really time-consuming and inefficient way to socialize. You meet more of a person saying "hi" to their face than you do after months of reading their posts online. When I was a teen stuck at home with the family and school, I had time for that back when the internet and games were an escape and a way to have some control over my social life. It's me that's changed, not the internet.
- hucker 11y ago
  I'm going to have to disagree. While is spend less time socializing on the internet now than when I was younger, that is not because I have less time on the internet, but for lack of opportunities. Hell, I spend more of my days on the internet now, whether I'm studying or working. And while the internet can never (for me) become a substitute for socializing in the real world, I don't really find it more efficient than on the internet. If you simply read someone's posts, sure, but from conversing (on e.g. IRC)?
- lost_name 11y ago
  I don't disagree but it's hard to say the internet hasn't changed. 15 years ago Digg didn't exist, Facebook wasn't even a concept, and no one ever used the term "social media." I wonder if the proxy interactions, things such as likes, karma and retweets, etc. have replaced the desire to get any approval from other people? Maybe we never really cared about the heartfelt appreciation from a person we didn't actually know, but it turned out the number of people we reached was always more interesting. You don't actually have to get to know or interact with other people; you can shout into the void and know someone else heard you from a couple numbers, and maybe we collectively decided that's all we really wanted. edit: I suppose I'm using "we" as "people" in this comment, also I didn't consider how old danneu might actually be; Maybe younger is 5 years ago.
- Raphmedia 11y ago
  > You meet more of a person saying "hi" to their face than you do after months of reading their posts online. Yes, but that don't stop you from reaching out and saying "hi". I am (mainly) a front-end developper, and I occasionally send emails to the developper of product or websites that I love and simply offer to help them out. I don't work for free, but what I am doing isn't working. It's sharing knowledge. I would email "Hi there! I love your product! I noticed that your X isn't working correctly... did you try Y solution? I had the same problem a while back." Sometime, this email is ignored. Sometime, a developper end up reading it. Sometime, it's some guy who is passionate about his product but has no idea what code even is. Yes, the internet is turning into a mall. That doesn't stop you from becoming friend with the managers of the store next to yours.
phlandis 11y ago
Hey I'm Phil.
- pawelabrams 11y ago
  Hi, Phil and everyone, Paweł here (you can call me Paul, Polish is hard). This article highlighted the existence of Urbit to me (and probably many more)... and I shouldn't probably talk about your startup, since this thread is arguing exactly against it. Just to say: you're doing good work – and I might meet you some time in Urbit's chat :D
jefurii 11y ago
Tilde.club seemed to be on the verge of starting something like this. SDF has been doing it since the 1980s. https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...
PopeOfNope 11y ago
Something has definitely changed though, the internet communities of the past used to be very VERY tight-knit. They're still out there. They don't advertise, for obvious reasons.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  In a way, it's no different than the old days; the good stuff is out there, you just have to dig and find it...and now most of it is also right next to / under a mile-high mountain of rubbish :)
  - hodwik 11y ago
    In the old days everywhere you went was tight-knit. These days, only really obscure concerns remain tight-knit.
ggchappell 11y ago
> ... I never get into the depth of conversation I once did. That's something lost. Others have given some good answers, but I think there is another factor: the way discussions are organized. In a typical BBS, or on UseNet in days of old, a thread was linear, identified only by its subject line. Multiple people could stay with a thread for a relatively long time and have an extended discussion. Today, most online forum software (HN, Reddit, etc.) displays threads as trees. Each reply begins a new subthread. As a result, a conversion involving more than 2 people will rarely be linear, and a reply 2 or 3 or 4 levels in will be read by almost no one. But the solution is not to move back to linear threads. Those were abandoned for a good reason: they do not scale. Six active posters might be able to have a reasonable linear discussion. 100 cannot. Linear threads are also much easier for one poster to hijack. Among 6 people, there is a decent chance that none of them is a jerk. Among 100 people, the chance is pretty much zero. So the thread gets filled with troll posts. Conclusion: tree-shaped discussions, along with voting, are what prevents us from being drowned in troll posts & flamewars. So, what is the solution? I don't know. It's an interesting problem to consider.
- jchung 11y ago
  Pretty sure this is exactly what @codinghorror is experimenting with on http://www.discourse.org/ http://www.discourse.org/
  - sergiotapia 11y ago
    I use Discourse daily on the meteor and ember forums. It's just a forum, just a little faster and built client-side tech. Nothing really 'amazing'.
- hokkos 11y ago
  I think about it regularly. There is the Discourse solution that is mostly linear but with a replies button to show inline the replies. There is the google wave solution, if I remember well, that is tree like but more dynamic than reddit. Maybe there should be something hybrid where new answers are shown at the top but can be inline expanded to show the context and the replies, and the tree structure is kept after.

