Hrm. I can only imagine the Yahoo! Chat room issue, or "What was IRC like in 1990?" edition. I could see a few on Myspace alone (here's to Tom, I hope he got

Hrm. I can only imagine the Yahoo! Chat room issue, or "What was IRC like in 1990?" edition. I could see a few on Myspace alone (here's to Tom, I hope he got some "fuck you money" out of the deal). And so many Livejournal communities! I am older than the usual skew of the HN demographic and I can only say that a lot of this feels like surfing or stepping off of one escalator and onto another. Yes, you can do it smoothly but at some point the endless transition from one thing to another feels shallow, and the gossamer threads of personal relationships between you and someone else on a vanishing Internet community snapping might only be heard by the smallest of web spiders. Businesses shutter, call some place Paradise and kiss it goodbye, new moderators decide to "pivot" or the gentle incoming surf of Eternal September rises like a tsunami and washes it all away. We may have become perversely attached to the impermanence of things and, if so, may be then treating one another with less depth than can be kind. Nobody names mayflies.