36 ms·

I don’t want to be an internet person

• 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  nice. here is my idea.... i was online from my pre teens time. i actually had to wait a 'few' years to get my own email address. back then, there was no "social media", no algorithm and you were taught to not give your real "A/S/L" because people could track you down and hurt you and all that. oh the days. i adopted this randomuser handle, not linking my accounts from one service with another, not reusing handles, not having google/FB/apple accounts, it takes time and energy. anonymity on the internet is a wonderful thing really. forget the abusers and stuff, moderation is for that. when you consider the real problem of doxing, you appreciate the benefits of using anoymous handles. >Everyone knows, abstractly, that the internet is not real life. But you can’t picture it, not really, until you sit across from the real people behind the screen. Even the darkest online personalities are just people on their phones. It is oddly disappointing to meet the “worst person on the internet” and find that they are nothing at all. we call if "AFK" and not "IRL"
  • FeistySkink 4y ago
    How do you avoid being doxxed based on your writing style?
    • mnky9800n 4y ago
      I have a terminal application that i wrote that rewrites all text that i plan to write to have a neutral tone. so i type the comment, put it into the terminal application, it rewrites the comment, and then i post that instead.
      • jacooper 4y ago
        Is it open source?
      • askiiart 4y ago
        How did you do that? GPT-3?
        • boppo1 4y ago
          They made it up
      • eu 4y ago
        Do tell more, please.
    • causi 4y ago
      Someone could use my writing style to link my online identities together. How does that help them doxx me when there is nothing written under my real name?
      • throwaway32433 4y ago
        https://stylometry.net/user?username=causi https://stylometry.net/user?username=causi You don't need to give out your name and address to be doxxed, there's enough information from your comments across your accounts to reasonably identify you if someone wanted. MIT did a study on 'anonymised' data and found out it only took something like 2 data points to identify someone.
        • dbspin 4y ago
          Perhaps, but the site above doesn't seem particularly effective. I have an alt for reasons of convenience I use about equally regularly to my main. It's not even listed on the set of likely candidates. Meanwhile I've five spurious correlations above .6.
        • buildsjets 4y ago
          Stylometry does not identify any of my alternate accounts. I ain't skeered.
          • costco 4y ago
            It might have if I had used an algorithm that wasn’t the easiest to implement on stylometry.net. Unless you are varying your writing style across accounts a more sophisticated algorithm could very likely figure out your alts given enough comments. Which is not to say that you should give up everything and stop posting on HN but just something to consider depending on who your adversaries are.
            • causi 4y ago
              That's kind of ignoring my original point that it doesn't matter how many of your accounts they ID if you never put your personal details on the internet.
    • 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
      Wow. Interesting question. I don't have a second account so I checked stylometry and it gave me bunch of names that I know are not me. Maybe I will try with a new second account and confirm. Second, stylometry can dox me how? My current handle is not attached to anywhere else on internet and even if someone did HN/reddit/twitter stylometry analysis, how will that reach my home and or identity of my passport? Its not like I post anything online in my own name. Haven't in actual years. So assuming an adversary was trying to find me and did see my reddit or active twitter account, so... What? Short of breaking into it and checking the 2fa number (which I avoid at all costs) how ? Maybe amazon but I don't write reviews so ..... How would you go about this?
      • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
        << stylometry can dox me how? By themselves, none of the things we discuss are inherently bad. They are just tools. I open with this, because it is important to understand that stylometry by itself uncovers only a small facet of your online persona, by possibly identifying your footprint and allowing for ingestion and analysis for OTHER identifying information. Using your example your passport may not be online, but lets say you link self-hosted project, your website may be registered to your company and, depending on how you set it up, your information may be relatively trivial to run against information broker database ( LX, TR ). It is surprisingly easy to slip even if you are privacy conscious of it and it really only takes one time since internet does remember ( and it is saved somewhere ). I guess what I am saying is I would not dismiss it outright, but at the very least I would check the link parent added; it actually is kinda amazing.
    • mechanical_bear 4y ago
      Use different slang on different accounts. Don’t bother with capitalisation on some. Use British English on some. Etc. The speaking style aligns with the username.
• Eumenes 4y ago
  Is this journalism?
  • pksebben 4y ago
    editorial. it's not making any bones about being an opinion piece
  • hacym 4y ago
    It’s an editorial piece, closer to opinion than news.
  • LastTrain 4y ago
    Why do you ask?
  • helios_invictus 4y ago
    Does it matter?
  • flyingfences 4y ago
    yes
  • greenhearth 4y ago
    Yes, it's gonzo, in tradition of Hunter S. Thompson
  • buildsjets 4y ago
    There is no requirement for HN submissions to be journalistic, so I don't know why you were expecting that. What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
• nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Behind "Creepy is the new cool" lies ambivalence [1]. Author Ginevra Davis writes a voluminous 4300 words that revel in, celebrate and exalt a culture which, in her parting sentence, she reveals to be the sum of all her fears. [1] https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/4415/current-theories-of-the-psychology-of-ambivalence https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/4415/current-...
• woodruffw 4y ago
  I thought this sounded familiar, and sure enough[1]. Edit: To make it explicit, which Palladium notably fails to do: this person is a reactionary and has a history of encouraging young girls to commit suicide. [1]: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=founder-of-milady-nft-project-revealed-to-have-horrifying-history https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=founder-of-milady-nft-proje...
  • WFHRenaissance 4y ago
    <deleted>
    • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      CharlotteFang literally admitted to being Miya on their own Twitter, the link is right in the page linked by GP.
      • WFHRenaissance 4y ago
        <deleted>
        • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
          >Miya is an egregore. CharlotteFang was status-jacking here. Uh-huh. Fascinating. Do go on.
        • alduin32 4y ago
          Are internal posts by CharlotteFang asking to "search & remove any occurrences do kaliacc" status-jacking as well ?
