Tiny, weird online communities made a comeback in 2017 | Hacker News Reader

Tiny, weird online communities made a comeback in 2017

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268 pointsprostoalex84 comments

I am a member of three (admittedly weird) niche communities. These have been orders of magnitude more impactful in my life than Facebook. The friends I met there have become real-life friends. We've flown around the world to visit each other, we've laughed and cried, we send each other quirky gifts, and cheer on each other's kids. These are the only close new friends I've made in the last 10 years. Two of those communities are based around subreddits, the other a 90s era web forum.

The thing that makes them work where Facebook groups simply don't, I think, is pseudonymity. One of those groups has been particularly powerful, and it is a group that inherently involves being mutually vulnerable, so I certainly would never have joined under my real name, and I enjoy being part of the community even though only a handful of people know my IRL identity.

Reddit has some big problems, but is the best platform I have found so far for these niche communities. And my experience totally chimes with this article: big social media is as shallow as a puddle. Small niches are where real communities form.

I agree with your last paragraph, and IMO the reason is reddit is based on common interests, like Usenet used to be, while Facebook is based on random ways you met people in life and twitter is based on people trying to boost their ego.

I agree about Reddit being Usenet-like. Unfortunately it's a really horrible version of Usenet, partly thanks to the number of unpleasant people who use it, but also due to the karma system - in theory a way to collectively highlight good posts, but in reality often simply becoming an end in itself (karma whoring, playing to a gallery) and a weapon (people burying legit posts they simply don't like/agree with).

On Usenet you could filter anything you didn't want to see, which is reasonable, but you could not - as on Reddit, or HN - make it more difficult for other people to read it too, which is not reasonable, and simply helps to create a hostile, cliquey, poisonous echo chamber.

Cliques did exist on newsgroups, but they had less tools at their disposal. In fact one of the reasons people left Usenet for inferior moderated web forums is because while they could (quite rightly) control their own experience, they (quite rightly) had no ability to control the group.

Ironically, although Usenet is considered to be dead these days, it's in some ways in better shape than ever.

20 years ago it suffered from its popularity, under attack from spammers and trolls attempting and often succeeding in destroying newsgroups.

These days it probably has more users than it had before the mid 90s internet explosion, whereas spammers and trolls have largely moved on to bigger audiences elsewhere.

It's strange for me to read people talking nostalgically about how the internet was better in the past, about online forums they were a part of 15 years ago, or Reddit or 4chan, and seemingly have no experience or even knowledge of Usenet.

And that something as similar and simple to use as email is ignored by people who rue the loss of old (web) forums.

Unlike web options Usenet is no-nonsense, free, has no admin headaches, no advertising, no Evil Corp owner (or potential sell out to Evil Corp when the community grows enough), it's anonymous, private and allows unrestricted speech (within applicable law, obviously).

All it requires is for people to use it.

I agree about usenet, but must admit it’s not very accessible to people unfamiliar with it. I think a good web interface would go a long way to helping adoption. Perhaps one exists and I’m just not aware.

The company providing the world's most popular email web interface should have been the prime candidate to provide web Usenet, but instead they saw Usenet only as a means to get people on to their own terrible Google-only groups (while producing such a monumental amount of spam, trolling and abuse to Usenet, many people to leave altogether).

A better idea than a web interface IMO is Usenet access simply built into a browser by default. It makes sense to have Usenet in an email client, because they are closely related, but not many people use email clients any more, so not many people are going to find Usenet that way.

If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups, with proper filtering (not just on the overhead headers, but on the HEAD of each message), I would use it all the time, and I believe many thousands of other people would too.

> If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups

One part of me believes this would be the best native addon coming from Mozilla in years.

The other part of me worries it would bring on a new age of Eternal September to Usenet, which has been isolated long enough again to form a particular kind of culture that would seem fragile in the face of sudden mass immigration given the size of the Usenet community today.

Google makes some IMO very weird decisions about seemingly low effort/cost offerings, even if a bit niche, that would seem to be very complementary to products/services that it does put its full weight behind. Dropping Reader didn't make a lot of sense to me for this reason. The lukewarm support for Scholar is another.

Google's infrastructure is geared towards making enormous services cheaper to run, at all costs. As a result, the maintenance burden of Reader was far higher than you might have expected.

That should explain at least part of the decision.

Netscape Communicator, anyone?

Never mind Opera 12 and older.

Could be that we will see Vivaldi revive this, if they ever get that far...

> If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups, with proper filtering (not just on the overhead headers, but on the HEAD of each message), I would use it all the time, and I believe many thousands of other people would too.

