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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

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.
  - 1bpp 1y ago
    https://archive.is/yv7k4 https://archive.is/yv7k4 Readable article
  - novok 1y ago
    Thats a spam problem and solvable by different means. FWIW I never get such experiences and made internet friends even on reddit via the DM system. For people to develop friendships with each other, they need to be able to have 1:1 or 1:small time with a ton of back and forth, and public comment sections don't lend themselves to 100 deep message threads. Chat rooms do, chat threads do, and DMs do. In real life it happens naturally as people split off into side conversations.
- bri3d 1y ago
  I think the ease of direct connection helps, but there's also a big difference in terms of permanence and frequency/volume. While on IRC people were frequently running bouncers or logging bots that eventually posted to the web, it still felt ephemeral and therefore more authentic. The same goes for Discord - much as the demise of the traditional web-indexed phpBB forum is lamented, I feel that people more frequently act like "themselves" in spaces that don't feel as permanent, regardless of if they actually are or not. Plus, most active IRC and now Discord users just post a lot more messages than, say, an average HN user, so there's a lot more socializing to be done. For whatever reason, public Discords just don't seem to work the same way as IRC did, though. I've had great luck seeding Discord servers with friends from elsewhere (real life, forums, shared activities, etc.) and making friends as the group grows, but I've never really jumped into a random Discord and made a friend the way I did on IRC. I can't really figure out what the difference is, but it's one of the little things I miss that I haven't been able to put a finger on. Overall though, I've made plenty of friends online, even in the last few years and even as I get older and the Internet changes. The original article really didn't resonate with me at all, which actually made it even more thought provoking for me - I can't imagine making 16 years worth of posts without a single direct connection.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  I think that I can also vouch for things like discord in the fact that it can bring internet friends. Though I think that two things that I hate is that information there isn't as structured in the sense that someone might come reading this comment after specifically searching for this topic of comment culture. But the same couldn't be said for things like online forums and as such I can't shake the feeling that if we all collectively stopped commenting on things, it can really move a lot of discourse away that might influence new generation. I myself have been inspired many times to try something new or think of some idea because of some idea just to try if that make sense. Or seeing someone post some idea that I like and then reading the comments to find nuanced opinion about and maybe I can chime in sometimes helping it. I feel like commenting system to definitely be one of treasures like wikipedia although I think that the noise:signal ratio is definitely higher in commenting systems (ie. they have more noise than signal)
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  The difficulty, I find, is to find yourself a "new" hole; I've been in the same online community for about 20 years now, and while I've dipped my toe into e.g. other Discord servers, it's a one off visit and then I just lose interest because there's people I don't know there. But this is RL too, if you're looking for a new community, it's easy to feel like an outsider. And it takes energy and / or conscious effort to get a feel for the community, and this can cause friction. After 20 years, where do I find the energy to invest in developing new relationships? How do I find enough interest in a possibly new subject to stick with it?
coffeecoders 1y ago
I feel the same way. Back in the day, I spent a lot of time on namepros and xda developer forums, and a few of the friendships I made there have lasted for years. I still talk to some of those folks weekly, and even meet a couple in person now and then. It does feel harder to build that kind of connection today. Maybe it’s the anonymity, maybe it’s the sheer volume of noise, or just the way platforms are designed now. The sense of community that used to form around niche forums seems a lot rarer. Maybe it was also my age. I was a teenager back then and more open to forming those connections.
jchw 1y ago
The entire Internet now is a giant confirmation bias machine, which is impressive considering it also exposes you to unlimited conflicting viewpoints no matter how crazy they are. I think this is just a natural consequence of structuring everything around engagement. Even when you're seeing multiple viewpoints, it's rarely going to be in a positive light.
- awesome_dude 1y ago
  It could also be that, that's the kind of world we really live in. Most of the discourse that we see is where groups of people are intersecting that wouldn't really meet in the real world because of the echo chambers we keep. The Americans are often saying that they only see that crank uncle, or their liberal nephew or niece, at thanksgiving, and, honestly, it's the same for the rest of us around the world - we're normally only exposed to the very different viewpoints at family gatherings. IRL we try to avoid conflict, and try not to associate with people that hold views that are vastly different to our own, so much so it's considered "unprofessional" to have the discussions at work that would show how different everyone's (political) viewpoints are in the workplace.
  - jchw 1y ago
    Social media exposes us to more viewpoints than we would normally see, but I think there is actually a such thing as too much. Online communities have the same kind of issue, they really need to strike a balance between being too much of a "circle jerk", and being too fractured and conflict-ridden to have productive discussion. What I think is interesting, though, is that due to the way social media platforms work, you can actually have both a massive circle jerk amongst people that agree with each-other, and constant, unending, vile conflict between people who do not, due to algorithmic feeds. (If anything, they both wind up feeding into each-other.) IRL I think people are often more empathetic and sympathetic, and I think that this environment leads to less polarized opinions even when our exposure to viewpoints is relatively limited. That said, lately, IRL socialization has become quite limited, especially after the COVID-19 lockdowns. Online interactions are just not really the same... especially not limited to text, over heavily manipulated platforms like Twitter/Facebook/etc. Seems a bit contradictory I'm sure, but if the problems of socializing on the Internet were simple and easy to understand, we wouldn't have to talk about it so much :)
Telaneo 1y ago
The 'make friends on the internet' age as it was back then is probably largely over outside of select niches, but I still find fulfilment in commenting and discussing matters within more niche topics. Within those, it's still fairly likely that I'm not actually talking to a bot, and that they're not a complete knobhead who isn't discussing in good faith. Hacker News gets there sometimes, but it can still spill over into the bad discussions that have now flooded mainstream social media.