    • sugersvoltet 4y ago
      >While CharlotteFang may be termed something close to reactionary (if your IQ is low and you can only think of 3 or 4 political archetypes) I would put them more in the neo-Nazi / pseudo-Esoteric Hitlerist archetype (https://archive.ph/qlYqD https://archive.ph/qlYqD): >How to save a nation in 5 steps: >First, you kill the Jews, who always seek to ruin and exploit other nations. >Then, you remove any peoples who are not native to the country in question*. >Then, you remove any vestigial influence left by the Jews, either by re-education, physical removal or otherwise. This includes everything under the cultural marxist platform: feminism, homosexuality, "sexual revolution," etc. >Then, you will work to re-coup and re-discover any heritage that may have been lost due to Jewish influence. You will work to carefully modernize your country based on the principles traditional to its native culture. >Now you may allow non-natives into the country but with limited rights on a temporary basis. Other peoples and countries will not be discriminated against, they will each be considered meritable under their own culture; but nothing will be done to draw their influence into the country's own identity. And before one argues this was edgy rusing and meming and LARPing and all that, CharlotteFang/Miya was an active, long-time moderator and owner of several 8chan /pol/ offshoot imageboard websites and boards, as well as a heavy poster on the original 8chan /pol/, all of which have connections to neo-Nazi mass shootings, including one attempted mass shooting of a synagogue (who Miya and friends affectionately refer to as "doorcuck" because he failed to breach the door of the synagogue and resigned himself to murdering some nearby civilians instead). Plus a perusal of their old Twitter makes it very obvious exactly where their sympathies lie. It's all Savitri Devi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savitri_Devi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savitri_Devi) type stuff.
• coldtea 4y ago
  >Like most online culture, it all feels so profound until you realize that he hasn’t said anything at all. So pretty much like TFA... Which is basically a virtue signalling hit piece (the target even asks "if they're planning to write a hit piece"). "The content of his work would repel, or simply confuse, a traditional viewer" ... and then the author points to a screenshot of a tweet (the "drop out of college, default on your student loans" etc (of which the most controversial part is about not getting the covid vaccine) that would seem totally quaint under lots of pretty tame contexts (from 60s counter-culture and 70s punk fanzines all the way to modern leftists), as if the average Joe is the standard after which anything becomes scary... >To 99.9 percent of the population, Charlie is nobody So just like the author?
  • hacym 4y ago
    You’re weirdly trying to attack the author. Why is that?
    • throwaway346434 4y ago
      The author did exactly what the subject of the critical opinion piece did, but did a worse job of it and was entirely unself critical.
      • shanebellone 4y ago
        Good morning, Charlie.
    • coldtea 4y ago
      Because I don't like reading shallow hit jobs, and I think it's not just sloppy writing, but reflects to their authors too.
      • hacym 4y ago
        How is an opinion piece a shallow hit job? If you’re reading this as some credible news… stop?
• jzellis 4y ago
  The worst thing about these people isn't that they're shitty edgelords spouting nonsensical gobbledygook about NFTs like they've discovered fire. The worst thing about them is that they're uniformly boring in every conceivable way. Great, some submillennial has made his own version of ZooTV on a dying social network. That must be terribly exciting if you've never seen any media ever that came out before Gossip Girl. Yaaaaaawwwwwn.
  • zmxz 4y ago
    > they're uniformly boring in every conceivable way This is such concise and brutally accurate way to sum it up, I salute you for this brilliant description. I could not agree more, such a spot-on assertion!
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • kwyjibo1230 4y ago
      Your comment sounds almost Seuss-like somehow. Partly that description and assertion is a slant rhyme, but it also feels like there's some kind of (un)intentional pentameter going on
      • notpachet 4y ago
        "I am the very model of a modern Major General!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXf0o2d-W5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXf0o2d-W5w
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • georgeburdell 4y ago
    As a Millennial who spends a decent chunk of time on the internet, but not on social media sites, your words are incomprehensible to me and I’m not sure why.
• buildsjets 4y ago
  "All my friends are online. Will people forget about me if I am not on the internet?" Yes. But they really weren't your friends to begin with, so it doesn't matter.
  • jacooper 4y ago
    I see this a lot, but is it actually true? Friendships are built on a shared interest / shared activities, and frequent contact. When you stop using the communication medium your friends use, then you just added friction to reach you, which stops frequent contact. you slowly go from a friend to an old friend or a distant old friend. There is a reason that when you move, its a lot harder to keep up with your old neighbors.
    • izzydata 4y ago
      I think it is more implying that friends that you have exclusively online are more of psuedo-friends than real friends. Especially if they make no effort to continue communication after you stop using whatever form of social media you were using before.
    • nonameiguess 4y ago
      There's a difference between a real friend and someone you have some affinity with and currently happen to share a community of some sort. It's fairly common to meet a friend while attending a particular elementary school, going to a church, playing a sport, but when you finish school, stop going to that church, stop playing the sport, you remain friends. It's obviously common to lose touch with a bunch of people and never talk to them again, either. Those were not your true friends. Which raises an interesting question. Is it possible at all to have a relationship that purely takes place on a web platform that will continue after you leave the platform? "The" communication medium your friends use seemingly shouldn't matter. A person you only interact with when there is no friction involved isn't much of a friend.
      • clnq 4y ago
        Jack Shafer in their book "The Like Switch" says that there are 4 elements in building a friendship: proximity, intensity, frequency and duration of interaction. Similarly to work and school friends who are very proximal and spend a bit of time with us, online friends tend to be very distant physically but the interactions we have with them can be intense (like gaming) and frequent. So these pseudo-friendships can have some elements of a strong (substitute for the word "real") friendships, but don't have all of them.
• mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  > I don’t want to be anything like these people. I don’t want to be an internet person. I love this. I got a similar vibe from people who were "too good at IRC," way back in the day. They had a constant, sarcastic, tired energy about them. They had difficulty being genuine about anything. They knew so much and yet they were so stuck in their life somehow. And that sucked the life out of them. It's like they were too tied to this vague idea of being online that they weren't willing to sacrifice it to have a better life. The Internet is a tool, not an endpoint.
  • pixl97 4y ago
    >The Internet is a tool, not an endpoint. Not to be pedant about such things, but there may be a reason it's a common scifi trope that people are hooked to machines and live in virtual worlds. It is not out of question that the internet eventually becomes an endpoint in itself.
    • mattgreenrocks 4y ago
      That's not pedantic at all. I've consciously decided I will favor Real Life over the Internet as much as possible. I really believe the meme that Nothing Happens On The Internet; it's a projection of the Real World and as people we are very susceptible to confusing the map for the territory. From the article: > You can close the computer, but the world will go on without you. Even if culture decides that the Internet is tantamount to real life, I'm happy to keep the Internet at arm's length. It is profoundly weird to me that the private online life I led in the 90s was something shameful and to be hidden and now it's okay to be so addicted you become awkward in real life, constantly on your phone, and that I should give a fuck about my follower count. Besides, accepting that the world will go on without you is part of adulthood.
