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The internet was way more social before "social media" came along.
by ravenstine 8y ago
The internet was way more social before "social media" came along.
- pcurve 8y agoI think anonymity was a big plus, including getting to know them part. It took work, but it was a lot of fun. Just like making friends in real life.
- buboard 8y agoOtherwise known as "unblock lists"
- lucb1e 8y agoI don't understand what you mean and can't find the term literally on Google. Do you have a link to something explaining it?
- c0nsumer 8y agoThe idea is that you didn't hear everyone, or even a significant amount of people, by default. You effectively had to find what you wanted and make efforts (joining chats, RSS feeds, etc) to tune-in. Or... make lists of things to... unblock.
- baddox 8y agoI assume the commenter means that, with modern social networks, you specify a list of people with whom you socialize, instead of previous networks (perhaps like IRC) where you stopped by and could socialize with whoever happened to be there. Of course, this is not really the case. Twitter is a great example where the default is that anyone can stumble upon your profile and tweets.
- buboard 8y agoyep , this. and even twitter is somewhere-in-between
- Hello71 8y agoOtherwise known as "white lists"
- CydeWeys 8y ago100% agreed. I had much better real personal conversations on the "old" Internet. Facebook and smartphones killed it. Nowadays a lot of people are only available via SMS, and I don't have the patience to type out long messages there. Calling someone up and chatting is better. I loved the IM era and it's a huge shame it's over. I don't have as many personal connections with people now as I did then. AIM, ICQ, and later Gtalk were all amazing.
- pwaivers 8y agoI don't think the IM era is over. Now, there is Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Google Hangouts. These have some very cool features and you can easily set up a chat with all your friends.
- apearson 8y agoI think it's better to say, the desktop era has ended and the mobile era has begun. A lot of people don't sit in front of a computer popping online and offline anymore. Everyone is always online and I feel like that has fatigued people.
- mjevans 8y agoYes, in the old days you might have been lucky enough to be post-dialup, but being AROUND meant you were actually interested in being somewhere, rather than being nowhere online and instead only brushing up against that.
- pantalaimon 8y agoVery much this. With always online mobile instant messaging I always feel like I'm bothering someone when writing them. For me I've solved it by treating it as an asynchronous chat and won't always reply immediately. On desktop chat you would know that people would only be online if they made the conscious decision that they are up to chatting.
- PenguinCoder 8y ago
- umeshunni 8y agoSure, if you happened to be privileged enough to have the internet then.
- wpietri 8y agoBy the time Facebook and Twitter were founded, about 2/3rds of the US was online: http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/us/ http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/us/ So a) one didn't have to be hugely privileged to be online before social media took over, and b) I don't think the level of privilege of participants has much to do with the change that this article is talking about.
- umeshunni 8y ago1. There are countries outside the US (and Europe) 2. Most of these countries came online only in the mobile era 3. Many of these countries have Facebook and broadly, Internet usage that eclipses US and Europe.
- Aeolun 8y agoI don’t think they’ve been online long enough to have much relevance to the point of this article though.
- wpietri 8y agoI agree all those things are true, but I don't see how they are relevant to the point. Are you perhaps claiming that social media evolved differently in some of those countries and so one of them serves as some sort of contrasting example to the article?
- overthemoon 8y agoI agree. That being said, and all caveats about Apple software, privacy, etc aside, using iMessages to text people from my laptop feels a little like the old AIM days.
- cableshaft 8y agoI use Hangouts to chat with people via my desktop over SMS. Only with my core group of friends though. I used to chat with all sorts of people. There's this one random guy that pings me whenever I pop on Steam and if I'm not busy I'll chat with him for awhile.
- sodosopa 8y agoThat depends. Blogs and Twitter were great until they became marketing tools.
- dharmab 8y agoErrant Signal has done some good videos on this in the context of video games- both online video games and video games set in the era before social media. "Social Spaces and Payload Races" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hj1haLcdI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hj1haLcdI0 "Secret Little Haven" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzHFRfOVOuQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzHFRfOVOuQ
- meddlepal 8y agoI am glad I got to experience the "old" internet. I miss it deeply though.
- prawn 8y agoWas it the old internet or the younger you? I used ICQ and whatever else at the time. These days I chat with a few people via Hangouts and enjoy it, though the discussions have changed because I'm ~20 years older.
- Aeolun 8y agoI think it is a combination of both. The younger internet was more open and free because there were less people using it, and by extension, less people actively trying to break it. Now stuff has to be locked down, because otherwise bad shit happens.
- agumonkey 8y agoI'm struggling to wrap my head around the shift between those two eras. The more the ~new web tried to be .. the worse it got. AIM/MSN days were so stupidly simple. Forced integration with real life made everything into pain and didn't improve relationships.
- nbaksalyar 8y agoIt really was. ICQ, MSN, and even Skype had this feature of finding people by their profiles (country, age, interests, etc.). What’s more important, people were open to talking to complete strangers back then, and it felt like magic to talk to someone from the other end of the world. And it was nice to be contacted randomly by new people. Some modern social networks have similar features, but I can’t imagine doing this in this age. And in the last 5 years I’ve never been contacted randomly by anyone either.
- depressedpanda 8y agoI literally got laid after being contacted out of the blue by a semi-random stranger on ICQ back in the day. We had met once when we were twelve or so. She was actually looking for a friend of mine, but we decided to meet up. Being college kids, stuff happened. Nowadays I would just have dismissed and blocked her as yet another spambot.
- wott 8y agoWell, in those days IRL, everyone's name, address and phone number were publicly available in the phone book, you would answer all phone calls without knowing who was calling, and it wasn't a problem is it was someone you didn't know; same for visits. Nowadays, each of those is seen and felt as a terrible violation of your privacy, your intimacy, your property even... and people often rather play possum than take the 'risk' of picking up the phone or opening the door when the phone or the door bell rings. When you call someone who hasn't got your number already, you are initially met with hostility (in the lucky case the person even picks up the phone) and have to justify "how the hell did you get my number?"
- icebraining 8y agoAren't you talking to complete strangers right now? I can't say I remember meeting you :)
- nbaksalyar 8y agoWell, isn't HN an oasis of the good old Web? ;) You're right though, but these connections are rarely long-lasting.
- tigershark 8y agoYes, totally agree, but you have also to consider that 25+ years ago we were the only like-minded people that enjoyed to explore the possibilities of the then brand new world changing technical service called gopher... sorry I meant “internet”. Now it’s kind of extremely inflationated.. everyone has access to it for no reason at all apart, in most of the cases, to increase its own ego. Something that for us was just short of magic, now it’s as easy and natural as breathing. I’m still happy about the result because now it’s trivial to learn something that you care about if you’re passionate enough. But interacting with people driven from the same passions that we experienced in the past is something that it’s very difficult to find today. Maybe HN it’s one of the few places where sometimes you can breath a similar atmosphere.
- BurningFrog 8y agoI can't help think that the people who say that were younger and more social then. First half is definitely true :)
- laumars 8y agoI'd never thought about it before but you're absolutely right
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoDepends. It had smaller communities, so it felt more personal and closely knit. Nowadays it's much more of a soapbox platform, especially Twitter which is shouting into the void. Facebook felt like a more closed community - I checked it out at some point and felt like hey, this doesn't feel like there's billions of people on here. Low on ads too at the time. Since then though the noise has drowned out whatever signal was there, and adding more people only increases said noise. I had a realization the other day that two thirds of the posts my friends on there make are also ads - posts about movies they watched, shared trailers, games they played, etc. Intersperse that with the regular ads and it's an ad stream. I glaze over every time I try and visit it now.