4 ms·

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

by 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.
  - hodwik 11y ago
    Exactly, the fact that there are more people (at "HN, slashdot, reddit, many IRC channels and many other places") means that you don't really know anyone. Remember back when you'd join a new forum, and they'd have a Welcome Thread just for you, asking you about your interests, etc.? When's the last time you've received a real personalized welcome to a web community? I think it's been at least 15 years for me. I'm not sure how many people on Hacker News actually remember that internet, most of the community here might be too young to even know what we're talking about. Edit: Someone ought to make a Web 1.0 emulator, that is invite only. People can set up their own websites, etc. but there is a limited amount of people allowed to join. We can live in the old days FOREVER. XD
    - derefr 11y ago
      A thought coming from military logistics: one of the best things you could do for the "friendliness" or "camaraderie" of a group of people is to cut it into monkeysphere-sized packets (~150 user cap), such that the people in that packet associate mainly with one-another. This is a "Company." So, imagine a website like Reddit, where upon registration, you get assigned at random to a Reddit Company—a little shard of Reddit with its own posts and comments. Imagine further that you could give people an invitation link to allow them to move from their company to yours—again, permanently, though if you made friends in the original company they'd likely be willing to invite you back. This would have a lot of the Web 1.0 feel, I think; the users would probably get to know one-another quite well, and those "welcome threads" would be perfectly common. Interestingly, even though a given user's view of the website would only show items from their partition, you could still use statistical information collected from the entire user-base to do "wisdom of crowds" things, like ranking items. In a company-partitioned Reddit, each post's votes could be aggregated by URL across all Companies, with the Company itself then getting to decide to what degree they care about the tastes of the masses, versus the tastes of their (presumed) peers.
      - personlurking 11y ago
        Would the French "Company" only have 49 users? http://i.imgur.com/SLwl1Gl.png http://i.imgur.com/SLwl1Gl.png
  - seanp2k2 11y ago
    IRC is still alive and well, and many people who also don't want the IRC days to be over still hang out :)
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    You can still find those communities, but you have to go looking for them. Between about 2006 and 2012 I used to spend a ton of time in the Amiga community. It was an interesting mix of experiences, each of the different forums had their own feel and different core users, though there was a lot of cross-pollination between them, with discussions often a mix of underdog us-against-the-world wide-eyed optimism, nostalgia, caustic technical posturing and kitchen sink dramas. It was varied enough to keep my interest, but small enough to get to know the people involved (I recognise some people who post in HN who I knew from my Amiga days). I also learnt a bunch, first exposure to FPGAs was through Amiga developments, for example. If you're interested in classic computing I'm sure it'll still be relatively active, would start lurking at amigaworld.net and see where it takes you. I'm also sure you could find other similar communities if Amigas weren't your thing.
  - 1arity 11y ago
    yes completely agree with the status quo reinforcing effect of voting. it also encourages ego games which contribute to trollage.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- seiji 11y ago
  However there are still plenty of people congregating But not in the same way. I used to know people's lives from IRC and ICQ. I remember chatting online for hours. I was interested in their lives and they were interested in mine, and not just in the current vapid "HN cares inordinately about young successful people and old rich people because it gets you in their good graces" sort of way. Now I can't get anybody to return a direct iMessage in less than 3 hours to 2 days and that's from people I already know. HN is kinda useless from a "developing friendships" point of view because it's topic hopping, not just open for daily rambling discussions. Reddit is even worse off because you can't have a meaningful community of 300 million people. We've definitely lost something. I think it'll come back, but we have to engineer it—the past won't circle back on its own with the current barrage of centralized-only, for-private-profit only, fast-flux, buzzfeed-adhd-driven discussion platforms being shoved down our keyboards.
  - Nadya 11y ago
    >I used to know people's lives from IRC and ICQ. I remember chatting online for hours. I was interested in their lives and they were interested in mine, and not just in the current vapid "HN cares inordinately about young successful people and old rich people because it gets you in their good graces" sort of way. Now I can't get anybody to return a direct iMessage in less than 3 hours to 2 days and that's from people I already know. I still use IRC and don't have this problem at all. I've even been in the same IRC channels for nearly 5-6 years now. These random strangers from around the globe know more about me and my interests than my own family.
  - eropple 11y ago
    > I used to know people's lives from IRC and ICQ. I still do. Not even holdover communities; I joined a new community about a year ago, and another two years before that. These folks are cool, I like them, I've met a bunch of them in person whenever they come to town for PAX or whatever. > Now I can't get anybody to return a direct iMessage in less than 3 hours to 2 days and that's from people I already know. That sounds like a friend-selection problem to me.
  - dTal 11y ago
    >HN is kinda useless from a "developing friendships" point of view because it's topic hopping A much larger issue IMHO is the lack of any provision for private messaging (aside from email addresses in profiles).
qiqing 11y ago
I meet and befriend all manners of people who are different from me (across nationality, age, sex, religion, etc.) at Burning Man.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  Burning Man is indeed great for that, and the community aspect is the biggest attraction for me. Also, it was nice meeting you at jQSF :)
- ErikRogneby 11y ago
  I've been twice and didn't find it all that diverse. Here is some data: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-ethnic-and-gender-diversity-breakdown-of-Burning-Man-attendees http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-ethnic-and-gender-diversity... Not saying that you won't meet awesome people, but I think the demographic is a lot less diverse than most people like to think.
  - gaius 11y ago
    It's diverse in the way Google is diverse: lots of races, gender identities and sexualities, but everyone's a 20-something graduate of the same handful of schools, has the same attitudes and politics, similar jobs etc.