      • waboremo 4y ago
        The bigger impact here when it comes to internet/real life schism is the fact that employers will utilize any digital footprint to make judgments about you, and subsequently fire you or refuse to hire you because of it. At the same time, having a follower count beyond a certain threshold also gives you access to a lot of real life resources. Both of these have tremendous impact on people in many ways, as an example one of the careers kids have most wanted to become in several decades now has been internet-focused (youtubers, tiktokers, influencers, etc). That's the issue with the qualifier "as much as possible". That will always be sliding towards increasing levels of digitalization that the qualifier becomes meaningless.
• syntheweave 4y ago
  I found XOXO conference to be much the same way. The attendees were capable of some basic social grace, but having manifested from the context of "internet people," they lacked substance in person. It's not hard to not be an internet person. You just have to decide to actually study something, anything, and to a deep level. Once you do that the grounding manifests itself and then you have more important priorities that preclude drifting around like that.
  • neilk 4y ago
    I suspect this is an attempt to troll us all into fighting, by bringing up a beloved conference that some might classify as “woke”. But anyway, there’s something to what you say but I think that analogy doesn’t go very far. Every year the hosts have, in their intro keynote, urged attendees to be more outgoing than normal. So yeah there are lots of introverts. But the promise is that being more outgoing will pay off - because XOXO is curated to be entirely nice nerds. And it’s very anti-grifting. The scene the OP portrayed of e-girls and NFT guys seems like a polar opposite of their vibe. It’s more literature nerds showing off their board game about Pride & Prejudice, or an indie game about a mischievous goose. The whole point of XOXO, I think, was to find people who were doing internet stuff for the love of it.
  • ryandrake 4y ago
    Back in the day, I went and attended a "Fark Party". Remember Fark? Well, they actually had meatspace events, and they were as pasty and awkward as you could possibly imagine! Mostly a bunch of 20-year-olds who were much less interesting than they thought they were. Fortunately, the one I went to was in Vegas, so it was easy to ditch the edgelords and go have fun. A few people mentioned the article's subject matter being Gibsonish, but if I recall (haven't read him in a while), Gibson's cyber-characters were not just online-cool, but were generally backed by richly complex humans. The influencers and Twitterati the author describes have barely any human personality behind them--they're all boring, vacuous, superficial. "You're really not that interesting."[1] 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-ZTksDoH6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-ZTksDoH6w
• trentnix 4y ago
  It’s Vampire: The Masquerade for the modern rebel.
  • toyg 4y ago
    Being socially-challenged enough that you can only work hidden behind a screen hardly makes you a "rebel".
    • Apocryphon 4y ago
      I think another one of the themes of that setting was that the Sabbat or the Anarchs were themselves LARPing as rebels against the Camarilla while creating their own petty kingdoms to control. A rebel today is a warlord tomorrow. Perhaps the same could be said of keyboard warriors.
• aliqot 4y ago
  I know of a few people who will be receiving this link as a gift from me today :)
  • swader999 4y ago
    Maybe they need help, encouragement and a true friend more than this kind of "gift"?
    • throwayyy479087 4y ago
      I really, really think that negative feedback needs to make a comeback. Anything besides a hugbox counts as bullying now, even when _people desperately need to change_. The people in this article are horror shows who need introspection, not encouragement.
      • missingrib 4y ago
        They're horror shows because...they're boring/awkward/spend a lot of time online? I think you need a reality check.
        • throwayyy479087 4y ago
          The main character in this is a prolific antisemite and has Nazi leanings. That’s a horror show.
      • swader999 4y ago
        Well it's fair to debate the best way to bring about change that I agree they need. I certainly don't mean to encourage them to continue on this path. Everyone needs a kick in the ass now and then but I would bet money that kind of approach here would just push them further into their shells.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
    • 4y ago
• ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
  "I Don’t Want to Be an Internet Person" "Ginevra Davis studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford and now works in art and design. She writes about technology and youth culture." One step would be to stop using your state-issued name on the internet. "Cr4zyBoy4eva" is a bit better than the Facebook/LinkedIn-mandated "real name", but rather childish, hence why an arbitrary UUID string might be a better fit. "There are no girls on the internet" and "on the internet men are men, women are also men, and children are FBI agents" point to a deeper truth, which will only be amplified by the post-Turing test chatbots, beyond ChatGPT: the internet is not for humans, there are no humans on the internet, don't be a human on the internet.
  • reaperducer 4y ago
    stop using your state-given name on the internet. I'm what country does the state decide what your name is? I thought that was always the province of someone's parents.
    • shanebellone 4y ago
      It's a phrase describing the name found on your state identification.
    • throwaway4aday 4y ago
      While you're technically correct that the state does not pick the specific name you are given, in many cases they restrict which names you can register. Germany has restrictions on both given names and surnames. State-given name is a misnomer for the concept though, they should have said state-registered name. https://www.germany.info/us-en/service/04-FamilyMatters/name-declaration-child/950018 https://www.germany.info/us-en/service/04-FamilyMatters/name...
      • ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
        Yes, corrected to "state-issued".
    • ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
• throwaway4aday 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure this generalizes to everything. People who cultivate a persona in any sub-culture or domain seem to be a fish out of water when confronted in a different context. Take someone from the rave scene and plop them down in a microbrewery bar and everyone will gawk at the brightly colored fidgety person that has no idea what to order. Take a polished SV entrepreneur and deposit them in an Idaho roadhouse and observe as they struggle to communicate with patrons that don't speak pitch-deck. Extremely online people generally don't practice the skills necessary to communicate well in person like eye contact, conversation, or manners so you'll get predictable results when gathering them in meat-space. I'm pretty sure a bit of googling will turn up a long history of articles of this nature dating all the way back to the BBS days. Having attended BBS meetups I know that the vibe of these gatherings hasn't changed.
  • ipaddr 4y ago
    BBS meetups weren't really like that. You had young/old mismatched people who could communicate because life wasn't online back then.
