8 ms·

An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're co

by nicbou 3y ago

An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that. But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonalds: a generic commercial space built around spending money. It has no personality, it's not safe, and no one feels at home there. Why would you invest yourself in a space like that?

Sebastian_09 3y ago
Although not exactly generic shopping streets you describe, but “anonymous” places also have been theorized and dubbed a “non-place” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-place https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-place)
vntx 3y ago
> Why would you invest yourself in a space like that? Low barrier to entry. Convenience. Ease of use. Sign-up and now you can talk to your friends from across the world! Now, you have to be force-fed shit ads along the way. I don’t think anyone who values their social life would like it if you put it like that, but inertia and the gravity of network effects are a bitch. The real problem is these private platforms have the power of public utilities, and we treat them like public utilities until they pull the rug from under us, and siphon our data to profit psychopathic overlords. Furthermore, these companies don’t just throw ads at you, they also aid the surveillance state which can compromise your basic rights to privacy and fair elections. Malicious foreign governments use it to influence elections with false information and propaganda. Malicious domestic government can use it as a easy spying tool by buying or scraping data. No one will be safe on these things until we get proper government regulation. The EU’s GDPR is a step in the right direction but more work needs to be done.
bmacho 3y ago
> An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. > HN is like that. HN is the only place that is not a pub: jokes are frowned upon, and even moderated out. Post Valuable Content, or GTFO. You can joke and feel belonging literally everywhere else, catpost half drunk and high, noone cares really, from the small subreddits and discord servers and fb groups to the big subreddits, discord servers, fb groups. > But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonalds: a generic commercial space built around spending money. We must have a different internet, every other place I know is full of personality and total unique, people repeat the same sets of inside jokes over and over. HN is way the driest and most soulless.
- r00fus 3y ago
  > HN is way the driest and most soulless. Well if you are looking for memes and catposts, yeah, the S/N ratio here is quite low. Honestly I think of those things as noise, so I see S/N of HN as much higher. I can always go elsewhere for the vibes.
  - markjonsona989 3y ago
    My instinct was to agree with the comment above, but after giving it a few minutes I think I'd rather have a moderated "soulless" HN. It seems to me that there is a fine line between innocent jokes and full-blown juvenile behaviour. The amount of effort you would need to invest into sustaining such a place is not worth it, best to just not allow it at all. There are plenty of places where you can get your dose of jokes and fun. One thing that keeps immature and rude people away is precisely the "dullness" that the post above speaks of. People get tired and move on, leaving the place clean and tidy for others to use. HN has problems of course; downvote bullying is one of them. I'm not saying HN is perfect, but I'd rather not turn it into Reddit or Youtube. So I don't know where this leaves HN between the "pub" and "commercial street".
    - soerxpso 3y ago
      I prefer it this way. I would love to see original jokes on HN, but the issue is that if you allow "jokes" in general, there's a flood of low-effort repetition of popular phrases or comments where the only "comedic" value is that they've forced something into a cliche sentence structure. That feels more soulless than the way HN is, because comments get so samey. You see the same effect sort of start to creep in on certain political posts, where people feel that they can achieve a cheap sense of attention and comradery for expressing a trite idea instead of a joke (comments that mostly amount to "Elon Musk is a mean man! Who else agrees???")
    - epolanski 3y ago
      I think HN is fine as it is. I come here because it is one of the very few places where you can have interesting discussions and read interesting comments from people with a similar intent and interest.
jwells89 3y ago
Much of this has to do with scale. In small communities, interactions are more likely to skew positive, meaningful, and desired. The discussions that rise to the top are those that are most interesting and relevant to the community. In giga-networks like Twitter, you might get some vague sense of a belonged-to community, but the boundaries are fuzzy at best and when posts find their way beyond those boundaries, context is lost and you end up with scores of randos whose full-time job is seemingly to surf the service searching for posts to clout farm with by either replying to them with their entirely uninformed (often inflammatory) opinion or quote-tweet with similarly uninformed ridicule, which can turn disastrous for the quoted poster if it goes viral. The posts that rise to the top are the ones that are the most flame-baity and controversial. It's a much more negative experience overall.
- nicbou 3y ago
  Scale and boundaries yes. A community is participative. If everyone is just passing through, the community can't feel familiar and it can't self-police its vibe.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
I think online communities aren't. A pub is a healthy, proper, community experience. Any human interaction that isn't face-to-face is injurious to your health.
- lambic 3y ago
  I very strongly disagree, without online interactions I probably would've gone crazy during lockdown. Even now that's all (mostly) over, I still rely on online interaction for communicating with most of my family.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  That's just a ridiculous statement. My friends gathering on Discord to play some board games or video games or TTRPG is not any more injurous to your health than any other social leisure activity.
- phito 3y ago
  Usually the things you consume in a pub are not healthy.
- MonaroVXR 3y ago
  Disagree, unironically physical world is discriminating, full of high educational adults, acting as big childs with wrong assumptions and nothing to talk about. Hackersnews is the opposite with smart individuals.
VancouverMan 3y ago
I don't see any real difference between your "online pub" and globalized-entity "pedestrian street" examples. They're both highly-controlled and highly-curated venues. Environments like those just encourage conformity. That, in turn, results in interaction/discussion that's rather bland, homogeneous, and sterile. I definitely find this site to be like that. The "showdead" setting very slightly mitigates it, but even then, I almost never find any sort of truly thought-provoking discussion here. Those venues seem to exhibit a false sense of community to me. There's interaction, but the participants are either ruthlessly conforming, or they're walking on eggshells.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  The only way communities work is if people engage in some level of self-policing with regards to their behavior. Sites that fail to keep the kind of community necessary for people to largely self-police end up requiring top-down policing, or descend into cesspits.
rchaud 3y ago
My soccer club's message board is exactly like this. Old school phpBB, lots of cantankerous regulars and useless back and forth chatter, just like a pub. Design wise it's completely unchanged from the 00s look except for a mobile friendly stylesheet introduced some years ago.
epolanski 3y ago
vBulletin/phpBB forums and IRC were for me peak internet. I would maybe add early Facebook for the social, but not funniest part. Some discord servers do a good job at recreating the vacuum of IRC (albeit every single one of them has always way too many channels) but the vacuum of forums is just not well replaced.
suction 3y ago
[dead]
michaelcampbell 3y ago
like usenet.
hippari2 3y ago
HN certainly doesnt feel like that, small reddit sub is just barely.
braza 3y ago
I can relate to that comment. I have been on the internet for a while, and I always loved online communities because I did not have access early in my life to resources that I was interested in, and those communities gave me a sense of belonging and intuitive resources that fulfilled my life. While this was great, for the last 6 years I have stuck to nurturing small communities with no more than 20 people because even gated communities (especially big ones in Reddit and Slack) are not fun anymore. Several behaviors that I noticed in those small communities were: - status game with participants receiving attention and dictating the "discourse" more based on social status than content - Safeticism: tons of artificial rules that contradict even local and national laws - Tons of non-contributing people are shitting on the water and pushing great contributors away.A lot of great contributors are leaving, creating the dead sea effect on the community.
A_Venom_Roll 3y ago
I really like this metaphor
chromakode 3y ago
This is often termed a "Third Place" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
- nicbou 3y ago
  It's very similar now that you mention it. It should feel the same and achieve roughly the same goals.
- Jeff_Brown 3y ago
  I love having a word for this.
- Tarsul 3y ago
  Thank you for posting this. Now I finally understand the PlayStation 3 (?) marketing... :)