- noosphr 1y ago
  I've always treated comments as about me first and about other people second. If I can't defend my point of view from some online random then I haven't really thought it through. Online discussions are still quite good at ripping bad arguments apart, even if there's rather more vapid noise around than there used to be.
- awesome_dude 1y ago
  There's still avenues for connections - I am making "friends" as we speak on reddit with like minded people (specifically politics, people who are sitting roughly in the same point in the spectrum as me) I've noticed that the demise of twitter has impacted my ability to connect with like minded people - I gave up on mastodon because the ability to stumble upon other people with similar tastes wasn't nearly what I wanted it to be. Here (HN) I have mostly found wonks and trolls replying directly to me, but I do see a lot of interesting discourse (which is what I'm looking for... right) which will likely lead to connections (eventually)
  - D13Fd 1y ago
    Are they people, or AI bots? And how can you be sure?
    - awesome_dude 1y ago
      Does it matter?
bri3d 1y ago
I agree with this overall, and I don't think it the notion of making friends online has died, for what it's worth: I've made a lot of friends online from various comment-media in the last 3-5 years. Forums are still the highest friendship to noise ratio, oddly, with Discord in a close second, but I also got my current job off of Hacker News and have made some friends here too. I also 100% agree that super-wide-scale social media feels like it's dying, though - Instagram, Twitter, and any Reddit with more than a few thousand users are definitely worse by the day, but I never really got a huge amount of value from those spaces anyway. My Twitter account (which in fairness, I think had 1FA with a password from 2008 or so) somehow got taken over by what appear to be drug dealers from Japan and I didn't particularly mourn the loss. Oddly the only online space I really _miss_ is, of all things, the early days of Xbox Live voice chat. Matchmaking seemed to really heavily favor ping and in turn I'd frequently encounter my neighbors in lobbies. Everyone used a microphone. It was still toxic in terms of various -isms, slurs, and so on, but the trash talking was generally more of an aside and you'd frequently get some genuine small talk and connections while you queued for matches. I've tried it a few times since and while I'm sure part of it is just me getting older, the signal isn't even really there (I think a lot of people are in private party chats in Discord, if they're talking at all) and if it is, the noise ratio is way higher than it used to be.
PaulHoule 1y ago
Habermas wrote a ponderous two-volume book titled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Communicative_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Communicative_Ac... which seems to postulate that some kind of deliberative process by which "people come together to share disparate views" could solve many of the problems that he points out in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book) if we could just find the right process but in 2025 it seems dangerously naive today. That is, when people come together to share disparate views online they seem to relish attacking each other and reinforcing tribal identities. I have a lot of problems with this recent Nate Silver editorial https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-is-blueskyism https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-is-blueskyism particularly (i) it didn't start on BlueSky but really started on Twitter and Tumblr, and (ii) centrists like Matt Yglesias who pick fights with that kind of leftist or anyone who complains about being bullied by trans people is either doing it to get a rise or drive traffic to their blog. Even if he names it wrong, the phenomenon he's describing is a very real thing and it's particularly harmful to the causes and the individuals that those who participate in it claim to be advocating for.
mancerayder 1y ago
I mind less the trolling and argumentation, it's the personal attacks and especially the one-liner 'mic drop' replies that I see so much on Reddit that we see here sometimes as well. Lots and lots of single sentence replies makes me want to close the entire browser.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  And the repetitive memes. I mean that's memes, but still, half of a Reddit comment section is predictable.
  - hallole 1y ago
    I really wonder why that's the case, because I only ever see it on Reddit. You're very right, and it annoys me to no end how repetitive, corny, and omnipresent the joking is. This is always the case whenever someone posts with a good question; good answers are inevitably buried at the bottom.
eawgewag 1y ago
Wow, I enjoyed your comment deeply and it reminded me of 15+ years ago on the internet, where your experience really matched mine. I still am friends to this day with the people I met 15+ years ago. I haven't made an internet friend in over 10 years though. I personally believe that part of this is due to the upvote/downvote culture of Reddit. We're all incentivized to say something that will attract upvotes. There's a positive side to this -- thanks to this I regularly read really funny, entertaining comments. Genuine genius in the comments section. On the other hand, its just to entertain. There's nothing really human or of substance there. Or, what's especially dangerous, to say something that bucks the trend, the status quo, admit an unpopular vulnerability outloud and suddenly you're hit with waves upon waves of downvotes. Not only that but I genuinely believe that the downvotes empowers angry debaters to come in and pick apart whatever it is that you said, just to enjoy the upvotes. I perceive it as a kind of bullying. At any rate, I don't think these spaces are designed for intimacy. They're designed for memes and funny jokes, not genuine conversations.
- novok 1y ago
  It's really the small communities on reddit where you get less of the upvote culture mattering much and the same regular few dozen to hundred people that are interesting.
nirui 1y ago
> It was that a comment on a message board would lead to following them on LiveJournal... I remember "back in the days"™ many forum software allowed a feature called "signature", it allows you to attach custom pictures and links after each and every post you posted. Many people use this feature to advertise their sites/blogs for others to visit. Then the feature got weakened by both the social media platforms and forum software, to the point that it's gone and forgotten. But based on my experience, it was the best place in the old time to do advertisement and SEO. I learned and bookmarked many interesting blogs from those signatures. Now days, I'll just google it if I need anything, and never look back after I'm done. That's one reason today's Internet is dead to me.
vivzkestrel 1y ago
since we are on the topic, here is a tutorial on how to write internet comments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_QmvZRS85U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_QmvZRS85U
OhioMan2943 1y ago
For me, this highlights that knowledge gating some things really does have benefits for community- even though the internet really should be accessible for all, it was experientially better for us when it was people like us.
datavirtue 1y ago
Dropping by reddit for 30 seconds is a great way to expend dignity talking to AI bots.