    • toast0 4y ago
      BBS meetups are filled with BBS people who may seem mismatched to outsiders, but their community is the BBS, and for some, their life is online on the BBS
      • lupire 4y ago
        What do they talk about online? It seems that the reason they BBS is that that in-person meetups (or even plain IM/email chat) don't work for them.
        • autoexec 4y ago
          In my experience most people who joined a BBS didn't have any problems with email or IM, but at that time most didn't have access to either of those things outside of the BBS systems they used. Even people who had internet access back then used BBSs to communicate with people near them on topics that were either local or which generally interested them. Most boards had spaces which allowed general discussion of anything, even if the BBS was created with a specific subject in mind (computers, warez, occult stuff, photography, etc). Lots of the people I saw at meetups were a bit on the shy/awkward side, which wasn't too uncommon for people who were into computers in general those days, but they were able to get along fine at meetups because they already knew many (if not most) of the other people there. They'd spent hours talking, and debating, and sharing ideas with them. They could go to a meetup and talk about all the same things they talked about online and they already had some idea of how people would react to them. A local BBS was a great place to meet friends because it gave people a safe space to get to know each other at their own pace with carefully chosen words before being forced into real-time face to face interaction, and once they already had relationships established the transition to hanging out in real life was made much easier.
• boredumb 4y ago
  The pattern here is not the internet but these people being severely autistic and so they are probably forced to thrive online where they aren't having to deal with eye contact or other social queues that they can't really process. Not even sure what this was meant to be, but it should probably be rewritten to "I don't want to be an autistic person" and it would have read the exact same way. Even down to the preferred drug use being a straight up dissociative...
  • throwaway346434 4y ago
    I found the author's pointed lack of bothering to ask about pronouns when the subject of their investigation posts under different ly gendered pseudonyms; use of the words "normal people" and infiltrating a group only to neg them to be more problematic than anything. The subject of the article might be a real shitheel. But the author doesnt do us any favours by cloaking themselves in being a Voice of the Normal while being themselves a shitheel.
    • jacooper 4y ago
      > lack of bothering to ask about pronouns Because no body actually cares, no body will use your made up pronouns. > use of the words "normal people" and infiltrating a group only to neg them to be more problematic than anything. Isn't it obvious that the people in this group are clearly not normal?, they even admit themselves!
      • tetrep 4y ago
        How are peoples' names less made up than their pronouns? It seems just as rude to refuse to use someone's preferred name as you would their preferred pronouns.
        • throwayyy479087 4y ago
          Outside of a small set of Twitter/Tumblr/TikTok bubbles (which overlap in userbase), pronouns are fixed: he/she/they (rarely they). Xe/Xir is not something average people will honor or use.
• jacooper 4y ago
  > You hear it all the time—“the internet is horrible, but.” But I can learn so much. I need it for work. All my friends are online But these are not the Internet's problem, rather edge forums/social media problems, however I recognize that for many people, the internet is just social media at this point. A true internet person should be one who uses it frequently, that would probably be a software developer, yet most of the time they aren't as crazy as these people. > He slouched in his chair and told me, unprompted, that he doesn’t have many friends Wow. These people are just mentally ill at this point, its impressive that they were able to attract girls to this shitshow. Also how do they make money? Do they all just sell NFTs ? > I don’t want to be anything like these people. I don’t want to be an internet person. Amen.
  • sugersvoltet 4y ago
    >Also how do they make money? Do they all just sell NFTs ? Correct, they sell NFTs of mass-generated cartoon art.
• nullstyle 4y ago
  Damn, palladium has really fallen off, quality-wise, since their launch.
• cxf12 4y ago
  I now know that giving my 10 yo daughter a phone for Christmas 3 years ago was a huge mistake for the exact reasons this article sites.
  • jacooper 4y ago
    I was given unfiltered access to the internet at an early age, yet I found my self avoiding almost every pitfall in it I still don't why or how to direct kids towards having this "internal compass" to avoid weird or dangerous stuff.
    • joemazerino 4y ago
      But when? The internet is much more dangerous now than it was in the late 90s.
      • lilboiluvr69 4y ago
        I'm not entirely sure I agree. I mean, maybe I do. I think one could argue that the internet is a lot more moderated in this day and age, but maybe you were referring more to the addictive and destructive effects of social media. Do you care to elaborate?
        • clnq 4y ago
          Moderation seems to be best at getting rid of low-hanging fruit. There is much less easily accessible gore, shock and radical content online these days. But thanks to the very large scope of the internet, there's plenty of more insidious threats of the cultural (unsavory, doomer), physiological (dopamine-bombing scroll media, attention-grabbing content, personalized emotional manipulation by ads), and societal (dating/friendships moving online, echo-chambers, etc) nature. Probably like the author of the comment you are responding to, I also grew up with the early pre-y2k internet. As a kid, I've seen some extremely disturbing thigns online that are burned into my memory until today. And yet they do not have as much impact on my life today as the terminally online society does. It's hard to exactly quantify how our lives would be different if the internet never developed past it's 1990s state. But I feel strongly that they would be very different. Would my life be much different if I didn't see one or two unsavory images as a kid online? Probably not. Even when I was young, I had functional mental/emotional boundaries for that. On the other hand, as an adult, I still have to consciously stay away from doomscrolling because I know my brain has never evolved for that kind of abuse. To sum up, moderation doesn't seem to target threats online that are actually dangerous. And they seem to have impacted our society tremendously from my perspective.
• gwbas1c 4y ago
  I was very active in my local dial-up BBS scene in the mid-late 1990s, when I was a teenager. I even ran a dial-up BBS. Outside of school, I estimate that I probably spent more time online than socializing with my friends IRL. (In real life.) BUT: I have much more vivid memories, and better bonds, with my friends. This is partially because we spent a lot of time together in school, and because we actually bonded. Although I had online friends, and I took the time to meet some other BBS people IRL, I never developed any real bonds with them. One of my very active BBS users attended the same college as me. We met a few times, but never rekindled our online bond. This made me realize that my online bonds are more like a hobby than a real lifelong friendship; much like at-work friendships that fizzle out after a job change. Needless to say, a few years ago I generally dropped out of Facebook; the hobby (Facebook) was getting in the way of my relationships. The people I care about either don't post on Facebook, or Facebook seems to make me angry at them.
