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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. T

by 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
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    That's remarkably close to suggestions I've had for a "Dunbar's Web". You could cover the entire population of Earth with a small set of tiers: six or seven, each neighboring with 50-150 others. I also see the possibility for both immigration and some form of exclusion or shunning. There are further complications: the 90/9/1 rule, multiple personals, etc. But I find it interesting.
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.

by hucker 11y ago

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
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  That's remarkably close to suggestions I've had for a "Dunbar's Web". You could cover the entire population of Earth with a small set of tiers: six or seven, each neighboring with 50-150 others. I also see the possibility for both immigration and some form of exclusion or shunning. There are further complications: the 90/9/1 rule, multiple personals, etc. But I find it interesting.

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.