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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

I think what we've lost on the modern Internet from forums is a stable-ish social order. You knew people in a different way, remembered names and faces, understood personalities and attitudes. Some came and went but for the most part, there was some sort of community with social hierarchy and structure, agreed-upon values.

I think losing that is a large part of why Internet discussion has kind of turned to shit. Lacking real belonging, people create ephemeral tribes out of their perceived identity instead.

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The entire online population of the Internet in the late 1990s / early 2000s is the size of a "small" current-day social network. On the order of 100m people or so.

Individual communities were much smaller than that, and in a crowd numbering from 100s to 1,000s, you'd come to recognise names and frequently meet IRL. I still see people I know from those days turning up online today (there are a few on HN itself).

Conversation scales poorly.

I'm not sure what exactly it is that online discussion is meant to accomplish any more (well: selling terabucks worth of advertising and manipulating behaviours at a global scale), but back in the day, we were at least sold on the idea that it might be personal connection and useful information.

That ... seems to have been a pipe dream.

Put another way, tribalism is one response to world too large for everyone to belong to the same tribe, and the establishment of tribal boundaries itself begins defining further emergent behaviours.

There's also the intersection with existing tribes and rivalries and a carrying-over of dynamics from the offline world to the online, which again, most commentators of the 1970s--1990s seemed to have conspicuously missed.

I'm a forum veteran, spent years on the staff of a popular gaming forum, and these days it's hosted on my personal server as a nod to history, though there's little activity. And I agree with this, each forum was a society in itself with regulars who would know each other very well, and other recognizable people.

A lot of that is, I think, due to the visual layout of forums. There's a thread layout that UBB used, and later phpBB and vBulletin shipped with similar layouts, where each post has a poster info box on the left side, prominently displaying the username and some other info about the poster (join date, title). Avatars would also soon appear there. The poster infobox, along with signatures, made it visually easy to recognize the different people and subconsciously learn them. Compare to something like HN or classic Reddit, where the username is in a small font above the post text, and in HN's case in a less prominent color.

I accept that most forums have died and they're now a niche platform, but I still don't think anything replaces them well. The other platforms are all very different. (Micro)blogs are built around one person's content. Platforms like Reddit are built for discussion, but in a way that encourages fast discussion and fairly brief posts, it's not for conversations lasting days or weeks. Discord is great for real-time interaction but exchanges are even shorter, step away for an hour and the conversation has moved on completely on an active server. Discord is pretty much like IRC with formatted text and channel groups.

Forums combine community-building aspects with a format that is well suited to long, detailed posts and conversations that develop over weeks. At the same time an active forum with decent moderation is also suitable for high traffic and rapid conversations, not quite Discord pace but rapid.

"Stable-ish social order" is a byword for homogeneity, isn't it?

We were all nerds, mostly descended from Europeans, associated with post-war higher education, learning through math or reading, and critical thinking. We had (inside the US) geographic diversity, but otherwise had very similar social norms. The wide range of social norms from UC Berkley to WUSTL to MIT.

Everybody you met on a BBS was likely to be interesting to you, because they were another person with interests significantly like yours.

The worst parts of the "open" internet today are full of people who see your interests as antithetical to their own interests.

> "Stable-ish social order" is a byword for homogeneity, isn't it?

I mean you talked to the same people over time, rather than, like most social media today, new people every time. You recognized people, and those people had social relationships with other members. There was a reasonable mixture of backgrounds and genders, but people didn't seem to make as big of a deal about it.

I do think the reason it appears very important today is because it can help form some semblance of cohesion and structure in social media that really doesn't cater to that sort of thing.

That’s fair; a community of repeat players has a different feel than people trying to win one round.

Your OP said the stability involved “some sort of community with social hierarchy and structure, agreed-upon values,” though, which I think came partly from the early Internet being a narrow-ish slice of class and culture.

Stable is a very different word from homogeneous. It implies a regular cast of characters, not an identical one.

Late-90s to late-2010s forums were hardly all homogeneous. Age-wise was the most homogenous dimension - the number of folks 40+ was low - but many of these communities were full of people who'd grown up with the internet pre-college or even pre-high-school.

With a stable cast of characters you actually get to know people even if they're different, you don't simply assume that their interests oppose yours, like you seem to be doing.

A similar transition happened with the advent of smartphones. Before smartphones, anybody on the internet was someone who owned and could operate a computer.

Well, at least in my experience, no.

