11 ms·

I kissed comment culture goodbye

• Raztuf 1y ago
  Nobody dares commenting eh ?
• tptacek 1y ago
  Weird! Sorry to hear that commenting (including on HN) didn't make this person any friends. It has made me a bunch of friends, including some very close in-person ones. I don't think I'm an oddball in that regard! Of particular note: comment culture is how I managed to engage with local politics here in Chicagoland, through which I met a ton of my neighbors and got actively involved with campaigns and the local government itself. Those are all in-person relationships that were (and remain) heavily mediated by comments.
  • Spooky23 1y ago
    My experience is pretty close to yours. I’ve gotten to know a few people via internet fora, and learn a lot. I got the opportunity to join a city commission as a direct result of participating on Nextdoor of all places. There’s also another category — people like you! I usually stop and read your posts in the same way my dad would a columnist in the paper years ago. I think the author of the post was looking for something in the wrong place. Which is all good!
    • tptacek 1y ago
      Nextdoor (at least here) is satanic, and still I'm thrilled that it worked out for you. One of the big drums I'm trying to beat is getting message board nerds into active politics through message boards. Well played!
      • hn_acc1 1y ago
        For me, the meme that "you learn to hate all your neighbors" was true of nextdoor.
  • Karrot_Kream 1y ago
    It's hard. When I was younger and on certain forums and chatrooms my comments made me friends. My closest friends are from a chatroom I was invited to by a friend of a friend in a subculture. 80% of that chatroom was invited to my wedding and 2 of them were my Best Men. But I find that the internet has gotten too big and everyone online just feels so angry and hurt all the time. This might be me; I am older and have less time. The bar to novelty in my life was a lot lower in my late teens than it is now. But I can't shake the feeling that "something" has changed in the world around me. Every social medium, from the follower-only Mastodons to the heavily algorithmicized Twitter FYP is angry at something or dunking on someone. (N.B. Sometimes I wonder if this is the nugget of truth behind the wisdom of having kids. That at some point humans become inflexible and recalcitrant but the act of having kids ties your own mood and outlook to the future of humanity as a whole rather than your own crotchety self.)
    • jenna_tuscon_98 1y ago
      [dead]
    • seabass-labrax 1y ago
      I'm no sociologist, but a pet theory of mine is that lots of people have realized that one doesn't necessarily need to listen to others in order to achieve one's goals. For instance, in the past you could write a letter of complaint to a company and have a reasonable chance of getting a personal response, but it can be difficult to even find any contact information now, and any response is likely to come from a script. Companies know they can ignore complaints and pretty much carry on as before. I don't suppose one always liked the personal response but it surely feels better to be listened to. People who want to discuss things in good faith (which presumably includes you and I) and achieve consensus get bogged down in long and complicated discussions while those who have selfish motivations just do whatever they want largely without any cost. The overlap between people who are 'well-meaning' and 'successful' shrinks, leaving the well-meaning people angry and bitter - not generally at each other, but still sometimes unfortunately.
  • zahlman 1y ago
    > It has made me a bunch of friends, including some very close in-person ones. I don't think I'm an oddball in that regard! I've been here over a year and seem to be fairly well recognized at this point, but I don't think I could even confidently name another user in the same city as me.
    • tptacek 1y ago
      For whatever reason, no meetup-type-thing for HN in Chicago has ever stuck or resulted in anything for me. I mostly meet people because they email me (or I email them).
      • kevinrineer 1y ago
        I hope you didn't encrypt those emails /s. Do you think it would be different though if you didn't create and post your own content? It certainly seems that contributing to discourse with just comments is quite limiting to creating deep enough social connections.
  • novok 1y ago
    The key is to reach out in private messages to make a relationship and to be an active poster so other active players would be interested in you. HN makes that effectively impossible, so if that is most of your comment culture time then it's difficult. Most don't realize you need to do active reach outs and be reachable.
  • jader201 1y ago
    > Sorry to hear that commenting (including on HN) didn't make this person any friends. Has HN really helped people connect in this sort of way? To me, HN has almost always felt anonymous, in the sense that I don't recognize (hardly) any of the users that post (aside from maybe dang). A lot of times, I don't even look at the username. I think this is a combination of a lack of an avatar that nearly all other social media platforms have (except maybe Reddit, which also feels anonymous for the same reason, but I don't use it much/am not a member), as well as the low contrast username. HN seems to intentionally deemphasize the author, and draw the focus on the content of the article and comments. Which results in a lack of connection (again, likely by design). But I've been around for almost 15 years, and can't think of a single person I've connected with outside of HN, and could maybe name less than a handful of users by their username. Again, not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. Just would be surprised if many people have made friends on HN (unless you're going out of your way/trying to build a network, which I guess some people likely do).
    • tptacek 1y ago
      I've met multiple business partners on HN, and friends I routinely hang out with in Chicago, and people I talk to in private chats most days. I've made more connections here than on any other group besides IRC #hack (a function of how old I was in the 1990s), and that includes the local politics Facebook group in my muni, which has introduced me to over a dozen people I now know IRL.
    • g-b-r 1y ago
      Well, you're not supposed to chat on Hacker News, there are strict rules on what comments you can make; so you can only make connections by contacting guys in other ways, which can only happen if they did put contact info in their profile page. But, yes, the way the username is displayed matters as well, I rarely look at it.