• PixelForg 4y ago
  This article has been eye opening for me, I too spent a lot of my time on the internet but thankfully never came across the deep end. Made me realize that there's no point in keeping up with memes and stuff and made me think about what actually matters
  • pixl97 4y ago
    Eh, this article really touches on nothing new and if I bothered I could find many others like in in the past X00 years based on people that dive head first into things and make it their lives. "I don't want to be 'religious fanatic group' person" , "I don't want to be 'music trend people", ad infinitum. It turns out that people that tend to focus on one subsection of culture are not well rounded and generally boring superficial people. Nothing about this has to do with the 'internet', it's just that HN is eating it up because the word internet is in it and many of us have a strange magical reverence to it.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• hardnose 4y ago
  I don't want to be a Stanford art major who describes people they meet in passive-aggressive terms like, "clear skin and dead, vacant eyes".
  • thundergolfer 4y ago
    That comment is not passive-aggression, the second part of the description is an overt denigration.
  • glasss 4y ago
    That was my biggest takeaway. I didn't realize I was reading a hit piece, but maybe that's my fault.
    • Sebguer 4y ago
      Given that the people being detailed are literally documented predators & abusers, I think the tone of the article was overly kind.
• BWStearns 4y ago
  I like the piece. The tone kinda gives me the same vibes as Neil Strauss' The Game (vibe heavy anthropology trip into the distasteful, or at least unnerving, subculture). The part at the very end about the internet people winning is the part that freaks me out (and drives my own middlingly unhealthy doom-scrolling). Just the other day I saw Curtis Yarvin is now some minor Rasputin figure for Peter Thiel, and I couldn't help but think "that lunatic monarchist edgelord from years ago is now influencing where real real political money gets spent?" I don't want to be an internet person, or even pay as much attention as I do, but it feels kind of like even if you don't believe in the internet, it believes in you and it'll eventually show up anyways.
  • TremendousJudge 4y ago
    It reads a lot like Neal Stephenson to me, both the tone and the topic. Anyway, if you like that sort of dives into a weird subculture let me recommend Sam Fussell's Muscle. Here's an interview with the author that got me to read the book: http://www.drmichaeljoyner.com/sam-fussell-an-interview-with-the-author-of-muscle/ http://www.drmichaeljoyner.com/sam-fussell-an-interview-with...
    • BWStearns 4y ago
      I didn't consider that because it's nonfiction but I can see that now. Thanks for the recommendation!
  • mkeeter 4y ago
    Ironically, Palladium magazine (which published this article) itself is backed by Peter Thiel, and is... not unsympathetic to that worldview. For example, "Science Needs Sovereigns": https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/10/03/science-needs-sovereigns/ https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/10/03/science-needs-sovere...
    • BWStearns 4y ago
      Interesting on several fronts. The article you linked is a uh, lot to unpack haha. I get where they’re coming from but unless they come out and say thiel is our wise philosopher king so we needn’t worry about men not being angels and such, it’s hard to see what relationship between science and power couldn’t be justified. They nod at Lysenko and basically say “yeah but this bureaucracy is really a drag”. In industry there’s benefit in mad little dictators telling the establishment to stuff it, cause damage is limited and gains are outsized. But it really seems like they dismiss the scientific method as burdensome. Unorthodox thinking is still alive and well but yeah they have to put up or shut up just like the mere mortals who don’t have an easy answer to hard questions. Edit to add: after a brief read of Samo’s work I’m now somewhat concerned that he’s a much less insane yarvin with indistinguishable goals and a much higher chance of nudging things in his direction.
• joemazerino 4y ago
  I appreciate this article. First, it is well written. Second, it is well-versed. I know many, many people who have fallen into this trap of being an Internet "coolguy" and are absolute boring, anxious and insecure nerds in meatspace. Ironically they often yearn to connect their irl popularity with their internet personality. It's as if they realize the Internet moves fast with or without them.
• imwillofficial 4y ago
  I went in not expecting much. I ended up enthralled. A fascinating article.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• accountforgot 4y ago
  >his orthopedic sneakers couldn’t touch the floor... >his tiny frame perched a few feet away on an oversized leather chair... >a crooked smile that reveals a row of nubby teeth >disappointing to meet the “worst person on the internet” and find that they are nothing at all I think the author has missed the point about why Charlie is the way he is, why he has spent so much of his social life online, she did apparently reveal how this Charlie is looked upon by "normal" people in real life through no fault of his own.
• satokema 4y ago
  It's fine whether or not you want to be "online" or "offline" - you just need to understand that the basic currency is different. If you think being an online person is some horrible thing or a marker of being a bad person, you just value different things. The kinds of people in TFA are selected for by merit of not living up to your offline standards in one way or another.
• jrm4 4y ago
  Author seems a little too close? For me, the big takeaway is how it represents the superficiality that happens here? Like, this whole thing wants to be genuinely cool/Gibson-ish, but I can't get over the banality of it all. I was poking around some of the content and it's just so blah, in terms of how they're just taking a laundry list of every hot button issue and then asking, "okay, how can I troll it?" -- revealing no core underneath.
  • rideontime 4y ago
    IDK, it's even more damning that someone who wanted to believe couldn't bring herself to do so.
• bowsamic 4y ago
  This is possibly the most cyberpunk thing I've ever read
  • greenhearth 4y ago
    Jeez, really? Please read some Phillip K. Dick at least.
    • bowsamic 4y ago
      I meant that happened in real life. Did you need to be this annoying and pedantic?
• brycewray 4y ago
  After reading this, I was reminded of the phrase “That way madness lies.” But I Am Old.™
• efishnc 4y ago
  I actually find that I'm more awkward online/in chats than IRL. The fact that you have longer to think about your messages and modify them before publishing, that you have to think carefully so as not to multi-text (which seems desperate), that you don't have access to non-verbal cues for context, can't smile etc. all contribute to this.
