4 ms·

I had the totally same experience with early online communities (Everything2, Slashdot), and for a long time made a conscious effort of keeping my avatar off th

by morisy 14y ago

I had the totally same experience with early online communities (Everything2, Slashdot), and for a long time made a conscious effort of keeping my avatar off the Internet. It's a little utopian, yes, but being able to deal with people based on their ideas, ideals, and quality of work, and develop fast friendships without ever being aware of so much (Great line: "How could the internet know you were gay? 80 years old? Hispanic? Transgender? Karl Rove? It just didn’t matter.") is what made the pre-Facebook net magical for me and so many others, and what, in many ways, makes the rash of so many social-mobile-local startups so boring: They trade personal flare for personal expression, let users show off badges instead of actual achievement.

mjn 14y ago
One thing I'm not quite sure what to make of is that I felt a lot of that aspect on the BBSs I started out on during high school, despite them being more local. Since there was free local calling but long-distance cost money (possibly a US-specific thing), I dialed up only local BBSs, which made for a certain location specificity. I liked that to some extent, because it made the local BBSs "special" in some way, kept the communities at a manageable size, and made it easier to develop an "audience", so to speak, in a little niche where you weren't competing with everyone on the whole planet for the same audience, like you are in the flat geography of the internet. But, at least in the circles I ended up in, nobody really tried to meet up, or wanted to know much about who you were IRL. So it had this odd feeling of both very cyberspacey, where you could be anyone you wanted online, but still a "clumpy" cyberspace where the clumps were related to RL location.
- svachalek 14y ago
  I was also part of my local BBS community but many/most of us did meet up in person. It was kind of interesting seeing faces to match the online personas as I pretty much always guessed wrong. I never imagined that some of us were women, some were very young, some pretty old, and one was the 6'6" tattooed scary guy at school.
- pasbesoin 14y ago
  I was part of an Internet based, but highly topical, forum. The experience was somewhat similar. Clumpy and fairly self-selecting. Some people did meet, out-of-band and/or in real life. But the nature of the community, and the worldwide physical dispersal, kept this rather limited. Actually, while the forum had a very specific topic of focus, people there got to know each other rather more generally. It's the one place where I wore an avatar. One of the cartoon character defaults. The anonymity and strong community ethic of respect for privacy actually facilitated communication. I find the "real name" initiatives ("now with photos") trending to the same sort of superficiality I run into "in real life". "Brogramming" and a lot of the rest of the "current trends" also come to mind. I think some of us are going to continue to look for those more intimate, even while more anonymous, communities. HN used to be (more than) a bit that way, before it exploded. (Where, too, people chose to reveal themselves to others, but on an opt-in basis.)
mhartl 14y ago
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog—or at least, they didn't until Facebook came along. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.j...
- russell 14y ago
  "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" is an adage which began as the caption of a cartoon by Peter Steiner published by The New Yorker on July 5, 1993. (From Wikipedia.) At least they ought to give credit.
  - BrandonM 14y ago
    It looks like that comic is signed, "P. Steiner"?

by morisy 14y ago

mjn 14y ago

One thing I'm not quite sure what to make of is that I felt a lot of that aspect on the BBSs I started out on during high school, despite them being more local. Since there was free local calling but long-distance cost money (possibly a US-specific thing), I dialed up only local BBSs, which made for a certain location specificity. I liked that to some extent, because it made the local BBSs "special" in some way, kept the communities at a manageable size, and made it easier to develop an "audience", so to speak, in a little niche where you weren't competing with everyone on the whole planet for the same audience, like you are in the flat geography of the internet. But, at least in the circles I ended up in, nobody really tried to meet up, or wanted to know much about who you were IRL. So it had this odd feeling of both very cyberspacey, where you could be anyone you wanted online, but still a "clumpy" cyberspace where the clumps were related to RL location.

svachalek 14y ago
I was also part of my local BBS community but many/most of us did meet up in person. It was kind of interesting seeing faces to match the online personas as I pretty much always guessed wrong. I never imagined that some of us were women, some were very young, some pretty old, and one was the 6'6" tattooed scary guy at school.
pasbesoin 14y ago
I was part of an Internet based, but highly topical, forum. The experience was somewhat similar. Clumpy and fairly self-selecting. Some people did meet, out-of-band and/or in real life. But the nature of the community, and the worldwide physical dispersal, kept this rather limited. Actually, while the forum had a very specific topic of focus, people there got to know each other rather more generally. It's the one place where I wore an avatar. One of the cartoon character defaults. The anonymity and strong community ethic of respect for privacy actually facilitated communication. I find the "real name" initiatives ("now with photos") trending to the same sort of superficiality I run into "in real life". "Brogramming" and a lot of the rest of the "current trends" also come to mind. I think some of us are going to continue to look for those more intimate, even while more anonymous, communities. HN used to be (more than) a bit that way, before it exploded. (Where, too, people chose to reveal themselves to others, but on an opt-in basis.)

mhartl 14y ago

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog—or at least, they didn't until Facebook came along. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.j...

russell 14y ago
"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" is an adage which began as the caption of a cartoon by Peter Steiner published by The New Yorker on July 5, 1993. (From Wikipedia.) At least they ought to give credit.
- BrandonM 14y ago
  It looks like that comic is signed, "P. Steiner"?