  • lapcat 1y ago
    > Weird! Sorry to hear that commenting (including on HN) didn't make this person any friends. It has made me a bunch of friends, including some very close in-person ones. I don't think I'm an oddball in that regard! You're #1 in karma on HN, so you are a kind of oddball: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders Also, Chicago is 3rd most populous city in the United States, which likely helps, because your odds of "meeting" someone online who happens to live in your city is higher than people who live in less populous areas.
    • tptacek 1y ago
      Totally fair point re: Chicago! Conclusion: everyone should move to Chicago. Chicago is amazing!
      • lapcat 1y ago
        > Conclusion: everyone should move to Chicago. Chicago is amazing! I've actually considered it. However, Chicago appears to be quite expensive, at least where I was looking.
• esafak 1y ago
  It's not really a social activity, but an intellectual one to stay informed about and discuss technology. You can stop visiting if you don't need to keep up. If I were retired, I'd be doing other things.
• nostrademons 1y ago
  I actually made plenty of friends commenting, in the early days of the Internet, but it wasn't just commenting. It was that a comment on a message board would lead to following them on LiveJournal, which would lead to AIM chats, which would lead to volunteer positions and real-life meetups and being invited to their weddings and a job referral to Google in the late-00s. I've got plenty of friends now. Most are not the ones I met online; that was a phase of our life that has largely passed us by, though I keep up with a couple. I still comment on things, but it leads to more shallow relationships if any, but perhaps that's because I'm not really looking for friends anymore. But I think that the bigger reason I'm reconsidering commenting online is: I can never be sure if the other person is real anymore. And even if they are, it often doesn't feel like they're debating in good faith. A lot of recent Reddit comment threads have really felt like I'm arguing with an AI or Russian troll farm. Social media now feels like a propaganda cesspool rather than something where people come together to share disparate views.
  • novok 1y ago
    Yeah I second this. You need a social media structure that follows this. HN doesn't build for it because there is no private message or comment reply notification infra. Other news websites and youtube comments are even worse. Reddit also is a bit like HN in that regard where the main unit of social media is the community / news post, but you could make it work to make internet friends because it has PMs and focused communities. Instagram, X, & old school forums etc lend themselves to it a bit more, but it's probably the chat / watering hole ones like discord and IRC that lend themselves the most to making internet friends. All the other ones you need to reach out specifically and it can be difficult.
    • balder1991 1y ago
      Instagram even change the incentives from connecting to friends to be more like a TikTok app, where you scroll mindlessly through reels, because the incentive is only engagement now.
    • PaulHoule 1y ago
      Oh the last thing you want is DMs. On every platform I am on that has DMs whether that is Instagram or Mastodon or whatever, I get approached by people who say something like "Hey!" or "How are you doing today" and if I humor them they want to move the conversation on to Signal where there is less of a paper trail. So far as I could tell it is these people https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2025-02-08 https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2025-02-08 Right now I am trying to deprogram a rather isolated friend who seems to be sucked into this, it is so frickin' hard to get through to a person who has been seduced, has a crush on somebody, and who has accepted a sob story. If it is not that, there are all the people who are maybe promoting their onlyfans profile or maybe they're just trying to click on a virus, but either way it is awful. I've been cataloging features that are "expressions of hostility" on BlueSky profiles and one of the most common is "No DM" and it is so common and the people who use it are relatively normal otherwise that we don't treat it as a red flag. If I was starting out a new platform I'd have a ground rule of never supporting DMs because they are a hotbed of fraud and trouble.
• mehulashah 1y ago
  Oh dear. Should I comment on this?
• fsckboy 1y ago
  i'll tell you what my shrink tells me: you're not commenting, you're looking for friends, for the feeling of connection or community. stop thinking about the nature of comments, the content, the responses you get. start thinking about the thoughts/emotions that come up when trying to make connections irl.
  • Esophagus4 1y ago
    When I fit this pattern over my comments and irl connections, I get something like: I have some pretty strongly held, but also probably divisive opinions, that I’m afraid would push people away from me if I voiced them to my irl people. So the thought / emotion is feeling limited irl, and feeling less limited in an anonymous Internet forum. And even occasionally validated in an Internet forum when you find someone that agrees with you. (Or sometimes, when I’m proven wrong, I get something to think about for a little bit.) Interesting thought exercise, thanks.
• bowsamic 1y ago
  Expecting commenting to make you friend like connections is the Ur internet faux pas
  • marcosdumay 1y ago
    If it's some specialized niche forum, it's very possible. Even more if it's a discussion forum, instead of wall of temporal comments. HN doesn't qualify for either, but there probably exist active places that qualify.
  • maxbond 1y ago
    The expectation that Internet social spaces are massive "town square" style spaces where strangers interact but remain strangers is recent, circa maybe 2012. We can go back and forth about the precise year but early online spaces like BBSs, Usenet, IRC and traditional forums were relatively small and close knit. Couples holding real marriage ceremonies in the multiplayer role playing game where they met is a tradition older than the term "MMORPG" (they were getting married in eg LambdaMOO). Everyone comes to online social space looking for some kind of connection, friendship or otherwise.
• IncRnd 1y ago
  [flagged]
• gooodvibes 1y ago
  > That scares me. All of that social activity with zero ROI. We really don't need to assign ROI to every single thing we do. And I don't think comment culture takes away from any of the activites that lead to more meaningful relationships. Like, how do you imagine this works - "I'm not going to comment on this tech blog post while I'm having my cofee this morning so that later this week I can meet with people at a local book club"? One has nothing to do with the other.