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.
- 1bpp 1y ago
  https://archive.is/yv7k4 https://archive.is/yv7k4 Readable article
- novok 1y ago
  Thats a spam problem and solvable by different means. FWIW I never get such experiences and made internet friends even on reddit via the DM system. For people to develop friendships with each other, they need to be able to have 1:1 or 1:small time with a ton of back and forth, and public comment sections don't lend themselves to 100 deep message threads. Chat rooms do, chat threads do, and DMs do. In real life it happens naturally as people split off into side conversations.
bri3d 1y ago
I think the ease of direct connection helps, but there's also a big difference in terms of permanence and frequency/volume. While on IRC people were frequently running bouncers or logging bots that eventually posted to the web, it still felt ephemeral and therefore more authentic. The same goes for Discord - much as the demise of the traditional web-indexed phpBB forum is lamented, I feel that people more frequently act like "themselves" in spaces that don't feel as permanent, regardless of if they actually are or not. Plus, most active IRC and now Discord users just post a lot more messages than, say, an average HN user, so there's a lot more socializing to be done. For whatever reason, public Discords just don't seem to work the same way as IRC did, though. I've had great luck seeding Discord servers with friends from elsewhere (real life, forums, shared activities, etc.) and making friends as the group grows, but I've never really jumped into a random Discord and made a friend the way I did on IRC. I can't really figure out what the difference is, but it's one of the little things I miss that I haven't been able to put a finger on. Overall though, I've made plenty of friends online, even in the last few years and even as I get older and the Internet changes. The original article really didn't resonate with me at all, which actually made it even more thought provoking for me - I can't imagine making 16 years worth of posts without a single direct connection.
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
I think that I can also vouch for things like discord in the fact that it can bring internet friends. Though I think that two things that I hate is that information there isn't as structured in the sense that someone might come reading this comment after specifically searching for this topic of comment culture. But the same couldn't be said for things like online forums and as such I can't shake the feeling that if we all collectively stopped commenting on things, it can really move a lot of discourse away that might influence new generation. I myself have been inspired many times to try something new or think of some idea because of some idea just to try if that make sense. Or seeing someone post some idea that I like and then reading the comments to find nuanced opinion about and maybe I can chime in sometimes helping it. I feel like commenting system to definitely be one of treasures like wikipedia although I think that the noise:signal ratio is definitely higher in commenting systems (ie. they have more noise than signal)
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
The difficulty, I find, is to find yourself a "new" hole; I've been in the same online community for about 20 years now, and while I've dipped my toe into e.g. other Discord servers, it's a one off visit and then I just lose interest because there's people I don't know there. But this is RL too, if you're looking for a new community, it's easy to feel like an outsider. And it takes energy and / or conscious effort to get a feel for the community, and this can cause friction. After 20 years, where do I find the energy to invest in developing new relationships? How do I find enough interest in a possibly new subject to stick with it?

