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Agreed. I don’t even know what this elegy is for. “what was wonderful about the web, was that here was a machine for finding people with similar interests and e

Agreed. I don’t even know what this elegy is for. “what was wonderful about the web, was that here was a machine for finding people with similar interests and experience, anywhere in the world. That’s the web I want back.” Is that no longer the web? It seems pretty easy to find communities these days. The web I want back is the one powered by real people making real things. But rather than complain about it I think I’d rather be one of the people who is still here, making things.

Centigonal 2y ago
I'm looking forward to reading an aging GenZ-er's elegy of the web that looks fondly back on the age of TikTok and algorithmic feeds, back when people actually made things.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  I can write it for you: "I miss when the internet was an international gathering place, not a carefully guarded forum for communicating misinformation-free messaging about foreign policy and corporate life in the United States of America, England and Wales. I had a friend from China."
  - jamiek88 2y ago
    How when the Chinese won’t let people from China use it?
- gonzo41 2y ago
  Lets be honest, they won't have the concentration to be able to write more than a tweet about it.
stackghost 2y ago
>Is that no longer the web? I don't think so >It seems pretty easy to find communities these days. Outside of HN and a few niche subreddits, I can't think of many. Most good communities I'm part of are off the web on things like Discord which isn't addressable by search engines.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Discord is honestly one of the worst things to happen to the internet, and I'd blame Gen-Z for most of its popularity since they seem to have no idea why the internet was created in the first place.
  - hmcq6 2y ago
    In my opinion, you're shooting the messenger. Why does Gen-Z like Discord? No advertising, no enshittification, just a simple solution to a common problem. It's just modern AIM, but AIM wasn't blamed for "killing" forums. AIM and forums coexisted because they serve different purposes.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      >AIM and forums coexisted because they serve different purposes. That's the problem with Discord. As an AIM replacement, it's fine, because no one cares about being able to access other peoples' ephemeral private chats. But when large communities discuss things, it's very useful for that information to be publicly available and accessible from a search engine, and Discord prevents that, locking it all away from any outsiders. If your group really wants to be secret and private for some reason, I guess that's fine, but if you're a group discussing, for instance, bicycle maintenance tips, why do you want to keep others from seeing this helpful info? And why do you want to keep others out? Specialty subreddits don't have this problem.
      - hmcq6 2y ago
        So where do you suggest people post that is zero cost and advertisement free? These communities were pushed onto discord because there isn't a better place for them. The regional live music discord I'm in would be much better served by being on a web forum but running a forum costs money. Or they could use facebook but not everyone in the community has/wants a facebook account. Not everyone uses reddit/twitter/insert your favorite social media. > why do you want to keep others from seeing this helpful info? How paranoid would one have to be to think people are moving to discord to be malicious? The garden doesn't have walls to keep you out, the walls are to keep the advertisers/bots out.
echelon 2y ago
I still remember the screen names of folks I interacted with in and on IRC, AIM, ezboard, IGN boards, forums, etc. I only remember a handful of HN usernames and absolutely zero handles from elsewhere. Forums used to have large avatars and signatures you could customize and communities were much more tightly-knit. I imagine that's what Discord and VRChat do now.
- Chathamization 2y ago
  > I still remember the screen names of folks I interacted with in and on IRC, AIM, ezboard, IGN boards, forums, etc. > I only remember a handful of HN usernames and absolutely zero handles from elsewhere. Same. It's strange that in terms of interpersonal communication, we appear to be worse off than where were 25 years ago with AIM and e-mail. Back then it was common to carry on pretty deep conversations and relationships with people from all over the world. Part of my nightly routine was going over the day with my friends (both near and far). I would send long e-mail to my distant friends on their birthday, talking about all the things that had happened in my life, and they would do the same. I'd even keep in contact for years with pen pals I had met all over the world. There's no reason this couldn't be done today, but I suppose most people prefer the much shallower interactions we have now.
- klibertp 2y ago
  > I only remember a handful of HN usernames That's a feature. HN is expressly built to encourage high-quality content in the comments - by removing or discouraging things that tend to bring poor content with them. Not showing up/down-votes counts, not allowing avatars and discouraging lengthy signatures, not showing previews of images linked, not allowing to reply immediately to comments (and the length of "immediately" getting longer the deeper the thread) - the HN is coded this way to encourage sticking to guidelines and making thoughtful comments focused on informative, interesting content. It does make HN a worse place for building interpersonal relations, no question about it - but it also eliminates or blocks many of the enshitiffication vectors. Not all of them, and we do see changes over time in what's acceptable, going in the direction that some will dislike, but I think the fact that HN still existing in relatively constant form almost 20 years later shows that the strategy works, to an extent.
Chathamization 2y ago
> Is that no longer the web? From what I've seen, a lot - I'd say most - of the communities that existed outside of the major platforms have dried up or ended (the famous/infamous bodybuilding forum apparently just went down). Web forum communities, mailing list communities, communities built around an individuals website (it sounds strange to say now, but this was pretty common a couple of decades ago). Even the offline meeting sites like Couchsurfing and Meetup are a shadow of what they were in their heyday (about 15 years or so ago). The actual number of people actively using the internet is much higher, yet the number of people outside of a few small social media silos are much lower. So I can only surmise that these social media silos are giving the vast majority - almost everyone - what they want (those gratifying instant hits). It's just sad to know that there's apparently only a tiny sliver of humanity interested in venturing off the main path and interacting with people outside of these silos.
- dartos 2y ago
  You may be pleased to hear that those kinds of communities are actually alive and well, they just live on places like discord now. Places that largely can’t be indexed by google. My hope is that eventually these groups migrate to matrix, but we’ll see.
  - treyd 2y ago
    That's exactly the issue the parent poster is talking about. It's not the web in the strict sense, it's the siloification.
    - dartos 2y ago
      > It's not the web in the strict sense It kind of is though. Maybe not with discord specifically, because it’s a closed platform. but communities on open ones like matrix are just as much part of the web as any forum. It’s not a big platform with all users in one space. There are dedicated communities with passionate people talking, sharing ideas, helping each other out. Would you’ve considered IRC chat rooms on freenode part of the web?
moi2388 2y ago
The irony of posting this on hackernews..
turnsout 2y ago
100%. I've been writing HTML since 94, and there truly was no golden age. There have been (get ready for this) good and bad things about each era. It has always been possible to create communities, or break away and do something different. I really like ActivityPub, but it does not really change the dynamic. With all of that said, sometimes getting a fancy new notebook makes you more likely to draw/write, which seems to be essentially what Dave is experiencing. Nothing wrong with that!