  • 9rx 1y ago
    I posit that you do need to seek and understand the ROI, else you will miss out on something better. I generally find great returns from writing comments, though. It is some of the best entertainment value I can find. The returns aren't constant. There are periods where I no longer see the value and that's when I stop until I see the value again. But if you never find ROI, how does one find the motivation?
• yesfitz 1y ago
  > All of that social activity with zero ROI. At first, I thought that I needed to change my commenting habits, and, you know, try to make connections. But the more I considered how to make friends in comment culture, the more I realized that it wasn’t just my own social ineptitude. Comment culture has a problem. Systemically, it produces an internet of strangers. I can't tell if Hacker News is less affected by this, or if it lends itself to parasocial relationships, but I've started to recognize a few other users who seem to frequently read and comment on the same topics that I do. I don't think these will blossom into friendships, but many friendships of mine have started with frequenting the same location or event until you see who else is usually there, and then introducing yourself. If this kind of comment-acquaintance is common on HN though, it probably comes back (as always) to the self-selecting user base, the text-only interface, and of course, the moderation. Because I certainly haven't experienced it on Reddit, Twitter, or Meta platforms.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• bhaney 1y ago
  > I’ve benefited incredibly from commenting. > It has made me a (mostly) better person. > All of that social activity with zero ROI. Sorry you didn't make friends from it, but "zero ROI" seems pretty at odds with the rest of your results.
• skydhash 1y ago
  One of the most useful advice I got (forgot the name and the link) is to never got further than two replies deep. Every time I broke that, in hindsight, it was dumb to do so.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • balder1991 1y ago
    I’m making a mental note of that.
  • 9rx 1y ago
    What did you find dumb about it? The mind loves to invent time regret in hindsight: "I should have cleaned the house instead of watching TV", "I should have spent more time with my kids instead of spending so much time at my job", things like that. Is that what you mean?
    • anonymars 1y ago
      You are blessed if you have never spent half-hours of precious mental energy pissing into the wind for a back-and-forth stalemate comment thread. I'm on the train right now, I probably spent five minutes phrasing this comment (and if it feels like five it was likely ten) meanwhile I had a book I was going to try and finish and instead I squandered the ride on Internet junk food. So to answer your question: yes, but no.
      • 9rx 1y ago
        I've certainly spend half-hours of precious mental energy writing a comment because I was having fun writing it. Like watching TV from before, perhaps cleaning the house instead would have been a better use of the time, but It is what was enjoyable in the moment, and sometimes you can allow yourself to have some fun doing arbitrary things. I don't really see that as being dumb, but to each their own, I suppose.
  • Telaneo 1y ago
• tonymet 1y ago
  Even just yesterday I had a constructive reply where we were initially snarky and reconciled to a good outcome. That’s not representative, perhaps 1/3 of the outcomes when I’m commenting here, and 1/10th on broader social media. I struggle with comments, where I try to be succinct and to the point. I’ve been soft-banned on HN – to the mods credit they worked with me to restore my account, and had good intentions. Commenters and moderators tend to favor vague, long-winded language and double-entendre over direct & succinct comments. Hence my frequent downvotes and soft-bans.
• JSR_FDED 1y ago
  When I comment I’m engaging with the content - not trying to make connections.
  • balder1991 1y ago
    Except on LinkedIn where 99% of comments are self promotion.
  • Noumenon72 1y ago
    The thing about having engaged conversations with smart people about things I'm interested in is that I enjoy that more than having friends. If I were trying to make friends rather than substitute for them, I sure wouldn't do it by anon commenting.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• neko_ranger 1y ago
  I find typing the comment out, then deleting it and not submitting kinda gives my brain the 90% feeling of needing to say something. Only place I don't have to do this is 4chan, where the worst thing to happen is that your comment gets ignored or something mean is said to me (oh dear!) I unironically just closed this tab before submitting out of habit and reopened it to submit this
  • eterm 1y ago
    I've found increasingly I'll submit a comment only to go back 30 seconds later and delete it.
    • anyfoo 1y ago
      I mostly do that when I go "that was a little bit mean of me... do I really need to be mean, what's the point?" Fortunately, that seems to also have trained me to not write those comments in the first place. I also think much more about what I am trying to actually effect with a comment, not just about what feels good in the particular moment. One thing that didn't change though is that probably most of my comments are edited at least once, often a few times, right after sending them. And even if it's just swapping out a word, or adding a missing comma. This one here is no exception at all, I just added this paragraph after doing some minor edits.
    • abruzzi 1y ago
      I participate in a number of 'old school' forums, never anything like reddit or discord. On those forums, while I have posted on some a fair amount, I actually find that most of the time I spend 15 minutes writing up a post, then delete it. There are a number of reasons I don't hit the submit button. Sometimes its because I see that a lot of other posters will disagree with it, and I don't think they will argue rationally and in good faith; but the most valuable posts I don't submit are when I get to a point in my argument when I realize that I'm wrong or that my opinion or point of view is badly supported or any numer of other things that force me to re-evaluate position. I've probably held that position for a while thinking I'm right, but actually formulating the argument forces me to confront my biases or mistakes.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• minimaxir 1y ago
  My entire career on tech is thanks to my comments at the bottom of TechCrunch articles in the early 2010s (and I did hang out with the TechCrunch writers once I moved to SF). That was more a time where trolling in comment sections on blogs was more understood to be in good fun. Comment culture died starting in 2016, as the internet as a whole became more polarized and making maliciously edgy is both commonplace and rewarded. Hacker News is an outlier in that aspect as it avoided that fate.