• d_sem 4y ago
  Other commenters have already articulated how internet subcultures are comparable to other historical examples social subcultures. I think the first order bit is to ask the question if being an internet person produces a imminent threat to human civilization. Personally I perceive physical decay in our well being, happiness, and an overall reduction in the quality of live. I often am reminded how people use to spend their time in the physical space and wonder if we just spent 5% of the time on the internet supporting our local communities we would have a objectively better human experience. It's not that I perceive the internet inherently bad. However, as a tool for psychological distraction, it is incredibly effective and often used against our personal best interests.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• fleddr 4y ago
  A great way to test the difference between the online and offline world is to boast about something you accomplished in a family gathering, say thanksgiving. "I scored 3 goals in last weekend's game". That's wonderful! (nobody truly cares, but it's still recognized and celebrated.) "I got 40 likes on my last tweet" ??? "Wait, it gets better: 20 people watched me play a game. Had to stay up until 4AM but still, worth it." ??? Truly, nobody gives a shit. It means so little that people will not even pretend to recognize it. It's more like a negative accomplishment that gets people worried that you have poor judgement in life.
  • endorphine 4y ago
    Pretty sure the reactions you'll get in these occasions depend wildly on the people you are with at the time.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    I have a few streamers and Twitter personalities in my friend and family groups and so we do actually recognize these things. I grew up with a more "traditional" low-brow blue-collar upbringing and find it frustrating that my friends aren't following more of the World Cup, basketball, American football, etc etc. Funny how niches work right?
  • a1369209993 4y ago
    > A great way to test the difference between the online and offline world Nitpick: this is great way to test the hypocrisy in how people treat/view the online and offline world. It's not a inherent difference between them.
    • xboxnolifes 4y ago
      Agree. This has nothing to do with online vs offline. The distinction here works just as well between sharing two offline events. Some people care about some things, but not others, with seemingly no reason other than because some things are more culturally accepted as being important.
• CommieBobDole 4y ago
  I don't really think this is a new or interesting phenomenon just because it involves the internet; since the first subculture existed, people have sought them out and/or molded them in order to be a big fish in an incredibly tiny pond. This guy doesn't represent "online" or "the internet" any more than Bob Smith, who rules the entire North Boise Yu-Gi-Oh community (all seven members of it) with an iron fist, represents the physical world and human interaction in it. As other commenters have noted, the subject of the article is apparently also a terrible person and possibly a psychopath. Which again, runs true to type; he's found the largest possible community where he capable of being enough of a Big Deal to abuse people with impunity. Which, as it turns out, is pretty small and esoteric.
• throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
  then don't write an internet article
• AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
  And yet, here you are.
  • hacym 4y ago
    Being online and making it your entire personality and reality are two very different things.
• idiotsecant 4y ago
  If HN will permit a bit of old-man-shakes-fist-at-cloud I think the internet was better before we went and let so many people on it. It was small and poorly organized and weird and mostly authentic. The hyperactive and over-exaggerated always-on 'youtube personality' wasn't a thing and people talked about interesting things from time to time.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  I'm not sure if the sociological experiment that the author conducted was really immersive enough to produce a good take on the subculture. It's fairly obvious this was intended along the lines of Hunter S. Thompson's "Hell's Angels" - which may have spawned an entire genre of sub-culture literature (I don't know if Thompson really originated it or not, there may be earlier examples, perhaps Zora Neale Hurston). The theme is pretty consistent: a writer inserts self into subculture, gets the full experience, writes magazine articles/books that others can gawk at. Maybe this particular subculture is just fairly boring and shallow, mostly fabricated by moneyed interests (NFTs...) and there's just not much to say about it? Kind of sad, has the USA turned into a cultural wasteland?
  • greenhearth 4y ago
    Raymond Williams has theorized the nature of subcultures (residual and emergent), which are almost always incorporated into the mainstream in one form or another. I'm afraid that because this culture is so incredibly toxic that the effects of this incorporation will be like a collective poisoning. This can already be seen in the resulting superstructure (art, politics, finance) and mainstream social relations, all of which are deteriorated and confused more than ever it seems. In any case, I noticed the Thompson similarities as well. This kind of reportage flicks the light switch in a dark room, in which then the cockroaches run for the corners.
    • photochemsyn 4y ago
      Yeah, I can't really blame the author for not wanting to go any further down that particular rabbit hole. From what I've read, it also sounds unpleasantly similar to conditions in the FTX/Alameda warren.
• nootropicat 4y ago
  Online reality is as much real as the physical one, and as technology for io to the human body advances it's going to increasingly dominate. She feels noticeably superior to people that prefer the online reality for unclear reasons.
• GreenChairS33 4y ago
  We have long since moved from notion that the internet is an opt in tool. I fondly remember when Mac OS 9 would prompt you about the internet on first boot and you could pick "my computer does not connect to the internet". Looking at you Windows 11.
  • clnq 4y ago
    Looking at you, social fabric of society.
• DrNosferatu 4y ago
  TL;DR: Sounds like the title of a Ramones song!
• dinobones 4y ago
  What a boring article. Let people live how they want to live. Just because you don't like their lifestyle/personality/way of living doesn't mean you get to act like you're better than them.
  • rideontime 4y ago
    It's a boring article because it's about boring people, who try to pretend they aren't boring.
  • spcebar 4y ago
    That was absolutely my take when I read this, but reading the comments it sounds like there's some background to the character study that isn't elaborated on here. The criticisms in the article itself felt petty to me, but apparently Charlotte Fang has said some really terrible things in the past, and if I had to guess I'd say that's where the tone of disgust in this article is coming from, rather than them being a boring person.
• Izkata 4y ago
  > Internet culture used to be something you engaged with in private. You have your public self, your real self, and then the part of your brain that scrolls mindlessly at the end of the day. Funny, for me the internet was always where I'd let down the barriers and drop the facade, the place where you could actually find the "real me". Then again I don't think I'm the type of person described by "scrolls mindlessly"...
• mahathu 4y ago
  This was an interesting article, but I also kinda wish I hadn't read it. Knowing people like this exist just made me a little sad.
• Ensorceled 4y ago
  I grew up a geek in a rural area, learning how to filter conversations for your audience was a critical skill. Topics and conversational style amongst my D&D group was very different than amongst my other high school classmates and very different than when at my summer jobs. This is just an article about people who never learned that skill. I'm reminded of a few moments in my life that drove this home ... A coworker (60 year old railway worker) who said "You shouldn't use ten dollar words in a twenty-five cent conversation." A girlfriend who described the difference as "Weird is when you know you're weird and compensate when needed, strange is when you don't know you're strange."