Newsgroups were always bundled with email clients, so Thunderbird has support for NNTP.

I know, I said that in my post:

    It makes sense to have Usenet in an email client, 
    because they are closely related, but not many people
    use email clients any more, so not many people are 
    going to find Usenet that way.

> Usenet is free

Last time I checked it needed you to subscribe through some provider who charges money, ISPs used to offer it with the Internet access. Is it really possible to access for free?

Not only free, but you don't even have to register:

https://news.aioe.org/manual/faqs/#f2

Yes, if you don't care about the binaries groups, then there is at least https://dotsrc.org/usenet/ which offers free access.

For some reason your post reminded me of a list I saw quite recently of (surprisingly working) open/free news servers (maybe dotsrc was on it).

I can't seem to remember or find the exact list or page I saw before, but for anyone interested here are a couple of sites with a few of the other servers I remember.

Note: I haven't tested these, some may not work, some may not be deliberately open (perhaps just misconfigured), some may not allow posting, some may require registration, some may carry only a few local groups, etc etc etc.

Also, this post is related to text usage; if any of the following servers carry binary groups it's unlikely they'll have complete files.

    blaine.gmane.org freenews.netfront.net news2.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de
    news-archive.icm.edu.pl news2.neva.ru gandalf.srv.welterde.de

https://freenews.maxbaud.net/free-usenet.htm

And here:

    news.tin.org news.prz.edu.pl gandalf.srv.welterde.de pb1.pair.com lugnet.com 
    ingebrigtsen.no freedommail.novaithelp.com news.alaska-software.com richelieu.ac-versailles.fr 
    news.cadsoft.de news.omnitel.net news.tugraz.at news.mt.net.mk news.man.rzeszow.pl 
    serv3.vsi.ru news.szaf.org pair1.php.net news.sotcom.ru news.mozilla.org x6.develooper.com 
    hq.tin.org news.grc.com iad.wholesalenewsinc.com news.math.ncu.edu.tw bbs.math.ncu.edu.tw 
    news.securecomp.org guest.dogagent.com ddt.demos.su news.dbase.com newsfeed.iif.hu 
    news.iif.hu vm-news.spline.inf.fu-berlin.de news.spline.inf.fu-berlin.de mx.sotcom.ru

https://www.freeusenetnews.com

There's also https://www.eternal-september.org/ which offers free access to non-binary groups.

Google Groups ≈ Usenet

https://groups.google.com/

> I agree about Reddit being Usenet-like. Unfortunately it's a really horrible version of Usenet, partly thanks to the number of unpleasant people who use it, but also due to the karma system - in theory a way to collectively highlight good posts, but in reality often simply becoming an end in itself (karma whoring, playing to a gallery) and a weapon (people burying legit posts they simply don't like/agree with).

> On Usenet you could filter anything you didn't want to see, which is reasonable, but you could not - as on Reddit, or HN - make it more difficult for other people to read it too, which is not reasonable, and simply helps to create a hostile, cliquey, poisonous echo chamber.

( And... you apparently got downvoted :-/ )

The most infuriating thing I experience on the Web is indeed to see awfully wrong comments being massively upvoted, next to perfectly right, on the point comments being (even slightly) downvoted. And I am not talking about opinionated comments, but just factual comments. It just drives me nuts.

I noticed that even here, when I write opinionated, or a bit rough and definitive, or a bit provocative comments, I often get upvoted (sometimes downvoted, but that's not a problem, I understand it for this kind of comments); but when I write to state purely technical, factual, documented, provable facts, I get downvoted. I just sounds insane. I can understand the difference of opinions, I can understand being upset about an opinion being roughly put in a short comment. But what I don't understand is people who downvote perfectly right purely technical comments (like for example fixing errors in a program), where there is only one truth, there is no opinion to have about it, it is either right right or wrong. That's beyond me.

this is a reason slashdot's metamoderation was such a great idea, which has, oddly, never seen any further development.

Possibly because it is very strongly anti-gamification.

This while the HN/Reddit "karma" score is a very much a e-peen score board.

What is the problem in gamifying Slashdot? You can be "funny lvl 42" and "insightful lvl 8" for example.

I miss the ability to set your own scores so you could set Funny to score -1. Or ""Insightful"".

Sometimes people are not downvoting the content; they might consider the post was ill-timed, or irrelevant/pedantic, or inappropriate for any other reason in that context. It's hard to even guess without seeing concrete examples, but I often see people assuming too much of the motivations of downvoters.