  • tptacek 1y ago
    There are lots of smaller spaces that have vibrant cultures! There are subreddits that are worth paying attention to, and Facebook groups, and subject-specific PHPBB's. What hasn't worked out is the no-holds-barred mega-spaces.
  • mycall 1y ago
    2016 is around the time when troll farms and nation states really kicked into high gear their disinformation and FUD campaigns with the express goal of deconstructing unity and common value systems. It seemed to have worked quite well.
• ikesau 1y ago
  Yeah, mostly anonymous commenting tyranny-of-the-nitpickers is really unfulfilling. I miss phpBB as the dominant mode of internet socialization. Communities with norms, in-jokes, reputation. Take me back!
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• zoogeny 1y ago
  I know this sounds maybe a bit insane, or even self-aggrandizing but I don't comment on public websites for some benefit to myself. I write with the vague hope that some unique expression of myself makes some tiny difference to this universe. Every once in a while I have some experience or some a point of view that I don't see reflected anywhere else. One of the benefits of the pseudo-anonymization of sites like Hacker News is that I feel a bit more comfortable stating things that don't really have a place to say anywhere else. The only thing I regret is when I get into pointless arguments, usually when I feel that my comment was misunderstood or misinterpreted. But even those arguments sometimes force me to consider how to express myself more clearly or to challenge how deeply I hold the belief (or how well I know the subject) that lead me to the comment in the first place.
  • non_aligned 1y ago
    I think that the culture of a given forum plays a huge role. There are some places where commenting is meaningful because you're a part of some closely-knit, stable community, and you can actually make a dent - actually influence people who matter to you. I know that we geeks are supposed to hate Facebook, but local neighborhood / hobby groups on FB are actually a good example of that. There are places where it can be meaningful because you're helping others, even if they're complete strangers. This is Stack Exchange, small hobby subreddits, etc - although these communities sometimes devolve into hazing and gatekeeping, at which point, it's just putting others down to feel better about oneself. But then, there are communities where you comment... just to comment. To scream into the void about politics or whatever. And it's easy to get totally hooked on that, but it accomplishes nothing in the long haul. HN is an interesting mix of all this. A local group to some, a nerd interest forum for others, and a gatekeeping / venting venue for a minority.
  • lukan 1y ago
    "The only thing I regret is when I get into pointless arguments, usually when I feel that my comment was misunderstood or misinterpreted." I like that you try to learn from bad arguments, but don't forget, that many misunderstand on purpose, to "win" an argument. Or at least to score cheap karma points or virtual karma points from the audience. So there one can only learn to make arguments in a way that they are harder to be intentionally missunderstood, but those ain't truthfinding skills, they are debate technics.
• mingus88 1y ago
  Comment culture died for me in a different way. I was browsing some thread and someone referenced a meme typed out as :.|:; The comment had a few replies who recognized the meme. I had no idea what it meant so I asked Claude Well the AI knew what it was! It was the “loss” meme but the explanation it gave made no sense. Turns out the meme needs a strike through tag. This turns :.|:; into a four-panel diagram of a web comic. That’s when I realize that whatever trained Claude stripped out the formatting, and thus the entire meaning of the meme. And the comment I originally saw was a repost bot that also failed to retain the formatting when it reposted it. And the replies that understood the reference were all reposted by bots. So who even knows if we CAN make relationships on the internet anymore? I can’t trust that any comment is actual human expression any more. Or is it just bullshit stripped of any context or meaning
  • squigz 1y ago
    I'm not sure what you're talking about here? What strikethrough? I immediately recognized it in your 2nd line as Loss. This is a culture thing, not an AI thing.
    • mingus88 1y ago
      Claude tried to explain the meme but without the horizontal bar, it was not 4-panel. It contradicted itself explaining the dots. It makes no sense: • : (one person standing) • :| (two people, one standing, one lying down) • :| (two people standing) • ; (one person standing, one lying down) So I had to look up the meme, saw that the entire representation relies on a strike through. That’s how you get one person in 1 panel. That’s how you get four panels at all. Sure, if you have seen the meme without formatting, you would recognize it. You probably have seen bots reposting without the right formatting it just like I did. Or you didn’t. Who can say for sure? That’s my entire point. Comment sections are dead
      • anyfoo 1y ago
        It's true that nobody can say for sure, but bots reposting the loss meme somehow strikes me less likely as some people reposting the loss meme. And an entirely ASCII-representation (ignoring the strikethrough) is extremely easy to post, so could make this a relatively common off-shoot of the meme that many would recognize, strikethrough or not. Why do you think they were all bots?