by hodwik 11y ago

beamatronic 11y ago

In the BBS days, the bar was higher to getting online. Some technical knowledge was required, and there were extra costs. I'd like to know the modern day equivalent. I would be interested in seeing some sort of mesh network become popular, completely separate from "The Internet", with completely different protocols and paradigms, that you could access and participate in, just by sticking an antenna on your roof, plugging in some kind of adapter, and running some software. Or perhaps you could utilize existing Wifi hardware and run a completely different set of protocols on it.

pachydermic 11y ago
You're pretty much exactly describing HAM radio. Well you need to pass a test to transmit, but still...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- blackbeard 11y ago
  You should pass a test to transmit but there's a ton of pirate activity out there. I have some respect for rule breakers on that front because the barrier to breaking the rules is pretty high. If I had the inclination I'd build a QRP station and learn Morse. My days of burning fingers on a soldering iron and climbing up trees is gone now.
tricolon 11y ago
I'm not saying it's a modern day equivalent, but MetaFilter has kept its relatively high bar of a $5 one-time membership fee: http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi I find that enlightening discussions happen there with a surprisingly high frequency, even today.

hucker 11y ago

That was kind of the original beauty of the internet, friendships across nationality, age, sex, religion, etcetera. {An,Pseud}onymous or not. Now we're back to hanging out with the same people on the internet as we do in real life.

luso_brazilian 11y ago
Not really. The general population maybe, the latecomers and the new generations of the Internet (specially the 65+ Crowd that just got their first smartphone with FB and email apps). However there are still plenty of people congregating both anonymously (see 4chsn and other specialist forums) or pseudonymously (see HN, slashdot, reddit, many IRC channels and many other places), even in greater numbers than in the good old BBS/Usenet days. It just feels they it's disappearing because it is the exception now instead of the rule but places to share (sometimes weird) interests where nobody knows you're a dog are plenty and varied.
- hucker 11y ago
  While I see your point, I frequent most of the places you mentioned, and somehow they don't give me the same feeling of comradery as the IRC channels of yore. There are probably many reasons for this, but part of it is the numbers -- there is simply too many people on HN/most subreddits/chans etc. for me (may be different for other people obviously) to see people as anything but statistics. Also I think the {up,down}vote mechanic are good for aggregation sites, but toxic to communities in general. It rewards groupthink and noncontroversial content so much that for any, say, subreddit, with more than some certain amount of users it becomes incredibly uninteresting.
  - hucker 11y ago
    hodwik: It seems we've exhausted the max depth of the comments, so I'll reply here. I think you're a bit older than me, I never really experienced the BBS-days for example. Nonetheless, I agree completely. I remember especially a gaming forum in my language that I used to hang out on for years, where I knew 80% of posters, knew who was the trolls and who was the pros and we'd meet up for pizza every now and then etcetera. I miss those days. I see the forum is still up, but at some point it was overrun with users and the old sense of some kind of fellowship died out.

Swizec 11y ago

There is a solution. You live in a filter bubble. Start clicking like on things that challenge instead of gratify you. Upvote things that are different. Get off HackerNews and go hang out at a sceptics' message board. Or go hang out at an artist's community. They exist. They don't care about tech and startups as much. The internet is still out there. It's still interesting. It's still fun. But the big data/community silos are afraid of offending you because most people really really don't want to be challenged. It's up to you. You have to go find the challenge. Just like always. Step out of your comfort zone. The internet isn't boring because the internet has changed. The internet is boring because you got older and don't enjoy a good flamewar anymore. Or just don't have the time and energy to consistently challenge yourself with new ideas and communities. It happened to me too. And it sucks.

nosuchthing 11y ago
The internet has grown, and people have gravitated towards the slick sanitary UI of and larger user base of the social media capital cities. If there's anything to learn from Ello, it's that there's a large mass of social internet users who are willing to migrate to new services that arn't as shady and advertisement infested as the current juggernauts are, it's critical to offer an easy to use service like the juggernauts do or else it's not quiet worth it. If you care to do some exploring, there's plenty of communities out in the boonies but you would never know if you never went searching.

trhway 11y ago

may be just age? I think the youth do have their tight-knit communities of friends, game teams, etc... We are gen X, we're about technology and thus all the thrills of discovery of the capabilities during the early Internet (and that time has of course passed since then), the next generations just take it as matter of fact, as electricity from wall socket, and their excitement and life in the Net is in different plane, not that visible to us. It just we who moved into (and make up) the suburbia while new cool kids on the block are living their urban life.