by nicbou 3y ago

Sebastian_09 3y ago

Although not exactly generic shopping streets you describe, but “anonymous” places also have been theorized and dubbed a “non-place” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-place https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-place)

vntx 3y ago

> Why would you invest yourself in a space like that? Low barrier to entry. Convenience. Ease of use. Sign-up and now you can talk to your friends from across the world! Now, you have to be force-fed shit ads along the way. I don’t think anyone who values their social life would like it if you put it like that, but inertia and the gravity of network effects are a bitch. The real problem is these private platforms have the power of public utilities, and we treat them like public utilities until they pull the rug from under us, and siphon our data to profit psychopathic overlords. Furthermore, these companies don’t just throw ads at you, they also aid the surveillance state which can compromise your basic rights to privacy and fair elections. Malicious foreign governments use it to influence elections with false information and propaganda. Malicious domestic government can use it as a easy spying tool by buying or scraping data. No one will be safe on these things until we get proper government regulation. The EU’s GDPR is a step in the right direction but more work needs to be done.

bmacho 3y ago

> An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. > HN is like that. HN is the only place that is not a pub: jokes are frowned upon, and even moderated out. Post Valuable Content, or GTFO. You can joke and feel belonging literally everywhere else, catpost half drunk and high, noone cares really, from the small subreddits and discord servers and fb groups to the big subreddits, discord servers, fb groups. > But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonalds: a generic commercial space built around spending money. We must have a different internet, every other place I know is full of personality and total unique, people repeat the same sets of inside jokes over and over. HN is way the driest and most soulless.