• komali2 1y ago
  I'm addicted to commenting on the internet. I was like, top 1% of comment karma on reddit something like 10 years ago, not because I was popular, but I think just out of sheer volume of comments getting 10-100 upvotes. Then to twitter, much shorter dopamine loop but a much worse comment experience because the threading is shit and it's impossible to know whose talking to who about what and there's a character limit. I was trying to break both addictions so I thought I'd try a "lower engagement" platform like Hacker News, and lo and behold, addicted here. Thank god they throttled my posting here, or I'd probably post at just as high a volume as I did back in the day on reddit. Anyway like the author I often wonder, why tf am I commenting? I don't recognize any of you, even though I've had very pleasant interactions and have learned some interesting things here and there from you (like yesterday I learned about claude sub-agents), but it isn't what draws me. It's some kind of compulsion. Dopamine hits from replies? I do love talking to people IRL as well, so maybe it's just that? My friends tried to get me back into world of warcraft and an hour after logging in all I'd done was sat in a capital city arguing with people in Trade chat. Bizarre compulsion. I don't understand ROI thinking but what frequently breaks my addiction is remembering that my comments are adding value to some rich bastard's wallet at probably no return to me, maybe harm. At least on reddit and twitter. HN isn't so bad, I mostly have good interactions here, but I'm an addict so what is useful to some is to me, falling off the wagon. Which is what I'm doing right now :P
• metalman 1y ago
  comment culture is an adventure for me it's teaching me how to be a better writer, by bieng able to see the responses to various styles of dialog, which is generaly impossible to do in the rural environment that surrounds me most of the time, and realy makes a difference when I venture into the city or have to engage beurocratic institutions, lawyers, bankers, and others working in more structured environments, devoid of wild and domesticated animals ,heavy equipment, perhaps simultaneously, which is the sort of thing that when included into general conversation in the form of "what have you been.up to", tends to derail conversations in an irecoverable way, so the internet gives me a place to test how that all works. thanks ,by the way
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• sneak 1y ago
  A lot of my more important (to me/IMHO) blog posts started out as seed crystal HN comments that I developed into full articles.
• jbjbjbjb 1y ago
  Small but organised communities that are on Twitch and YouTube live streams seem to counter that “series of one-offs” the author is talking about. I often watch YouTube live streamed sports watchalongs and have become familiar with the regular super chat contributors that are read out. Similarly on Twitch there are many regular streamers with small communities and regular chatters.
  • Karrot_Kream 1y ago
    Good point. I find some of the healthiest communities I'm part of online are influencer or game streamer communities.
• chriscrisby 1y ago
  I’m convinced
• letwhile 1y ago
  yeah me too. never commented since. life is awesome
• 1shooner 1y ago
  I never regret not commenting.
• 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  I still do it, but as harm reduction, I never read the replies to my comments
• iambateman 1y ago
  Commenting on HN helps me figure out what I think…in addition to learning what others think. Maybe 20% of the time I don’t actually submit the comment because I read it and decide I have nothing substantial to say. But the commenting is at least as formative and useful as the articles.
• the_af 1y ago
  I made a bunch of friends during the early internet (ok, not that early: during the phpbb forums era), some of which I even met in real life. From other countries than mine, too! But I think I've aged and the internet has changed too. Today, I have the friends I need in real life, and I don't make friends online. Not sure if it's me or the world has changed, or both. Probably mostly me.
• kelseyfrog 1y ago
  > Comment culture requires your social energy. It actually doesn't anymore. LLMs can transform you into Diogenes in a mech suit. You can minimize your expended energy, maintain emotional cool-ness (vital to being perceived as 'winning' to the audience), and ultimately turn every discussion into a war of attrition. If your opponent is getting emotional heated and burnt out, they eventually drop out. If you get off on winning online arguments, it turns comment culture into an asymmetric warfare. We're going to I expect this to destroy forums. Ideologies and untreated anti-social personality disorders cannot, at scale, co-exist with the commons.
  • dmbche 1y ago
    No they can't
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • maxbond 1y ago
    "Behold! A man," he declared, gesturing to a featherless ChatGPT.
  • Gigablah 1y ago
    > We're going to I expect this to Is this another instance where a strikethrough was supposed to be placed
• spacebuffer 1y ago
  Anyone know any forums where you can be sure you're talking to humans and feel like you're in a close knit community? I am not talking about reddit subs, maybe something more niche, even for hobbies outside computing. The only place where I felt in company of real humans is a couple of niche IRC channels, where someone without fail always asks me how my day is going whenever I join, I am looking for places like that.
  • mostlysimilar 1y ago
    Sadly forums have been out of fashion for more than a decade now. Even more sadly, most of those communities have moved to the closed platform Discord. :/
  • dmbche 1y ago
    I was gonna try and answer you, but I had the thought that you this could very well be a honeypotting bot trying to find untainted human-human exchanges, because scrapping and training on bot comments would be unproductive... I dislike that that's my reasoning. I would look for local( like in your state/city instead of global) or small userbases (so it's unlikely most are bots).
  • RiverCrochet 1y ago
    The only 100% certain way to know you're talking to humans is to see, hear, and smell them face to face. Given AI, bots, and desire to make Internet properties collect identification data of all users to make sure they're adults (even though their ISPs already do), I feel like your new, exciting and culture-driver Internet spaces of the future are going to be more like private clubs if trends continue. They won't be accessible until you physically check in with the admin at a public place, or attending a "Meet-N-Greet" type function. This will make them local-first, and such clubs/forums will have to master the art of developing and networking with other local chapters. Things operated like this before the Internet, and that's where the real people are probably going to end up back to, because the Internet is becoming as boring and tamed as the capital-intensive corporate-driven phone and TV networks of yesteryear. Should surveillance increase, I can even see the typical social function of the Internet being nothing more than an events calendar and payment processor, and no other real chat or interaction happening within it.
