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Comment by narnianal | Hacker News Reader

Is it still possible to "find your people online", though? Maybe I've missed a few steps by now but I don't feel there's any place online that I would still call "my people".

The old places where we met when we were 15-20 are almost empty. The new place, HN being one of them, have been willingly sacrificed to the making of money. And then there are places like FB, Instagram that aren't really places of finding, more the spam mailbox turned into a feature.

Last but not least there are these isolated group meetings in whatsapp, slack etc. But there I've only found ones that are mostly open and therefore lack the finding part. You really need to know what you are looking for to have any chance of finding such hidden places.

So where's that "finding your people online" place nowadays?

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You can probably only find the mainstream places because you're a mainstream person now. It happens to most of us as we grow older.

When you put a lot of effort into a subculture, you'll gradually get access to its more hidden parts. If you're active in the facebook group you'll get invited to the discord. If you poke around the subreddit you'll find the old phpbb forum. And so on. That's the way it always worked, it was just more natural to put the time and effort in when we were younger.

I think a lot of people are keeping that a secret and I do have quite some places I would not want associated with my public persona.

Any place that gets too much attention will at some point succumb to a form of mainstream zeitgeist. That also results in platforms like facebook getting boring outside of private groups.

> The new place, HN being one of them, have been willingly sacrificed to the making of money.

I have no clue what that means. Could you elaborate? Was there a earlier version of HN run as a charity or something? With unpaid moderators?

I have always assumed this was a recruiting service for YCombinator, hence their unobtrusive job ads. Was it an old Usenet group or something? Now that I think about it, I don’t really know where this site came from, assuming my sketchy knowledge is incorrect. I know I personally do not feel it has lost any of its character in the 9 years I’ve been a member.

In fact, HN was originally called "Startup News", so it was even more tied to the idea of making money. And yeah, the idea was always to be a place for YC discussion:

"our hope is that by creating a community at news.ycombinator, we'll be able to get to know would-be founders before they apply to us."

https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html

Had no clue! That’s neat to read, thanks.

It's completely possible - I'd argue easier than ever. I think we're in the renaissance of online friends with the rise of Discord. We've had this gap of a few years where we shed our online aliases and moved to MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc; which frankly aren't great at providing an avenue to make lasting friendship in my opinion.

For me, Discord has completely fulfilled this niche. In recent years I've developed great friendships with people on there, which has gone as far as meeting IRL (something I didn't even do during my chatroom/IRC/forum days), to even starting a business! The only issue is finding good servers, but a quick browse through Reddit will normally provide a decent starting point, and networking can get you invited to more private servers. There are communities for everything, from specific video games, to entrepreneurship, to fitness, to mycology. My friends IRL are great don't get me wrong, but if I started talking about mushroom cultivation with them for more than 5 minutes their eyes would quickly glaze over.

Don't forget Reddit. The depths of specialized subreddits there is mind boggling.

I'd say the upvoting nature of reddit makes sure it's always about the posts (and only posts that are favourable towards a like/dislike binary metric) and pretty much never about the people behind them.

Old forums would force you to understand the various characters in the place; Reddit, by design, goes out of its way to hide them.

> of specialized subreddits Care to name a few?

For me scuttlebutt. I know some folks really like Mastodon or Matrix for their communities.

scuttlebutt would be great if it wouldn't force this SJW and off-the-grid thinking on everything there. Technologically I also like it a lot.

I depends what your interests are, but there's almost always a channel on one of many IRC networks for any topic. Channels might not always be huge, but a lot of subjects have 30+ people.

Non-/r/All subs on reddit can also be great. Through these you can usually find another message board, chat, etc with another community (often the same people and then some.)

Often when I'm looking for a community that is focused on a specific topic, I search a common, but specific question for that community.

People often say that IRC is dead, but its not -- and it doesn't have to be. Find a channel and get talking. When the next searcher stumbles into the channel, welcome them.. repeat. Before you know it your channel of five or ten is up to 30, then 50.

Ultimately, it takes a night of tumbling down a rabbit hole. I can confidently say that there will be at least one thriving community filled with people with your similar interests. It just takes some digging beyond a search engine alone.

SomethingAwful forums still have a fairly dedicated pool of members who post regularly. Some have been on there for as long as 20 years. I remember recently talking to someone who met his wife on there a decade ago.

They're behind a paywall, with reasonably heavy moderation, so people generally behave ok, despite being anonymous. I guess the experience of being muted by a moderator in front of everybody for being an asshole is painful enough that most learn fast not to do that again.

Seems to me that any gated community of "underdogs" is going to attract a loyal following. It's harder to experience the same feeling in a place like reddit, where it's a free for all, there a lot more members, and someone's seniority is less obvious.

The problem with something awful is their early success went to their head. I was around in the late 90s when SA really took off and became the reddit/4chan of its day.

I know people who used to be massive cheerleaders for SA forums who eventually got sick of the mods. SAs business model used to be banning people for minor infractions and they could then pay $10 to get unbanned. Something as simple as saying "I went and saw MovieX it was 7/10 I thought not amazing" could get you banned for "trolling"

I'm out of the loop now as last time I even spoke to someone about SA was 10 years ago but when they were the top dog of internet forums it totally ruined the culture.

It's not perfect by any stretch. I suspect that right now it's very far into its plateau of productivity, and very far outside of the Internet's spotlight, which made everybody calm down. Lowtax is also not really involved much anymore, so the entire site is effectively on life support.

A lot of creators seem to have migrated toward the Patreon / Slack group model now.

I'm involved in a couple of communities that probably you wouldn't know or care about unless you were really invested in that thing, and which most would not bother to look for.

Try "underground" MMO games or some niche community, that are not on Facebook et al.

Telegram is amazing.

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