r00fus 3y ago
> HN is way the driest and most soulless. Well if you are looking for memes and catposts, yeah, the S/N ratio here is quite low. Honestly I think of those things as noise, so I see S/N of HN as much higher. I can always go elsewhere for the vibes.
- markjonsona989 3y ago
  My instinct was to agree with the comment above, but after giving it a few minutes I think I'd rather have a moderated "soulless" HN. It seems to me that there is a fine line between innocent jokes and full-blown juvenile behaviour. The amount of effort you would need to invest into sustaining such a place is not worth it, best to just not allow it at all. There are plenty of places where you can get your dose of jokes and fun. One thing that keeps immature and rude people away is precisely the "dullness" that the post above speaks of. People get tired and move on, leaving the place clean and tidy for others to use. HN has problems of course; downvote bullying is one of them. I'm not saying HN is perfect, but I'd rather not turn it into Reddit or Youtube. So I don't know where this leaves HN between the "pub" and "commercial street".
  - soerxpso 3y ago
    I prefer it this way. I would love to see original jokes on HN, but the issue is that if you allow "jokes" in general, there's a flood of low-effort repetition of popular phrases or comments where the only "comedic" value is that they've forced something into a cliche sentence structure. That feels more soulless than the way HN is, because comments get so samey. You see the same effect sort of start to creep in on certain political posts, where people feel that they can achieve a cheap sense of attention and comradery for expressing a trite idea instead of a joke (comments that mostly amount to "Elon Musk is a mean man! Who else agrees???")
  - epolanski 3y ago
    I think HN is fine as it is. I come here because it is one of the very few places where you can have interesting discussions and read interesting comments from people with a similar intent and interest.

jwells89 3y ago

Much of this has to do with scale. In small communities, interactions are more likely to skew positive, meaningful, and desired. The discussions that rise to the top are those that are most interesting and relevant to the community. In giga-networks like Twitter, you might get some vague sense of a belonged-to community, but the boundaries are fuzzy at best and when posts find their way beyond those boundaries, context is lost and you end up with scores of randos whose full-time job is seemingly to surf the service searching for posts to clout farm with by either replying to them with their entirely uninformed (often inflammatory) opinion or quote-tweet with similarly uninformed ridicule, which can turn disastrous for the quoted poster if it goes viral. The posts that rise to the top are the ones that are the most flame-baity and controversial. It's a much more negative experience overall.

nicbou 3y ago
Scale and boundaries yes. A community is participative. If everyone is just passing through, the community can't feel familiar and it can't self-police its vibe.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

I think online communities aren't. A pub is a healthy, proper, community experience. Any human interaction that isn't face-to-face is injurious to your health.

lambic 3y ago
I very strongly disagree, without online interactions I probably would've gone crazy during lockdown. Even now that's all (mostly) over, I still rely on online interaction for communicating with most of my family.
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
That's just a ridiculous statement. My friends gathering on Discord to play some board games or video games or TTRPG is not any more injurous to your health than any other social leisure activity.
phito 3y ago
Usually the things you consume in a pub are not healthy.
MonaroVXR 3y ago
Disagree, unironically physical world is discriminating, full of high educational adults, acting as big childs with wrong assumptions and nothing to talk about. Hackersnews is the opposite with smart individuals.

VancouverMan 3y ago

I don't see any real difference between your "online pub" and globalized-entity "pedestrian street" examples. They're both highly-controlled and highly-curated venues. Environments like those just encourage conformity. That, in turn, results in interaction/discussion that's rather bland, homogeneous, and sterile. I definitely find this site to be like that. The "showdead" setting very slightly mitigates it, but even then, I almost never find any sort of truly thought-provoking discussion here. Those venues seem to exhibit a false sense of community to me. There's interaction, but the participants are either ruthlessly conforming, or they're walking on eggshells.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
The only way communities work is if people engage in some level of self-policing with regards to their behavior. Sites that fail to keep the kind of community necessary for people to largely self-police end up requiring top-down policing, or descend into cesspits.

rchaud 3y ago

My soccer club's message board is exactly like this. Old school phpBB, lots of cantankerous regulars and useless back and forth chatter, just like a pub. Design wise it's completely unchanged from the 00s look except for a mobile friendly stylesheet introduced some years ago.

epolanski 3y ago

vBulletin/phpBB forums and IRC were for me peak internet. I would maybe add early Facebook for the social, but not funniest part. Some discord servers do a good job at recreating the vacuum of IRC (albeit every single one of them has always way too many channels) but the vacuum of forums is just not well replaced.

suction 3y ago

[dead]

michaelcampbell 3y ago

like usenet.

hippari2 3y ago

HN certainly doesnt feel like that, small reddit sub is just barely.

braza 3y ago

I can relate to that comment. I have been on the internet for a while, and I always loved online communities because I did not have access early in my life to resources that I was interested in, and those communities gave me a sense of belonging and intuitive resources that fulfilled my life. While this was great, for the last 6 years I have stuck to nurturing small communities with no more than 20 people because even gated communities (especially big ones in Reddit and Slack) are not fun anymore. Several behaviors that I noticed in those small communities were: - status game with participants receiving attention and dictating the "discourse" more based on social status than content - Safeticism: tons of artificial rules that contradict even local and national laws - Tons of non-contributing people are shitting on the water and pushing great contributors away.A lot of great contributors are leaving, creating the dead sea effect on the community.

A_Venom_Roll 3y ago

I really like this metaphor

chromakode 3y ago

This is often termed a "Third Place" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

nicbou 3y ago
It's very similar now that you mention it. It should feel the same and achieve roughly the same goals.
Jeff_Brown 3y ago
I love having a word for this.
Tarsul 3y ago
Thank you for posting this. Now I finally understand the PlayStation 3 (?) marketing... :)