> they might consider the post was ill-timed, or irrelevant/pedantic, or inappropriate for any other reason in that context.

I find the current single dimensional score limiting because of this. Sometimes I want to see a funny comment, sometimes I want to see an insightful one. Scoring them equivalently doesn't really make sense.

I don't really think "scoring" comments at all makes sense. I'd much rather systems like reddit do away with downvotes and point displays entirely, and only allow you to express your desire for something to be seen by 'upvoting'. That would influence it's sorting order, but nothing else. Users no longer get the dopamine drain of seeing "-15 points" on their post, and you stop seeing people edit things with "really? downvotes?". If someone disagrees so much that they need to express it, they should reply directly to the post.

HN as it appears to regular users is pretty close to my ideal system, except that it greys out heavily downvoted posts and you can see the number of points you have personally.

I can't stand comment systems with anonymous downvotes. It's like being in a group discussion, then someone else, hidden behind the curtain, calls out "You're an idiot!" Most people wouldn't stand for that. They'd say, "Come out and express your opinions, or stfu!"

I had a quick scan of your comment history for examples and the only one I could see that was grey and not simply opinionated was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15849233 , in which you've completely missed why people want lifetime management in Rust.

Check out Hubski you guys! It's very small right now, but I believe it has a better system to encourage good content. You can filter out anything you don't want to see and follow tags or people you want to see, to create your own feed. When you vote on a post, what you really do is share it with all your followers. The system works very well, even for spam, and it encourages friendly discussion and tolerance, because if you don't behave that way, people will just filter you out and move on.

I forgot about karma. I'd argue karma doesn't matter in the smaller subreddits. Thanks for the note about Usenet, I'll check it out.

The problem with no ability to control the group is the maintainers bearing all the spam costs, as spam gets transmitted from host to host so each user can filter it individually. (Filter it as a group, and you're controlling the group, whoops.) The arms race in email has done severe damage to many aspects of email -- do you think if everyone stayed on UseNet the problem would be better?

You really hit the nail on the head describing the uses of these sites, lol

Two other reasons Facebook really doesn't work, at least for me: a) the UI is not that of a proper forum or chat (small amount of characters per row, lack of controls for embedding content including quoting, content burried in between a ton of no-related content, etc). Actually, in my opinion the UI is abysmal when it comes to conveying information which is more than a picture of video or few words. b) when you're not in a closed group there's virtually an unlimited amount of people you don't even know who ca chime in and want to present their idea (which is almost like you're trying to have a serious discussion in real life and there's constantly a bunch of drunken people interrupting you st start spitting out whatever is on their mind).

It just does not work for me for having proper discussions (it does have a ton of other features which do work great, but not that). Reddit is sort of ok, if you find the right community. And many of the forums I already visited before there even was a Reddit or Facebook stil exist nowadays and some of them are even more alive than all those years ago. Most of them are specific (eg. one sport, one music style), the general ones are mostly gone.

I believe that Facebook Groups are one of the most powerful features of FB, but I agree that the UI is limiting and the admin controls are lacking.

Have you found any online communities with excellent interfaces? Ideally open-source?

I've been testing Discourse out and it seems pretty cool. Really fast UI too.

If you are looking for open source, I think Discourse is the best out there. We tried to move a community from an old phpbb forum to a newer software some years ago and checked several projects and most projects are either unmaintained or old (with old style PHP programming) or new but lack features we needed.

We ended up using NodeBB because the person who was going to maintain it was more comfortable with Javascript than Ruby.

I'd also recommend Discourse [0], as others already have. You can see it live on the Julia [1] and Rust [2] language forums, for example.

[0] https://discourse.org/

[1] https://discourse.julialang.org/

[2] https://internals.rust-lang.org/

One thing that FB groups have going for it (and I agree it's a terrible interface) is that you don't have to click on anything to see posts. Whereas in discourse you only see post titles, and a tiny blurb, the FB group is kind of like a custom group news feed. It's much easier for people to scroll through, and engage with.

Unless discourse has an "inline recent posts" view? That would be superb, for users not willing to commit by default to clicking on a post. It's amazing how big a difference that can make, with the scroll-happy click-averse folks trained on Facebook.

Can I ask what are your thoughts about this a bit in between flavor: https://beautiful.demo.ed.community/latest — it shows the first parts of each post, + some images. So by just scrolling, one gets a fairly good understanding about what each post is about. But to read everything & discuss, one needs to click.

