11 ms·

I think a lot of people here are missing the point. Yeah, there's a lot more content to consume now. However, it doesn't feel like a community... it feels more

• querulous 8y ago
  this absolutely still exists, it's just different than it used to be. go find a twitch streamer that averages 10-300 viewers and you'll find a community. join a slack/discord organization for some niche hobby and you'll find a community. start an instagram account chronicling your trips to craft breweries and you'll find a community
  • Qwertie 8y ago
    There are a lot of friends to be made on IM groups. I have found the best way to create a good community is to have it be invite only so you don't get random people joining and leaving constantly and the people who are there tend to stick around for a long time.
• Robotbeat 8y ago
  That's why I have private Tweets now and still use a pseudonym.
• lostctown 8y ago
  The nodes on our existing social graphs are too large. I'll define a node in this case as a user's potential social graph over time. A naive social network that mitigates this is nextdoor. I say naive because the concept of a "neighborhood" on nextdoor results in a lot of bigotry and noisy neighbor effects. Kind of literally in this case. But the idea of breaking down large nodes in favor of smaller nodes tied to the community in which a user resides is a decent idea. I speculate we'd see greater efficiency in self-regulation, too. It's not a silver bullet, of course. At least globalization tends to decrease cultural ignorance. I'd wager global social networks are here to stay, but I think a powerful network could arise that focuses on more refined slices of the social graph.
  • eksemplar 8y ago
    I think size explains some of it, but I think the way we view the internet is the real issue. Upvotes and karma systems have trained us into seeing the internet as a popularity contest even when we’re posting useless nonesense. Even on small subreddits, you’re still entering a staged debate which gets judged by its audience, and nobody wants to take an unpopular position, and if they do so by mistake they certainly won’t do it twice. Hacker news is similar. I’m sure there is a lot of people who hold back because they don’t want downvotes or maybe even because they don’t want no votes, and you simply can’t have any meaningful conversation when everyone is self-censoring.
• y2bd 8y ago
  This is pretty much how I felt as a long-time TF2 player super excited for Overwatch to come out, and then very sad once I realized what kind of game it was. You grab your friends and play Overwatch, while you play TF2 and meet your friends. And also a parallel, TF2 obviously still exists, but all of the servers I used to play on are gone now. Haven’t found anything else quite yet. FFXIV actually was super enjoyable from a community perspective, but I’m not super into MMOs.
  • nol13 8y ago
    Internet's been all downhill since Westwood Chat got shutdown.
    • spc476 8y ago
      It's all relative. There are some that think the Internet has been all downhill since September of 1993 [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
      • B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
        Or April 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
  • notaspider 8y ago
    I wish I had thought to cash out my hats before Overwatch came out :(
  • dannyw 8y ago
    The smallness and novelty of the internet made it more of a community. If you played TF2 in 2008, I would say the interests of each player is more homogenous and compatible compared to Overwatch in 2018. I think this is one factor at play. The other is the shift from desktop to mobile, from community participation to content creation or consumption - almost mutually exclusive. Finally, deprioritization of the identity (Reddit, Hacker News, many forums, even Medium to some extent) doesn't help either.
• bfuller 8y ago
  > I don't think relationships like that are really formed anymore. nah they are. you have to get into really specialized discussion groups.
• jonmb 8y ago
  Forums are still a thing. Maybe not as much as they used to be, but the communities are out there. I've met several people from IGN's forum. And I've heard of many meetups in subreddits. I agree with you though. The Internet is not "special" like it used to be when it was new. Now it's just another normal everyday thing, like the radio and TV... And full of ads.
  • mozumder 8y ago
    Better than forums for real-life socializing are mailing lists..
    • AstralStorm 8y ago
      Not really. They either tend to overflow and turn into a mess or stay very topical.
• mattnewton 8y ago
  I suggest reddit, there are enough weird ones hiding here or there
• icantdrive55 8y ago
  "Sure, maybe it is just an age thing, and nothing has really changed. But I don't know... I feel like the Internet used to be something special, and now it feels like flipping through TV channels in your office break room." At one time, I could get any book, journal, or work of art off the Internet for free. Yes--it was wrong, but it was also magical. Those days are gone, unless you live in a country that allows it? Today, I seem to go to the same monopolized websites. Websites that seem to control me? I never felt that in 2007. Hackernews is my one of my three sites I go to. And yes--it was so nice when celebrities didn't know how to use the internet. So--so nice. I wonder if artists/authors/creators are better off with today's internet? (Yes, downloading was against the law. I don't need a lecture. That period of history was exciting though.)
• jonreem 8y ago
  Join a discord server for a relatively niche interest that you have and not only will you meet many others with similarly deep interest in a water cooler format but you will be able to work on your hobby much more effectively with a close community of like minded people. Discord is a place that still has conversations and communities, not broadcasts and celebrities.
  • kuschku 8y ago
    Or go with good old IRC. In my experience on Discord you only find absolutely toxic communities, which is not very surprising, considering it's the casual equivalent of IRC.
    • gsich 8y ago
      What's 'toxic'?
      • JetSpiegel 8y ago
        Just the new thought-terminating cliché for "things I disagree with".
        • gsich 8y ago
          Thought so too.