by hucker 11y ago

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.
- hodwik 11y ago
  Exactly, the fact that there are more people (at "HN, slashdot, reddit, many IRC channels and many other places") means that you don't really know anyone. Remember back when you'd join a new forum, and they'd have a Welcome Thread just for you, asking you about your interests, etc.? When's the last time you've received a real personalized welcome to a web community? I think it's been at least 15 years for me. I'm not sure how many people on Hacker News actually remember that internet, most of the community here might be too young to even know what we're talking about. Edit: Someone ought to make a Web 1.0 emulator, that is invite only. People can set up their own websites, etc. but there is a limited amount of people allowed to join. We can live in the old days FOREVER. XD
  - derefr 11y ago
    A thought coming from military logistics: one of the best things you could do for the "friendliness" or "camaraderie" of a group of people is to cut it into monkeysphere-sized packets (~150 user cap), such that the people in that packet associate mainly with one-another. This is a "Company." So, imagine a website like Reddit, where upon registration, you get assigned at random to a Reddit Company—a little shard of Reddit with its own posts and comments. Imagine further that you could give people an invitation link to allow them to move from their company to yours—again, permanently, though if you made friends in the original company they'd likely be willing to invite you back. This would have a lot of the Web 1.0 feel, I think; the users would probably get to know one-another quite well, and those "welcome threads" would be perfectly common. Interestingly, even though a given user's view of the website would only show items from their partition, you could still use statistical information collected from the entire user-base to do "wisdom of crowds" things, like ranking items. In a company-partitioned Reddit, each post's votes could be aggregated by URL across all Companies, with the Company itself then getting to decide to what degree they care about the tastes of the masses, versus the tastes of their (presumed) peers.
    - personlurking 11y ago
      Would the French "Company" only have 49 users? http://i.imgur.com/SLwl1Gl.png http://i.imgur.com/SLwl1Gl.png
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  IRC is still alive and well, and many people who also don't want the IRC days to be over still hang out :)
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  You can still find those communities, but you have to go looking for them. Between about 2006 and 2012 I used to spend a ton of time in the Amiga community. It was an interesting mix of experiences, each of the different forums had their own feel and different core users, though there was a lot of cross-pollination between them, with discussions often a mix of underdog us-against-the-world wide-eyed optimism, nostalgia, caustic technical posturing and kitchen sink dramas. It was varied enough to keep my interest, but small enough to get to know the people involved (I recognise some people who post in HN who I knew from my Amiga days). I also learnt a bunch, first exposure to FPGAs was through Amiga developments, for example. If you're interested in classic computing I'm sure it'll still be relatively active, would start lurking at amigaworld.net and see where it takes you. I'm also sure you could find other similar communities if Amigas weren't your thing.
- 1arity 11y ago
  yes completely agree with the status quo reinforcing effect of voting. it also encourages ego games which contribute to trollage.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
seiji 11y ago
However there are still plenty of people congregating But not in the same way. I used to know people's lives from IRC and ICQ. I remember chatting online for hours. I was interested in their lives and they were interested in mine, and not just in the current vapid "HN cares inordinately about young successful people and old rich people because it gets you in their good graces" sort of way. Now I can't get anybody to return a direct iMessage in less than 3 hours to 2 days and that's from people I already know. HN is kinda useless from a "developing friendships" point of view because it's topic hopping, not just open for daily rambling discussions. Reddit is even worse off because you can't have a meaningful community of 300 million people. We've definitely lost something. I think it'll come back, but we have to engineer it—the past won't circle back on its own with the current barrage of centralized-only, for-private-profit only, fast-flux, buzzfeed-adhd-driven discussion platforms being shoved down our keyboards.
- Nadya 11y ago
  >I used to know people's lives from IRC and ICQ. I remember chatting online for hours. I was interested in their lives and they were interested in mine, and not just in the current vapid "HN cares inordinately about young successful people and old rich people because it gets you in their good graces" sort of way. Now I can't get anybody to return a direct iMessage in less than 3 hours to 2 days and that's from people I already know. I still use IRC and don't have this problem at all. I've even been in the same IRC channels for nearly 5-6 years now. These random strangers from around the globe know more about me and my interests than my own family.
- eropple 11y ago
  > I used to know people's lives from IRC and ICQ. I still do. Not even holdover communities; I joined a new community about a year ago, and another two years before that. These folks are cool, I like them, I've met a bunch of them in person whenever they come to town for PAX or whatever. > Now I can't get anybody to return a direct iMessage in less than 3 hours to 2 days and that's from people I already know. That sounds like a friend-selection problem to me.
- dTal 11y ago
  >HN is kinda useless from a "developing friendships" point of view because it's topic hopping A much larger issue IMHO is the lack of any provision for private messaging (aside from email addresses in profiles).

qiqing 11y ago

I meet and befriend all manners of people who are different from me (across nationality, age, sex, religion, etc.) at Burning Man.

seanp2k2 11y ago
Burning Man is indeed great for that, and the community aspect is the biggest attraction for me. Also, it was nice meeting you at jQSF :)
ErikRogneby 11y ago
I've been twice and didn't find it all that diverse. Here is some data: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-ethnic-and-gender-diversity-breakdown-of-Burning-Man-attendees http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-ethnic-and-gender-diversity... Not saying that you won't meet awesome people, but I think the demographic is a lot less diverse than most people like to think.
- gaius 11y ago
  It's diverse in the way Google is diverse: lots of races, gender identities and sexualities, but everyone's a 20-something graduate of the same handful of schools, has the same attitudes and politics, similar jobs etc.