(I'm developing this, and tweaking it a bit, maybe adding a config option so it becomes even more like the Facebook feed, is maybe something I should consider, hmm)

If you look at it on a smaller screen, like a mobile, it'll look a little bit even more like Facebook, ... but maybe more text from the posts should be included.

On one side I agree, it's easier to just keep on scrolling. On the other hand: having 'unread posts sice last visit' titles only acts as a filter from which it's easy to discard uninteresting things. And I'm not afraid to miss out since after years of 'training' on the internet we're probably all very quick at seperating the interesting from the less interesting by a couple of cue words. Moreover, often I have days or even weeks between visits and if that would all be available inline it would be a wall of text without oversight. But yes if you want it the Facebook way and regularily visit and don't mind having to scroll through uninteresting stuff instead of being able to skip it at a glance, it could be pretty interesting to have this added as an option next to the standard way.

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Roll your own!

As a user I just like standard forum software as established years ago. Not too much frills, just works. Think vBulletin, phpBB, Discourse, SMF. Actually there's not a lot of difference between them, and there's not many which are really bad. Don't have any experience as an admin though.

SMF = https://www.simplemachines.org/ (In case anyone wonders)

I agree on SMF. I am on quite a few forums that use it and like its UI very much.

People here mention Discourse — here's new community software inspired by Discourse; it's called EffectiveDiscussions: (for now at least)

https://www.effectivediscussions.org/

It also includes chat features from Slack, and features from HackerNews (threaded comments) and StackOverflow (question-answers), + some improvements over HN & SO: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can.... (I'm developing it.)

Something brought Facebook Groups to a period of gradual decline and I haven’t forgiven them for it. Even more frustrating is I cannot put a finger on what changed them, but it seems the ones I liked a lot all just got bigger? Or, they feel bigger and less like a community somehow.

I agree with this despite probably talking about different communities. It is night and day different than communities based around school and childhood.

Ditto. I wonder if anyone else here spends time on Sufficient Velocity?

It's an unusual place in many ways, not least for having been built by an idealistic (but pragmatic) lawyer who's been using it for, hmm, nation building?

Being able to find and converse with people who share my niche interests is one of my favorite things about the Internet. It was depressing to be interested in something and having no one to talk to about it.

Sounds cool. Can you mention the 3 communities?

I'm the opposite of this. I spent most of my life up to my mid-20s on internet communities -- first Usenet as a child (8 years old), then SA, then Reddit/4chan. I mostly read Reddit and HN now, but do not read and post compulsively like I did previously. I would easily clear 200+ posts a day on SA and 4chan. There's also the different pockets of people that I met through gaming.

It's been hard, but I've finally broken away from relying on the internet for friends and community. 2017 was the first year that I can remember where I spent more time with RL friends than internet friends.

People are too busy "playing boring politcian" on Facebook. But Reddit allows you to geek about certain topics without getting judged. If i make 50+ posts on FB about my favorite tv show on Facebook, i get called "obsessed" or get defriended

This article is very anecdotal and it doesn’t talk about the underlying reasons for why niche communities are making a big comeback.

It mentions that Patreon has risen in popularity but doesn’t talk about the YouTube adpoocalypse or the reasons why that occurred.

The adpocalypse and it’s impact on everything from news commentary to comedy channels is one of the biggest factors driving creators and hence users onto YouTube alternatives.

It doesn’t talk about said Youtube alternatives such as minds, steemit etc or why vidme shut down. It doesn’t talk about their differences or why one is better than the other.

It doesn’t talk about the economics of video hosting or how sustainable these platforms are.

It mentions the alt right but it doesn’t talk about twitter giving tons of those guys the boot or the rise of gab.

It mentions the alt right & Patreon but it doesn’t talk about how many of those people and other right wingers got booted off of that platform. It doesn’t talk about the cottage industry of Patreon alternatives that sprung up to cater to those people.

It also doesn’t mention mastodon or anything that’s going on with similar technologies.

It doesn’t mention why mastodon got big in Japan or talk about any similar niche services.

It also doesn’t talk about the possibility of advertising on twitter/Facebook/google being regulated by the USA/EU. It doesn’t talk about the testimony all three companies gave in front of congress nor its implications for the future of niche communities.

In summary this article provides neither a survey of the niche community landscape nor an explanation for why 2017 was the year niche communities made a comeback.

Every article doesn't have to mention every thing.

Would you mind writing some answers to those questions?

I would love to read these a lot more than the author's weak attempt to force politics on an otherwise really interesting topic.

Sure. I had been waiting for someone else to do this as it seems very obvious to me.

In the above comment I didn’t even get into the big war that’s looming between Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat for video ad revenue.