• hitekker 1y ago
  On the note of alienation in commenting, this perspective is the strongest one I've heard yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26640203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26640203. Read it; it's only a few paragraphs. If I could, I would distill that warning into the guidelines of any serious forum. Not just because it fits my lived experience. But because one of the people in thread who disagreed — a prolific developer who sought friends on the internet — later killed themselves because of the internet.
  • mindwok 1y ago
    Thanks for sharing that. Interestingly holds up in the way many people (including myself) use LLMs sometimes. It's a conversation with yourself.
  • eawgewag 1y ago
    Wow, wonderful. Thank you
  • hn_acc1 1y ago
    Depends on the topic - for politics, seems reasonable. When I'm following a few FB groups for a specific car model, because all the latest stuff seems to show up there, it's not quite as bad.
  • squigz 1y ago
    I mostly agree with the post, and believe we should work on that, but I disagree strongly with this last point... > This is also the fundamental mistake people make about the online world being a place where "discourse" can change anyone's internal landscape. It cannot, because it every discourse on the internet is by definition completely a subset of the ego of the single individual. Discussion on the Internet absolutely can change someone's "internal landscape" - I have constantly learned new things and grown as a person just reading comments on HN... like the one you linked. :) Does it happen over night, or just reading a comment and a flip gets switched? Generally not. But you read things, you reflect on them, you grow over time.
    • hitekker 1y ago
• binary132 1y ago
  I saw this thread and felt the need to comment pointlessly on it without aggrandizing the act of commenting simply to make some kind of point about the content but here I am making it out to be something important and meaningful when it isn’t oops how silly of me
• iphone_elegance 1y ago
  dumb movie, comment people are some the richest in the world
• beeflet 1y ago
  Writing comments just takes too much time, which is why I don't do it anymore.
• jongjong 1y ago
  I've also been commenting a lot over the past decade. Partly for practicing my writing, like OP, partly to help maintain balance within the social order by shedding light on alternative perspectives which were often overlooked. But now as my comments are likely being fed into AI for training for profit by specific individuals, it doesn't feel the same. I'm getting a stronger urge to keep my expertise to myself. Also, the benefits of good writing aren't as great anymore. I still kind of benefit in terms of practicing my tough typing... It's valuable to be able to type AI prompts quickly.
• aaron695 1y ago
  [dead]
• nirui 1y ago
  > Broadly speaking, the online platforms we use are not built for connection; they are built for engagement. This is universally true for all internet spaces, from stories to newsfeeds, for the intellectual and the plebian alike. It wasn't always like this, and the I feel the whole "engagement" blame is misplaced. You don't post comments for engagement, you post it for recognition. And people post selfies on social media not to farm engagement, but to attract attention. The engagement part come after it. Someone welcomed the content you posted, it's positive feedback from there. The social media platforms wants to farm engagement for profit, you, or rather most people at least, don't. The connection part on the other hand, is your own effort, it don't happen automatically. Platforms are just a place, a pub, for people to gather, you need to do the work to find friends.
• corytheboyd 1y ago
  I like my comments, they’re little droppings of my thoughts at the time that I can go back to. I delete many of them, if they get a single downvote, or if I think about them for 10 minutes after and decide not to have them permanently recorded. They don’t run my life, and it’s only HN and lobsters I leave them on. I just don’t assign much of my life’s purpose to these farts in the wind, and turns out it’s fine.
• worik 1y ago
  Gotosay: Come to HN for the comments...
• stronglikedan 1y ago
  Commenting is great. Reading replies and replying, not so much. I just fire off comments left and right, and never check back to see if anyone engaged. It's soothing without being aggravating.
• mancerayder 1y ago
  Is anyone old enough to have taken part in BBS culture? You had handles, so it was somewhat anonymous, and you argued heatedly, but teens and adults alike made real life friends that last lifetimes. There's something different about social media culture and polarization, and it's not as much the polarization as something else. I think it's the volume. Maybe I'm an elitist but there's something niche about agreeing to disagree. And building communities in other ways even when disagreeing.
  • derbOac 1y ago
    My guess is it's due to two things. The first is persona-centric rather than topic-centric spaces. The former emphasizes individual posters and attention to them; the latter, topics. The second is upvoting and downvoting. As I've returned to traditional forums a bit, it's been refreshing to have the content of the posts be at the forefront, rather than the popularity. Reaction emoji usually suffice to me to fill the role of upvoting and downvoting. Anonymity helps too, although I suspect it's mostly those other two things.
    • mancerayder 1y ago
      What traditional forums-that-are-not-HN are you returning to ?
• reportgunner 1y ago
  > I’ve benefited incredibly from commenting. > All of that social activity with zero ROI. Pick one
• mediumsmart 1y ago
  I comment to get downvotes and it mostly works.
• pjmlp 1y ago
  Doing comments since the BBS days, it was never about meeting people in person, rather discussing stuff with similar liked minds, even if there is plenty of trolling as well.
• incone123 1y ago
  I found this interesting: "part of an elite society of people who put their voice out there instead of lurked." I never think of people who just read comments without posting. I grew up before the internet so the nearest equivalent was writing to newspaper letters pages, and anyone who did that regularly was a bit lonely or strange but certainly not elite.