danneu 11y ago

> These days, I don't know a single person on the internet Getting to know people is a function of spending time with them. As you get older, you spend less time socializing on the internet. The internet, especially a forum, is a really time-consuming and inefficient way to socialize. You meet more of a person saying "hi" to their face than you do after months of reading their posts online. When I was a teen stuck at home with the family and school, I had time for that back when the internet and games were an escape and a way to have some control over my social life. It's me that's changed, not the internet.

hucker 11y ago
I'm going to have to disagree. While is spend less time socializing on the internet now than when I was younger, that is not because I have less time on the internet, but for lack of opportunities. Hell, I spend more of my days on the internet now, whether I'm studying or working. And while the internet can never (for me) become a substitute for socializing in the real world, I don't really find it more efficient than on the internet. If you simply read someone's posts, sure, but from conversing (on e.g. IRC)?
lost_name 11y ago
I don't disagree but it's hard to say the internet hasn't changed. 15 years ago Digg didn't exist, Facebook wasn't even a concept, and no one ever used the term "social media." I wonder if the proxy interactions, things such as likes, karma and retweets, etc. have replaced the desire to get any approval from other people? Maybe we never really cared about the heartfelt appreciation from a person we didn't actually know, but it turned out the number of people we reached was always more interesting. You don't actually have to get to know or interact with other people; you can shout into the void and know someone else heard you from a couple numbers, and maybe we collectively decided that's all we really wanted. edit: I suppose I'm using "we" as "people" in this comment, also I didn't consider how old danneu might actually be; Maybe younger is 5 years ago.
Raphmedia 11y ago
> You meet more of a person saying "hi" to their face than you do after months of reading their posts online. Yes, but that don't stop you from reaching out and saying "hi". I am (mainly) a front-end developper, and I occasionally send emails to the developper of product or websites that I love and simply offer to help them out. I don't work for free, but what I am doing isn't working. It's sharing knowledge. I would email "Hi there! I love your product! I noticed that your X isn't working correctly... did you try Y solution? I had the same problem a while back." Sometime, this email is ignored. Sometime, a developper end up reading it. Sometime, it's some guy who is passionate about his product but has no idea what code even is. Yes, the internet is turning into a mall. That doesn't stop you from becoming friend with the managers of the store next to yours.

phlandis 11y ago

Hey I'm Phil.

pawelabrams 11y ago
Hi, Phil and everyone, Paweł here (you can call me Paul, Polish is hard). This article highlighted the existence of Urbit to me (and probably many more)... and I shouldn't probably talk about your startup, since this thread is arguing exactly against it. Just to say: you're doing good work – and I might meet you some time in Urbit's chat :D

jefurii 11y ago

Tilde.club seemed to be on the verge of starting something like this. SDF has been doing it since the 1980s. https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...

PopeOfNope 11y ago

Something has definitely changed though, the internet communities of the past used to be very VERY tight-knit. They're still out there. They don't advertise, for obvious reasons.

seanp2k2 11y ago
In a way, it's no different than the old days; the good stuff is out there, you just have to dig and find it...and now most of it is also right next to / under a mile-high mountain of rubbish :)
- hodwik 11y ago
  In the old days everywhere you went was tight-knit. These days, only really obscure concerns remain tight-knit.

ggchappell 11y ago

> ... I never get into the depth of conversation I once did. That's something lost. Others have given some good answers, but I think there is another factor: the way discussions are organized. In a typical BBS, or on UseNet in days of old, a thread was linear, identified only by its subject line. Multiple people could stay with a thread for a relatively long time and have an extended discussion. Today, most online forum software (HN, Reddit, etc.) displays threads as trees. Each reply begins a new subthread. As a result, a conversion involving more than 2 people will rarely be linear, and a reply 2 or 3 or 4 levels in will be read by almost no one. But the solution is not to move back to linear threads. Those were abandoned for a good reason: they do not scale. Six active posters might be able to have a reasonable linear discussion. 100 cannot. Linear threads are also much easier for one poster to hijack. Among 6 people, there is a decent chance that none of them is a jerk. Among 100 people, the chance is pretty much zero. So the thread gets filled with troll posts. Conclusion: tree-shaped discussions, along with voting, are what prevents us from being drowned in troll posts & flamewars. So, what is the solution? I don't know. It's an interesting problem to consider.

jchung 11y ago
Pretty sure this is exactly what @codinghorror is experimenting with on http://www.discourse.org/ http://www.discourse.org/
- sergiotapia 11y ago
  I use Discourse daily on the meteor and ember forums. It's just a forum, just a little faster and built client-side tech. Nothing really 'amazing'.
hokkos 11y ago
I think about it regularly. There is the Discourse solution that is mostly linear but with a replies button to show inline the replies. There is the google wave solution, if I remember well, that is tree like but more dynamic than reddit. Maybe there should be something hybrid where new answers are shown at the top but can be inline expanded to show the context and the replies, and the tree structure is kept after.