Centigonal 2y ago

I'm looking forward to reading an aging GenZ-er's elegy of the web that looks fondly back on the age of TikTok and algorithmic feeds, back when people actually made things.

whatshisface 2y ago
I can write it for you: "I miss when the internet was an international gathering place, not a carefully guarded forum for communicating misinformation-free messaging about foreign policy and corporate life in the United States of America, England and Wales. I had a friend from China."
- jamiek88 2y ago
  How when the Chinese won’t let people from China use it?
gonzo41 2y ago
Lets be honest, they won't have the concentration to be able to write more than a tweet about it.

stackghost 2y ago

>Is that no longer the web? I don't think so >It seems pretty easy to find communities these days. Outside of HN and a few niche subreddits, I can't think of many. Most good communities I'm part of are off the web on things like Discord which isn't addressable by search engines.

shiroiushi 2y ago
Discord is honestly one of the worst things to happen to the internet, and I'd blame Gen-Z for most of its popularity since they seem to have no idea why the internet was created in the first place.
- hmcq6 2y ago
  In my opinion, you're shooting the messenger. Why does Gen-Z like Discord? No advertising, no enshittification, just a simple solution to a common problem. It's just modern AIM, but AIM wasn't blamed for "killing" forums. AIM and forums coexisted because they serve different purposes.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >AIM and forums coexisted because they serve different purposes. That's the problem with Discord. As an AIM replacement, it's fine, because no one cares about being able to access other peoples' ephemeral private chats. But when large communities discuss things, it's very useful for that information to be publicly available and accessible from a search engine, and Discord prevents that, locking it all away from any outsiders. If your group really wants to be secret and private for some reason, I guess that's fine, but if you're a group discussing, for instance, bicycle maintenance tips, why do you want to keep others from seeing this helpful info? And why do you want to keep others out? Specialty subreddits don't have this problem.
    - hmcq6 2y ago
      So where do you suggest people post that is zero cost and advertisement free? These communities were pushed onto discord because there isn't a better place for them. The regional live music discord I'm in would be much better served by being on a web forum but running a forum costs money. Or they could use facebook but not everyone in the community has/wants a facebook account. Not everyone uses reddit/twitter/insert your favorite social media. > why do you want to keep others from seeing this helpful info? How paranoid would one have to be to think people are moving to discord to be malicious? The garden doesn't have walls to keep you out, the walls are to keep the advertisers/bots out.