  • Loughla 4y ago
    I grew up very geek in a VERY rural area. I knew that there were places that I could be me, where I could be "country" me, and where I could be me "for adults". I learned that the me what I was, was also super unacceptable once I entered the world of higher education. I had to be "smart" me. Then in my undergraduate degree, I learned about code switching in the context of Mexican-American children of immigrants. And it hit hard. I was code-switching, but within dialects inside of one language instead of within languages. I also learned in that class that EVERY student who grew up rural, poor, minority, or anything other than middle- to upper-middle class white had extremely similar experiences. It was absolutely shocking to 20 year old me. To your point - this article absolutely reads like people who just never learned how to navigate different groups.
    • clnq 4y ago
      Code switching is completely natural to me, I would not know how to express myself with just one language to some people. What did you learn about it that impacted you the most?
      • Loughla 4y ago
        Honestly, just that it existed and was a common feature of some peoples' lives. I grew up feeling very outcast. I grew up in a town of less than 50, in a super poor, rural part of the US. My interests were outdoors related, but not guns and god like everyone around me. I was more interested in learning about natural systems and the interplay of wild plants and animals and humans in the world. I never 'fit in' anywhere. None of the school clubs, none of the classes, everywhere I went I felt that I had to 'be someone else'. Then I went to college and learned that, for many people, they literally get to do that every day, and that there was a name for it! It felt validating that someone else in the world experienced what I experienced (even if it was whole-language based instead of just dialect/cultural norm based).
• blue039 4y ago
  In the past being an "internet person" brought you into interesting sub-cultures. You had shibboleths (like quoting bash.org) that would identify you. Since the internet was small you would meet genuine often interesting people. I still have friends from the "wild west" days of the internet. The time period, I think, was the absolute best time to be alive and on the internet (though terminally online lamers and cry bullies demanding censorship may disagree). Now, the apt term for people who are "too online" is "terminally online". The terminally online are more like a cancer than an interesting sub-culture. Since social media has allowed them to gain some semblance of following in a hyper-niche subgroup they think they can take their absurd opinions, styles, ideas, etc into the real world and expect it to work. These people are easily identified. When placed in an uncomfortable situation they become cry bullies. You might know many of them as your current HR department.
  • Apocryphon 4y ago
    Your description is very accurate, but I would suggest that they are often the types to complain most fiercely about HR departments in general, not specific organizations per se but rather about the existence of HR as a social class that sets cultural norms. Terminally online folks dwell on both sides of the pro- and counter-establishment cultural divide.
• cpif 4y ago
  I'm a bit perplexed by the title. The article distinguishes between an early, anonymous, unregulated internet culture -- which the NFT club seems to resemble -- and contemporary internet people who "decided to make the internet boring." As cartoonish as it is, I buy that distinction. But usually, when people make it, they're making a plea for the old internet. The writer of this article, however, doesn't seem to be doing that. The milady community feels, "a little bit, like that internet from 1995"; it is unlike social media communities where you are "constantly performing your personality" and "Liking is a personal endorsement." Again, when people make that distinction, they're usually writing against likes, personality, and "iPhone photography of yourself." So regarding the title: does she not want to be either type of internet person? Or is "normie" social media engagement ok?
  • gabesullice 4y ago
    My understanding is that she feels like the pseudonymous internet is a black hole from which we can't escape and we've already passed the event horizon. - Some people don't know it yet. - Some people choose to pretend it hasn't happened. - Some people, like her, wish that it hadn't happened and are peering into the void, struggling to come to terms with it. - And the people she's writing about have realized it has happened and are running toward the singularity. She feels that our culture is defined by those going the fastest, long before the rest of society catches up to it. But we'll all get there eventually, and the avant garde will be further away from the unaware than ever before. I don't think she's making an argument about whether we should fall in any particular bucket. She doesn't want to be in the avant garde though. Maybe she's sad about that, because she pictured herself as being an avant garde kind of person.
• warinukraine 4y ago
  Off-topic. Does it bother anyone else this style of writing which starts by describing the physical traits of the characters? At this stage I just skip when an article starts like that.
• rideontime 4y ago
  These people are exactly as pathetic as I imagined them to be.
• Lammy 4y ago
  > As Miya’s infamy grew, the proliferation of helpers—as well as copycat accounts That's funny considering BPD_GOD already sounds like bootleg CHOBITCOIN. There is nothing new under the sun (and here's why that's a GOOD thing!!)
  • Apocryphon 4y ago
    It is rather reassuring to laugh at a devil for being a knockoff imp rather than the great dragon. OLD!!!!!!
• TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  This seems quite silly. Adolescent nihilism and alienation, scatter-shot irrationality, and calculated transgressions for attention are ancient. As is cynical opportunism. They've been part of (mostly) youth movements for centuries. The only thing changed by the Internet is accessibility. Previously people tended to know each other personally. Now they can mix it up online. This makes their presence a little more obvious and a little harder to ignore. But there must be hundreds of these micro-scenes with their nano-gurus and micro-leaders, and most people will still never come across them. They only become dangerous when they grow - or are grown - to the point where the groups stop being small and insignificant, and where the messaging is carefully and deliberately tailored to trigger irrationality and self-harm in mass audiences. That's not a good thing. But it's no worse - and often less effective and less toxic - than some of the nonsense pumped out by supposedly respectable mainstream media.
• TrevorJ 4y ago
  The irony here is that bloggers were a big part of internet counterculture not so long ago, and now we've got these long screeds written on blogs that exude a sort of boomer-ish "back in my day (6 years ago)...". The take would be a lot more interesting if the targets weren't so utterly, predicably, boringly safe to criticize either. I guess dissecting a counterculture that isn't predominantly young white men into NFT's would take a bit more courage. though.
• double_ee 4y ago
  I don't want to be an internet person either, but I'm fascinated by them, including people like Charlie Fang. I love listening to Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog's "Blocked and Reported" podcast, which covers a lot of very-online people, drama in communities you wouldn't have expected (like knitters, or the battle between the "prag libertarians" and the "Mises Libertarians"), and how much "mainstream" press gets completely wrong or lazily reports. I think a lot of these very-online people will come to regret it, especially because the Internet never forgets and they'll never be able to shake the reputation they've established.