• wayeq 1y ago
  I can't remember the last time I commented on an internet forum
• cookiengineer 1y ago
  I really understand the author's point of view, because it really reflects my perception of the ever-degrading internet. What were interesting ways to share interests, hobbies, projects and free knowledge degraded post-social media into a cesspool of engagement, with the exception being the AI generated jesus or cat pictures. Pretty much everything else went to shit and is created to make you mad, because that's when you talk or click the most. A couple years ago when I was targeted by APT28 the first time, I decided that the only healthy internet time is around twice a day for a couple minutes and that should be it. So I introduced the toilet rule: I only use social media on the toilet, and I don't even have the passwords on another device. This way I guarantee the same level of content quality that social media expects me to have, without the emotional aftermath when the bots try to reinforce you in their absolutist beliefs of why killing someone is actually okay. It's great, I can fully recommend it. I've never been more productive.
• defraudbah 1y ago
  sadly agree, as a gymrat girl in my early 20s it's hard to find friends online, everyone asks me to send a few pictures as soon as we start talking ૮₍•᷄ ༝ •᷅₎ა
• didibus 1y ago
  Oh wow, the argument was not expected but also very compelling, I'd been wanting to quit commenting as it's a big waste of time and often leaves me sour, as you almost always comment in disagreement or engage in tough debates and so on. It rarely feels good. But seeing it as a bad ROI in terms of social interactions that don't create any social bond, that's quite true. You spend all this time "socializing", and yet gain no social connection from it.
• quitit 1y ago
  Slashdot had a decent comment system where moderation points were assigned at random and a comment could be marked as insightful, troll, etc. This helped sustain discourse and resisted some of the usual “hive mind” pile ons that are common on reddit and here. I think we are all pretty aware of how the up and down arrows are supposed to be used versus how they get used. For content that doesn’t trigger an emotional response: the arrows are used appropriately, highlighting comments and silencing less useful discussion. HN is incredibly useful for discussion on non-controversial, almost mundane, topics. However it all comes undone for any topic that carries emotional baggage. Where up and down arrows are clearly used as “like” and “dislike” buttons regardless of the facts or merit presented in each comment. Instead commenting becomes an exercise in PR. The first clue is the comment count. HN has some very predictable patterns in comment counts. Platform operators may not be willing to change this as “hive mind” and “liked” content helps visitation, even if it doesn’t help discourse. The consequence of inaction however is that topic experts are pushed out by mobbing, because invariably not everything is sunshine and roses.
  • rjzzleep 1y ago
    Why did Slashdot die?
    • jq-r 1y ago
      Terrible mobile-first or "web 2.0" redesign.
    • manapause 1y ago
      In short, death by acquisition by dice.com
    • inejge 1y ago
      It slid into irrelevance as the early internet exploded around it and it became an angryish nerd oasis. Reddit easily outscoped it, and HN had the attraction of VC money sloshing behind the scenes. Slashdot, the site, still lives as a fossil from 10-15 years ago. It must be popular enough to pay its bills.
• BlueTemplar 1y ago
  This started out well, but then there are other aspects to consider : Discord, unlike IRC, is killing forums. And is on the Deep Web, meaning that all the lore, all the knowledge is lost to anyone searching for it, including Internet Archive crawlers. And in addition to that it's a platform, so people using it are collaborating with totalitarian extremists that are turning our countries into (uncool) cyberpunk dystopias.
• marginalia_nu 1y ago
  I think HN is one of the worthwhile places to participate in. It's sort of what LinkedIn wishes it was in many ways, drawing all sorts of big names and subject matter experts to participate and connect without all the business suits and insights on B2B sales. It shouldn't be taken as a replacement for having a social life, but can be a very good complement if your social life isn't as intellectually stimulating as you would like.
• Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  I should quit myself, I've been on HN and various websites commenting for years if not decades; top 100 commenter on one big popular website. But it's shallow and self-aggrandizing, because I comment, hit post, and... never look at it again because what if I'm actually held to account on what I just said? But also, nobody's ever read a comment and thought "whoa I need to get to know this person better!" and reached out - but that's normal because I never read a comment and have that thought. Publishing my opinion is great, that's why so many people have blogs and twitter and such as well, it's their own soapbox. But conversing over comments, not so much. HN's issue is that you don't get notifications if someone replied to you. Someone may reply to you, you may reply to them again, but who knows if they read it and reply again? Reddit's issue is that I ignore notifications. Forums were great 15-20 years ago, I'd go there several times a day, go through ALL the unread posts, read everything, reply, and there would be actual conversations going. But also usually not one to one, so you'd rarely stand alone in any discussions. But for me, that time has passed. I haven't been to these forums in ages (and I run them, lol), I just don't read long posts, especially from people I know who write long posts, the personal conversations have mostly died out and moved to Discord or private chats - because over time, people shared too much, were too trusting, and got hurt because of it. TL;DR, I'm still on the internet but it's a husk of the mid 2000s - or at least my experience thereof is, the generation following will probably say the same in 20 years time. It matters more what time in your life you are than the online communities themselves I think.