echelon 2y ago

I still remember the screen names of folks I interacted with in and on IRC, AIM, ezboard, IGN boards, forums, etc. I only remember a handful of HN usernames and absolutely zero handles from elsewhere. Forums used to have large avatars and signatures you could customize and communities were much more tightly-knit. I imagine that's what Discord and VRChat do now.

Chathamization 2y ago
> I still remember the screen names of folks I interacted with in and on IRC, AIM, ezboard, IGN boards, forums, etc. > I only remember a handful of HN usernames and absolutely zero handles from elsewhere. Same. It's strange that in terms of interpersonal communication, we appear to be worse off than where were 25 years ago with AIM and e-mail. Back then it was common to carry on pretty deep conversations and relationships with people from all over the world. Part of my nightly routine was going over the day with my friends (both near and far). I would send long e-mail to my distant friends on their birthday, talking about all the things that had happened in my life, and they would do the same. I'd even keep in contact for years with pen pals I had met all over the world. There's no reason this couldn't be done today, but I suppose most people prefer the much shallower interactions we have now.
klibertp 2y ago
> I only remember a handful of HN usernames That's a feature. HN is expressly built to encourage high-quality content in the comments - by removing or discouraging things that tend to bring poor content with them. Not showing up/down-votes counts, not allowing avatars and discouraging lengthy signatures, not showing previews of images linked, not allowing to reply immediately to comments (and the length of "immediately" getting longer the deeper the thread) - the HN is coded this way to encourage sticking to guidelines and making thoughtful comments focused on informative, interesting content. It does make HN a worse place for building interpersonal relations, no question about it - but it also eliminates or blocks many of the enshitiffication vectors. Not all of them, and we do see changes over time in what's acceptable, going in the direction that some will dislike, but I think the fact that HN still existing in relatively constant form almost 20 years later shows that the strategy works, to an extent.

Chathamization 2y ago

> Is that no longer the web? From what I've seen, a lot - I'd say most - of the communities that existed outside of the major platforms have dried up or ended (the famous/infamous bodybuilding forum apparently just went down). Web forum communities, mailing list communities, communities built around an individuals website (it sounds strange to say now, but this was pretty common a couple of decades ago). Even the offline meeting sites like Couchsurfing and Meetup are a shadow of what they were in their heyday (about 15 years or so ago). The actual number of people actively using the internet is much higher, yet the number of people outside of a few small social media silos are much lower. So I can only surmise that these social media silos are giving the vast majority - almost everyone - what they want (those gratifying instant hits). It's just sad to know that there's apparently only a tiny sliver of humanity interested in venturing off the main path and interacting with people outside of these silos.

dartos 2y ago
You may be pleased to hear that those kinds of communities are actually alive and well, they just live on places like discord now. Places that largely can’t be indexed by google. My hope is that eventually these groups migrate to matrix, but we’ll see.
- treyd 2y ago
  That's exactly the issue the parent poster is talking about. It's not the web in the strict sense, it's the siloification.
  - dartos 2y ago
    > It's not the web in the strict sense It kind of is though. Maybe not with discord specifically, because it’s a closed platform. but communities on open ones like matrix are just as much part of the web as any forum. It’s not a big platform with all users in one space. There are dedicated communities with passionate people talking, sharing ideas, helping each other out. Would you’ve considered IRC chat rooms on freenode part of the web?

moi2388 2y ago

The irony of posting this on hackernews..

turnsout 2y ago

100%. I've been writing HTML since 94, and there truly was no golden age. There have been (get ready for this) good and bad things about each era. It has always been possible to create communities, or break away and do something different. I really like ActivityPub, but it does not really change the dynamic. With all of that said, sometimes getting a fancy new notebook makes you more likely to draw/write, which seems to be essentially what Dave is experiencing. Nothing wrong with that!