• chippy 4y ago
  I went down the rabbit hole after reading this, as I love sub cultures and yearn to see some new ones. Some learnings: Now there is a certain avant garde playing with the narrative thing going on, which is part of it, so the story that you can find out about the thing is changed at the time its going on and after its happened. The lore is recorded by people within the culture and they are in on it. Certain of the interactions with the author and the characters she met were on the whole staged, or intentional trolling of the author. "some young writer is coming so let's tease her". The trolling, anti-cancel culture, the pro-autism always-online which may have come from the chans is almost 100% opposite from the "white pilled", positive, almost over the top caring messages that the subculture is putting out. But it's not the same as the we are all going to make it greed-optimism of crypto. As we see in these fellow comments, most people who have encountered internet people have found them to be nihilistic, anti-social, maladjusted and negative. This sub culture is trying to be the opposite of it, but it exists along side a kind of schizoid-side - it's very odd. Compared to other NFT young people meet ups (the author previously wrote a popular article about the Bored Yacht Club parties) - this subculture appears to have more women. Compared to other NFT projects, this art project does not prioritize holding or purchasing an actual NFT image, and seems to value a kind of plagiarism, "just download the png" or anti ownership in a way. It reminds of of plunderphonics/vaporwave from last decade. The traditional and social politics of the founders seem at odds with a rave and taking drugs. puzzling to me! Someone here says that the drug - Ketamine is apparently chosen as reduced social anxiety?
• fullshark 4y ago
  I can't escape the belief that the Internet is now a place for junk food media consumption and fake (not IRL) friends.
• LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Never heard of the guy he's talking about, but started getting strong "weirdo" vibes wrt the author after the third paragraph of character assassination, largely based around this persons appearance. For anyone who read all the way through - does it get anywhere close to making a point or is it mostly about how ugly people the author doesn't like are?
  • spongebobism 4y ago
    I stopped reading for the same reason.
  • to1y 4y ago
    Kind of ironic the author is doing the pretty much the same thing as the main character of her article.
• che_shirecat 4y ago
  milady
• amatecha 4y ago
  Flagged the post as I don't think a person engaging in the behaviour discussed in this[0] thread needs a greater audience or needs to be paid any attention whatsoever. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893781
  • jamestimmins 4y ago
    I'd argue that this is a misuse of flagging. This isn't spam or an endorsement of their worldview in any way. In fact, it goes out of their way to make the person seem somewhat pathetic. The dialogue taking place about the Internet People is fairly robust, indicating there's value in the content to the HN community.
    • amatecha 4y ago
      It's up to the mods to decide whether they think it's acceptable content or not - flagging simply brings it to their attention. I don't think the HN audience needs to spend their time adding such a horribly-acting person to their consciousness. There could be any number of other, non-problematic "internet people" to focus on in an article, and I would welcome such an article being written and/or linked to in place of this one.
      • goostavos 4y ago
        Leaving comments to boast about what you flag and moralizing about what kind of content is worthy of attention? You might be an internet person, my friend. More like this article, plz. Or we could go back to our usual high brow, attention worthy content of "I asked GPT about a thing and you won't believe what it said"
      • baandam 4y ago
        I am glad you feel the need to think for me.
  • hashxyz 4y ago
    That story is about a fake-cancellation that Charlie created with his friends against himself. It is some kind of commentary on this very situation of you trying to get this taken down.
• nperez 4y ago
  This article is interesting but it seems determined to reach its conclusion. I have a hard time believing that everyone seemed so cold and lifeless to those who weren't looking through the author's lens. I'd expect people to be a little awkward at any internet gathering. I feel like this piece seeks to "expose" them for not being as cool as their Twitter personalities, but we already knew that, and there are better things to criticize them for than their posture or red eyes.
• Cloudef 4y ago
  Less internet is more healthy for everyone
• lupire 4y ago
  > To 99.9 percent of the population, Charlie is nobody. So why is she writing an article about how terrifying he is that he scared her off the Internet? Over half of those 99.9% of people use the Internet. > When I got back from New York, I logged out of my Twitter account on my computer and deleted the app from my phone. And then immediately logged back in to Tweet about her article.
• patientplatypus 4y ago
• fedeb95 4y ago
  I say let's leave them the internet. We've got better things to do...
• _ktx2 4y ago
  > Will people forget about me if I am not on the internet? I dropped off the internet while I was in the military and deployed, the answer is yes. That said, I'd like to turn this on its head. It's normal for friends to go out of touch, reconnect in somewhat of a cycle. Some people stay constantly in touch, but not everyone. That isn't normal, and to be quite honest, would be super stressful for me. It's like juggling a dozen hot plates with pancakes being formed on them. You're eventually going to burn one or let it all burn spectacularly. My conclusion was that losing touch with a lot of my high school and college friends wasn't historically abnormal - staying in touch with them forever was. It's also normal to have different depths of friendships. Not everyone needs to hear your deepest inner thoughts. This kind of summarizes what I think is wrong with social media. Internet culture and it's subcultures are weird. That's to say, though, that any deeply entrenched culture is kinda weird. They have their own language, memes, attitudes, etc formed and influenced by the adjacency of it's members. That's to say, I look at sports people the way this person looks at the weird assortment they followed to a ketamine party. If you're going to a giant parking lot, ripping your shirt off, screaming, getting black out drunk, screaming at players, devoting precious memory to niche sports and player statistics - are you not mechanically the same as these folks? The difference being that your community is physical.
  • noobermin 4y ago
    >The difference being that your community is physical. And more socially acceptable.
    • kodah 4y ago
      The point of my text was to flip what it is to be "socially acceptable" in the modern era on its head. Grotesque manliness at football events to many people is so off-putting they won't be near those events or people. Same can be said for these new internet subcultures. Point is, I think if we zoom out this is just normal human behavior. To be something to talk about, to perceive yourself as someone, to have a common language, to have quirks and oddities. It's more about what you fit in with that describes what you find "weird". This author doesn't fit into this culture, but probably fits in to another culture that others on this post would find "weird".
• antod 4y ago
  Reading that made me think back to all those breathy Wired article from the early/mid 90s predicting the cultural future of cyberspace. Maybe it was because the writing style seemed similar, but that this is the let down review article rather than the hyped preview articles.
• jcpst 4y ago
  > The first social media platform, called SixDegrees IIRC, iam.bmezine was in 1994. Granted, it was a lot more esoteric/niche because you either had to pay or submit an image of a body modification to their gallery.