coffeecoders 1y ago

I feel the same way. Back in the day, I spent a lot of time on namepros and xda developer forums, and a few of the friendships I made there have lasted for years. I still talk to some of those folks weekly, and even meet a couple in person now and then. It does feel harder to build that kind of connection today. Maybe it’s the anonymity, maybe it’s the sheer volume of noise, or just the way platforms are designed now. The sense of community that used to form around niche forums seems a lot rarer. Maybe it was also my age. I was a teenager back then and more open to forming those connections.

jchw 1y ago

The entire Internet now is a giant confirmation bias machine, which is impressive considering it also exposes you to unlimited conflicting viewpoints no matter how crazy they are. I think this is just a natural consequence of structuring everything around engagement. Even when you're seeing multiple viewpoints, it's rarely going to be in a positive light.

awesome_dude 1y ago
It could also be that, that's the kind of world we really live in. Most of the discourse that we see is where groups of people are intersecting that wouldn't really meet in the real world because of the echo chambers we keep. The Americans are often saying that they only see that crank uncle, or their liberal nephew or niece, at thanksgiving, and, honestly, it's the same for the rest of us around the world - we're normally only exposed to the very different viewpoints at family gatherings. IRL we try to avoid conflict, and try not to associate with people that hold views that are vastly different to our own, so much so it's considered "unprofessional" to have the discussions at work that would show how different everyone's (political) viewpoints are in the workplace.
- jchw 1y ago
  Social media exposes us to more viewpoints than we would normally see, but I think there is actually a such thing as too much. Online communities have the same kind of issue, they really need to strike a balance between being too much of a "circle jerk", and being too fractured and conflict-ridden to have productive discussion. What I think is interesting, though, is that due to the way social media platforms work, you can actually have both a massive circle jerk amongst people that agree with each-other, and constant, unending, vile conflict between people who do not, due to algorithmic feeds. (If anything, they both wind up feeding into each-other.) IRL I think people are often more empathetic and sympathetic, and I think that this environment leads to less polarized opinions even when our exposure to viewpoints is relatively limited. That said, lately, IRL socialization has become quite limited, especially after the COVID-19 lockdowns. Online interactions are just not really the same... especially not limited to text, over heavily manipulated platforms like Twitter/Facebook/etc. Seems a bit contradictory I'm sure, but if the problems of socializing on the Internet were simple and easy to understand, we wouldn't have to talk about it so much :)

Telaneo 1y ago

The 'make friends on the internet' age as it was back then is probably largely over outside of select niches, but I still find fulfilment in commenting and discussing matters within more niche topics. Within those, it's still fairly likely that I'm not actually talking to a bot, and that they're not a complete knobhead who isn't discussing in good faith. Hacker News gets there sometimes, but it can still spill over into the bad discussions that have now flooded mainstream social media.

noosphr 1y ago
I've always treated comments as about me first and about other people second. If I can't defend my point of view from some online random then I haven't really thought it through. Online discussions are still quite good at ripping bad arguments apart, even if there's rather more vapid noise around than there used to be.
awesome_dude 1y ago
There's still avenues for connections - I am making "friends" as we speak on reddit with like minded people (specifically politics, people who are sitting roughly in the same point in the spectrum as me) I've noticed that the demise of twitter has impacted my ability to connect with like minded people - I gave up on mastodon because the ability to stumble upon other people with similar tastes wasn't nearly what I wanted it to be. Here (HN) I have mostly found wonks and trolls replying directly to me, but I do see a lot of interesting discourse (which is what I'm looking for... right) which will likely lead to connections (eventually)
- D13Fd 1y ago
  Are they people, or AI bots? And how can you be sure?
  - awesome_dude 1y ago
    Does it matter?