I also didn’t talk about how crypto currency factors into all of this either.

I think 2018 is going to see some pretty big shifts in the online media landscape.

I too would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. I agree, it feels like a storm is brewing.

Sorry to pile on, but I would also like to see a more thorough treatment of this topic.

Looking fwds to this

The current (or at least recent) era in online advertising and patronage seems to have been a fairly good one for a lot of niche content--at least such content as went viral for whatever luck of the draw reasons. It's by no means clear that, as the effectiveness and legitimacy of a lot of that advertising is increasingly scrutinized, whether many existing revenue models continue. Just because someone has been able to make money the last few years is no guarantee that they'll be able to continue doing so.

2017 was the year I left Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, etc. Nuked my old reddit account and came back to a fresh start with only a few niche subreddits and of course HN. I don't even frequent 4chan as much because it's losing its ground as a first-party source of internet subculture and information dissemination

I've significantly cut out the time spent engaging in communities that don't give me anything in return, and while it makes it very hard to date other people in my generation and at times fills me with a lonely sense of disconnection from society, I feel so much healthier.

>I don't even frequent 4chan as much because it's losing its ground as a first-party source of internet subculture and information dissemination

Like it or not, /pol/ is exactly that for the alt-right. It's also started to seep out into the other boards, which is something of a problem to be solved.

> It's also started to seep out into the other boards, which is something of a problem to be solved

Pretty much why I left. /pol/ is good to follow during important events like elections but in general the toxicity is unbearable... and the rest of 4chan culture has been suffering lately as well.

I hope one of the effects of this movement away from mass social media is a resurgence in self-hosted content and forum software.

2017 was the year in which I pruned my Facebook friends down from ~350 to 46. It was also the year in which I solidified friendships IRL that started in 1:10 scale truck modelling forums in Canada, the UK and Germany. I still check Facebook daily, but it's now down to once a day when I get up, rather than 100's of times a day. I only check in on Twitter once every couple of weeks or so, when I'm bored. For me this trend seems to be... a trend. One of my plans for this year is to build Clone Trooper armour, which will probably open up new friendships in the cosplayer world.

So I, as a single datapoint, love the trend. It's how I meet people who are absolutely, completely commited to the same things I am.

Sounds like a great direction to be moving towards. Much more grip on your social media, and you using it rather than the other way around.

Weird communities never disappeared they just got overshadowed by the rest of the social networking place. It’s like saying everyone goes to wal mart and home depo .

I would say your analogy applies, but in a different way: walmart and home depot arrived and mom&pop hardware and general stores didn't all disappear, but their numbers did diminish. Where 8 minimarkets were open, half may have closed (YMMV).

I thought the article would be about something like the rise of SSBC, maybe a reprise of diaspora*, and I wish this was true - but in reality most of these are still groups within the larger systems, let that be instagram or tumblr.

I'm a member of several 'weird' communities on discord. It feels like the old internet I loved of irc + forums, with voice and video chat bringing it into my modern times

I've been thinking about this sort of thing a lot lately and I even briefly made an experimental message board that limited the amount of posts the users could make. The idea was that it would slow down the pace of the board and encourage more people to post.

The idea never really took off, almost entirely due to marketing - I have no idea how to promote such a thing.

The site is currently down but if anyone has ideas how to regularly promote it (and maybe keep out jerks who post bad things) I'd love some ideas.

“Weird”

Actually niche online communities aren’t weird. Just because a topic isn’t repeated over and over again on big media doesn’t mean it’s weird. Big media doesn’t dictate what is normal.

> Big media doesn’t dictate what is normal.

Actually, it does. Unfortunately! :(

What's wrong with "weird"? It means: fateful, uncanny, magical. It's never properly been an insult, and those who misbelieve otherwise and deploy it in a pejorative fashion accidentally do that which they so label a favor by avoiding it - nothing ruins a small, special space like an influx of people who neither understand nor care what makes it special.

Nothing is wrong with it, it’s just subjective. Being subjective is usually not the domain of journalism (outside of op-eds).

Yes, I think VRchat is becoming one of those, with very high emphasis on the weird. Do you know the way, my bruddas?

Rather than the size of the community, I'd really prefer if we had more distributed and decentralized communities.

The pendulum has swung markedly from distributed to centralized communities in the last decade. Would be nice if it finally swung back somewhat in the other direction.

I'm feeling a bit nostalgic for the internet of the early 2000s.

Like lobste.rs, way better than HN with the wacko-fascist mods on this website that force their political views on the users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com