        • salvar 8y ago
          So there's no such thing as toxic behaviour in your mind?
          • diffeomorphism 8y ago
            How could you possibly get that impression from what was written? The claim was the complete opposite that almost any objectionable behavior is labelled as "toxic". It is hence about as undescriptive as "liberal" is in American politics. That term many years ago had a well-defined narrow meaning but is now far removed from that (or like "literally" often meaning "figuratively" in common use ).
• mseebach 8y ago
  I think a major factor is the fact that the internet is now mainstream. In the early days, you had something in common with everybody, simply by being on the internet. The place was silly with people absolutely floored by the idea that they were casually chatting with someone halfway across the continent, something only possible on very expensive phone calls until then. Everybody was also, by necessity, an early technology adopter. It's much easier to strike up a conversation with a stranger when you have something meaningful in common, and the early internet was that. Today, it's the equivalent of walking down the street, it's just infrastructure. Infrastructure is great, but it doesn't help you make friends.
  • maltalex 8y ago
    There’s still some of that in IRC. IRC clients serve as a barrier that filters out a surprising number of people.
    • mseebach 8y ago
      Just like in the real world: You don't go out on the street to meet people, you use the street to get to the place where the people you're likely to enjoy meeting are likely to be. IRC might be one such place, but there are many others - HN is one, even if not directly social in nature.
    • always_good 8y ago
      There's still some for sure, but I can't help but notice how empty IRC communities are these days. Bigger ones like #node.js/#javascript on freenode are about 10 people strong if you actually count the regulars. Frankly I think something like Slack is a better middleground for most communities. People are filtered out because they have to be bothered to install Slack and join the community. Yet it has community-building features that IRC doesn't have, like the likelihood that someone will get messages when they are offline/away and that they will actually come back.
      • thatfunkymunki 8y ago
        EFNet is still running strong! Plenty of good chats and communities around if you look for them. Freenode operator abuse is antithetical to community chats.
• hkmurakami 8y ago
  A lot of message boards are still going strong 15~20 years later though. I’m still an active part of one after 12 years. Meeting a German friend from there tomorrow irl for the first time in 10 years.
• keypress 8y ago
  Depends when you came, some folk are only just discovering online discourse. I'm a member of 'a' forum, and it still fosters conversation. To me it feels similar to an old usenet 'channel'. I'll admit it's not as zany and anonymous as it perhaps once felt. Back then we rather foolishly thought it was more ephemeral. I blush when glancing old posts. Such is - I guess.
• some_account 8y ago
  I miss those early days too. And I fear the internet will turn into another source of media channels where people are just consumers.
• yoyogesh01 8y ago
  I do feel the same. Back then i have published several blog of what i was learning, and interacting with visitor. I also met one of the friend i made online, guess what all that is past... Or May be i have become boring.
• personlurking 8y ago
  I feel like the time when online connections (ie, over long distances) ended in real-life encounters was good throughout the decade of the 2000s. After that, people became too flakey due to social becoming too important (the type that click "I'm going" to an event, but only do so as a means of saying they like the idea of going to said event).
• apatters 8y ago
  It's definitely changed and it happened slowly so we didn't notice at first. In the 90s and the early aughts the social fabric of the Internet was comprised of a number of small communities, each of which had a distinct membership and culture. By the 2010's the big players had come along and supplanted these Internet communities. Facebook talks all the time about its "community" but it's more like a theme park which gets visited by billions of people, and your friends all hang out around one ride but so do a thousand other randoms. You'd have to be a PR spokesperson to look at that and call it a community. All the big social networks employ this model of throwing everyone into the same arena but humans aren't wired to feel at home in that environment, so we get all these weird side effects like social media causing depression, loneliness, and the angst expressed by this writer. Reddit is the only one that hearkens back to the old days a bit -- each community has local moderators and a somewhat distinct culture, but the corporate overlord is still there sanitizing, monetizing, and occasionally messing with people's posts. I think the language issue is especially interesting, did we fail to recognize that our communities were dying because we lack a word for the thing that supplanted them?
  • lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    > All the big social networks employ this model of throwing everyone into the same arena but humans aren't wired to feel at home in that environment, so we get all these weird side effects like social media causing depression, loneliness, and the angst expressed by this writer. That is an amazingly good point - its very easy to be lost and lonely in a crowd.
    • Izkata 8y ago
      Mayhaps not perfectly applicable, but your last line reminded me of this: > Sheridan: Once during the war, my fighter was disabled. I sat there, radio out, power out, for eight hours, which seemed like eight years. I didn't think I'd ever see another living being. Well, I was rescued, obviously, but.. I'll never forget that.. feeling of helplessness. I, I never thought there could be anything worse than being all alone in the night. > Delenn: But there is. Being all alone in a crowd. You feel cut off from your people, from your government. You even begin to doubt yourself. I understand it so well, that it cuts to my heart. -Babylon 5 2x14, There All the Honor Lies, 1995
• konschubert 8y ago
  > And now, real identities are involved, so they have to be professional. My Twitter profile is linked to my real name, but on Mastodon I'm trying to stay anonymous. It's amazing how much more stuff I'm willing to post on Mastodon than on Twitter.
• mFixman 8y ago
  You got old.