bri3d 1y ago

I agree with this overall, and I don't think it the notion of making friends online has died, for what it's worth: I've made a lot of friends online from various comment-media in the last 3-5 years. Forums are still the highest friendship to noise ratio, oddly, with Discord in a close second, but I also got my current job off of Hacker News and have made some friends here too. I also 100% agree that super-wide-scale social media feels like it's dying, though - Instagram, Twitter, and any Reddit with more than a few thousand users are definitely worse by the day, but I never really got a huge amount of value from those spaces anyway. My Twitter account (which in fairness, I think had 1FA with a password from 2008 or so) somehow got taken over by what appear to be drug dealers from Japan and I didn't particularly mourn the loss. Oddly the only online space I really _miss_ is, of all things, the early days of Xbox Live voice chat. Matchmaking seemed to really heavily favor ping and in turn I'd frequently encounter my neighbors in lobbies. Everyone used a microphone. It was still toxic in terms of various -isms, slurs, and so on, but the trash talking was generally more of an aside and you'd frequently get some genuine small talk and connections while you queued for matches. I've tried it a few times since and while I'm sure part of it is just me getting older, the signal isn't even really there (I think a lot of people are in private party chats in Discord, if they're talking at all) and if it is, the noise ratio is way higher than it used to be.

PaulHoule 1y ago

Habermas wrote a ponderous two-volume book titled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Communicative_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Communicative_Ac... which seems to postulate that some kind of deliberative process by which "people come together to share disparate views" could solve many of the problems that he points out in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book) if we could just find the right process but in 2025 it seems dangerously naive today. That is, when people come together to share disparate views online they seem to relish attacking each other and reinforcing tribal identities. I have a lot of problems with this recent Nate Silver editorial https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-is-blueskyism https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-is-blueskyism particularly (i) it didn't start on BlueSky but really started on Twitter and Tumblr, and (ii) centrists like Matt Yglesias who pick fights with that kind of leftist or anyone who complains about being bullied by trans people is either doing it to get a rise or drive traffic to their blog. Even if he names it wrong, the phenomenon he's describing is a very real thing and it's particularly harmful to the causes and the individuals that those who participate in it claim to be advocating for.

mancerayder 1y ago

I mind less the trolling and argumentation, it's the personal attacks and especially the one-liner 'mic drop' replies that I see so much on Reddit that we see here sometimes as well. Lots and lots of single sentence replies makes me want to close the entire browser.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago
And the repetitive memes. I mean that's memes, but still, half of a Reddit comment section is predictable.
- hallole 1y ago
  I really wonder why that's the case, because I only ever see it on Reddit. You're very right, and it annoys me to no end how repetitive, corny, and omnipresent the joking is. This is always the case whenever someone posts with a good question; good answers are inevitably buried at the bottom.

eawgewag 1y ago

Wow, I enjoyed your comment deeply and it reminded me of 15+ years ago on the internet, where your experience really matched mine. I still am friends to this day with the people I met 15+ years ago. I haven't made an internet friend in over 10 years though. I personally believe that part of this is due to the upvote/downvote culture of Reddit. We're all incentivized to say something that will attract upvotes. There's a positive side to this -- thanks to this I regularly read really funny, entertaining comments. Genuine genius in the comments section. On the other hand, its just to entertain. There's nothing really human or of substance there. Or, what's especially dangerous, to say something that bucks the trend, the status quo, admit an unpopular vulnerability outloud and suddenly you're hit with waves upon waves of downvotes. Not only that but I genuinely believe that the downvotes empowers angry debaters to come in and pick apart whatever it is that you said, just to enjoy the upvotes. I perceive it as a kind of bullying. At any rate, I don't think these spaces are designed for intimacy. They're designed for memes and funny jokes, not genuine conversations.

novok 1y ago
It's really the small communities on reddit where you get less of the upvote culture mattering much and the same regular few dozen to hundred people that are interesting.

nirui 1y ago

> It was that a comment on a message board would lead to following them on LiveJournal... I remember "back in the days"™ many forum software allowed a feature called "signature", it allows you to attach custom pictures and links after each and every post you posted. Many people use this feature to advertise their sites/blogs for others to visit. Then the feature got weakened by both the social media platforms and forum software, to the point that it's gone and forgotten. But based on my experience, it was the best place in the old time to do advertisement and SEO. I learned and bookmarked many interesting blogs from those signatures. Now days, I'll just google it if I need anything, and never look back after I'm done. That's one reason today's Internet is dead to me.

vivzkestrel 1y ago

since we are on the topic, here is a tutorial on how to write internet comments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_QmvZRS85U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_QmvZRS85U

OhioMan2943 1y ago

For me, this highlights that knowledge gating some things really does have benefits for community- even though the internet really should be accessible for all, it was experientially better for us when it was people like us.

datavirtue 1y ago

Dropping by reddit for 30 seconds is a great way to expend dignity talking to AI bots.