• cousin_it 1y ago
  This sounds right to me: most of the comments I've written, on most sites, haven't been useful to me socially. The people I was talking to were strangers and remained strangers. But sometimes the act of commenting helped me understand something; sometimes my comments helped other people understand something; and sometimes, very often, reading other people's comments helped me understand something. So it's not valuable for socializing, but it is valuable for other things. That said, there's another problem with comment culture that seems worth mentioning. I seem to have gotten good at expressing thoughts that fit in a comment. That gives me a false sense of competence; but when I need to write something longer, like a blog post several pages long, the structure just completely falls apart. And writing a book I can't even imagine. It seems writing at different lengths is essentially different skills, which need to be practiced separately. And if that's the case, then as Annie Dillard says, why not just write something long to begin with? I'm actually thinking of that now.
  • satisfice 1y ago
    I want you to know I read this comment and appreciated it. I have just finished writing a book. It took fifty-five months from its inception. Twenty-four months since I signed the contract, and I was thirteen months late. I have written books before, and this was a book on something that I am pretty much the only authority on (my own methods of working), but still it was a slog. This book is the last one. Never again. It's so overwhelming to me. I felt like some hermit building a church on an island. I got the final proofs of the thing, today. It's a wonderful sense of accomplishment. But, no, never again!
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • matwood 1y ago
    > But sometimes the act of commenting helped me understand something; I write many more comments that never get posted. The act of writing forces clarification of thought which I find very useful.
  • seydor 1y ago
• astrobe_ 1y ago
  I agree with the author on the positive side of commenting. In addition to every they said, it learns you to accept being proven wrong, learn how ignorant you are, and is a great introspection tool. The point of commenting is not being social or a socialite. The best comments are questions - asking others, questioning yourself. Looking back at some of my comments, some were clearly toxic and I know why: it was time when things weren't going my way at work (cause most of my comment activity is in tech-related forums). It reminds me when I was bullied at school, which made me at times not the nicest brother. Took me too long to notice I had this tendency. But their reasoning then becomes unsound: "All of that social activity with zero ROI." They throw the baby out with the bathwater. It seems that the author belong to the same regeneration as mine, so they might be in that period of their life - the "forties blues" or "middle age crisis" (1). This doesn't "invalidate" this post, except for the false dichotomy between Internet acquaintances and IRL friends. It is a warning to be heard, at a time when we see more and more smartphone zombies in the streets. (1) it becomes really ironic when you been looking at teens and their identity crisis with a patronizing eye in your thirties-forties and then you experience it a second time yourself.
• jdthedisciple 1y ago
  private communities is where it's at, like Discord
• animal531 1y ago
  I only recently learned that I have a severe case of ADD. It has helped me with a lot of work related things such as the need to fix problems. As a result of that if there's a problem I work on it until its resolved, which has benefited me greatly during my career. But for every positive case there are just as many negative ones. I have an intrinsic need to answer questions and will often spend an inordinate amount of time doing so, when in fact I could have used that time far more productively.
• seydor 1y ago
  It's not just comments but the entire concept of virtual life. We lived many lives through a glass which made amazing things possible without any of the physical consequences. But AI is putting all this to death, because talking to a machine is not (virtual) social activity, and every question has been answered. It s becoming a slowly rising trend of people returning to the physical world only to find most people hunched over their phones. Things are happening, change is good
• vgr-land 1y ago
  I’ve been thinking a bit on how to improve discourse between disagreeing people and how the quick response style of comment sections don’t lend themselves to serious debate. One idea I have is to mimic Lincoln–Douglas debates where two people debate each other in a fixed format and with structured time for rebuttal. The hope being by slowing down rebuttal the response becomes more mindful. In general though I think its the speed and low quality of response leading to dissatisfaction of comment platforms.
• nancyminusone 1y ago
  Commenting probably bothers me the least on a list of things I think are bad about the internet. Comments are one of the few places you can still read about topic X and then see "well, here's topic Y". This is about the only thing making the internet a world wide web and not a world wide expanse of tiny unconnected islands. Search engines are not effective at making these connections anymore, and AI makes the connection but hides it. As for the worst thing, I think it's that you can have "kittens playing" and "terrorist attack" posts right next to each other. That can't be a good way to view what's going on.
• varelse 1y ago
  [dead]
• kldg 1y ago
  Agreed. I met my late wife on social media. You could definitely make friends on things like forums, but the people on modern social media platforms are different; there's a complete, pervasive lack of trust among today's users. In the 90s and into the mid-aughts, we would give out our names, phone numbers, and addresses no problem. It's a world where cryptocurrency could sprout because it was built around chat rooms and forums with like-minded individuals, or individuals working/playing in particular niches. Today, most people seem to assume giving your address is something only an idiot would do, or that times have changed drastically so it was fine then but stupid now. I think we live in a world now where people are conditioned to no longer speak to each other. This is a world where Jesus would be very strange indeed, even if we do find ourselves under a nominally Christian nationalist government. Imagine letting a stranger into your house, or even talking to a stranger in a parking lot. There will, for sure, be no kind of foot-washing. I agree this is largely conditioning coming from the gamification of socializing brought on by social media and other websites to drive engagement. I don't think the average Internet user would be like this without conditioning by big technology companies. I think it can be beaten by recognizing it as a harmful addiction, and an addiction that can be pretty tough to beat. Government and tech companies aren't going to fix it; it's something you have to want to fix for yourself.
• koolhead17 1y ago
  comments to IRC to beer catchups were a thing in past.
• sansii 1y ago
  This post made me want to comment again