I feel like I grew up on forums and I'm still followed around by the psychological archetypes and ghosts of the long-term friends and acquaintances and their personalities many years later.

I've been in communities with theologians, philosophers, republicans, democrats, economists, poor, rich, nutjobs, communists, programmers, non-programmers, truck drivers, radicals and straight down the middle types. People from Europe, Asia, South Africa, South America, NZ, Australia, North America. Singletons, children, members with families, and even a couple of oldies.

Modern social media feels so absolutely non-diverse and universally dumb, consumerist, artificial and corporate focused in comparison I don't generally want a part of it.

These days I'm largely stuck on a private discord server without about 20-30 other people that I've known anonymously for the last 5-10 years because there are no more open or interesting communities available on the general web that don't get the doors knocked down by spammers, hackers or hostile actors.

> I think what we've lost on the modern Internet from forums is a stable-ish social order.

This can't be overemphasized enough. Outside the internet, people simply do not have equal ability to garner attention. This is due to a variety of reasons, depending on context. In a room full of people, for example, you have to read the room and demonstrate a certain level of social awareness if you want to be heard.

The same is not true for most social media platforms. Instead, people are given equal opportunity to incite discussion -- and the most inflammatory material typically rises to the top. This is not a stable social order: It's an attention-deficit-seeking social order.

Forums like HN account for this, by placing higher value on longer posts, written with the intent to be a positive contribution to the community. (I suspect, but am not sure, that the length of the post is part of the algorithm here.)

On old-school forums, people valued the identities they created, and worked to protect the reputations of those identities, even if they were anonymous. Strangely, even though people often use their real name in contemporary social media, they often don't attempt to protect their reputations, when engaging online. That is a mystery to me.

> Instead, people are given equal opportunity to incite discussion

"Equal" how? This seems to suggest that a random person sharing their musings with their social circles on a public account, vs, say, Trump pre-ban don't have *dramatically* different reach and ability to incite discussion. That seems obviously incorrect.

That's a good point. I was wrong in the broad sense. However, I was thinking, specifically, of the context of comments on Facebook posts (and Twitter posts), where the playing field is actually level, and the comments that "rise to the top" are, as a rule, the ones that are the most inflammatory.

Ah, I see what you're saying. That does make sense.

How about this edit:

Instead, people are given the illusion that they have equal opportunity to incite discussion

Doesn't change OP's point. It's just clearer.

Almost every influencer starts out as a "random person." Trump started out as just another random B-lister - a larger audience than a non-celebrity anybody, but hardly the audience he ended up with. Social media, with its broadcasting of things to everybody instead of just to a particular small-to-medium sized group of forum participants, enables them to gain massive audiences. Getting that audience as a forum poster would have been far more difficult. The path looked more like "author at a online magazine" than "now has millions on millions of Twitter followers."

Trump wasn't some random person though--he had a huge financial and social network before he became notorious in politics on Twitter. It does not follow that every influencer starts out as a random person at all.

It's a little bit ironic that you mention that here, since I do feel that way on HN. And yes, I do recognize usernames occasionally and I also get recognized (and emailed!) on occasion :)

I feel like HN has more of the feel to it of a typical forum but it's missing a bit in the relationship building department.

I was quite active in a few forums many years ago where I knew all the regular folks and made a few lifelong friends.

But despite being quite active on HN for 6 years (and lurking much longer) I only recognize a handful of names, rarely see them comment, and don't think anyone is aware that I exist. I believe it's because, like Reddit, it's a bit too big for that type of interactions.

I'd say a big factor is the lack of ability to just socialise. Forums, even those built around some specific topic, normally had a busy "offtopic" section for general chatter. Here, everything has to be at least vaguely about the subject of the thing being linked to, with no space to talk about how your day was or whether you liked <movie> or what have you.

A major culprit there is the absence of private messaging. There's no way to build intimacy. Sure, you can email, but that's a much larger step change in interaction - and giving your email to one person means giving it to everyone.

For me, it is also Avatars. I often just don't read the name before the comment, maybe after, if I found it interesting. When people had little pictures it was just so easy to recognize them when just scanning the conversation.

I think that's on purpose, on HN. IIRC the stated reason is that it encourages you to focus on the content of posts rather than who wrote it, though IMO it's net-harmful and is part of why certain types of trolling and shit-posting are super effective on HN.

It may also (unintentionally?) serve to limit strong bonds developing on the site and prevent the rise of well-known posters who aren't already HN celebrities for reasons outside their posting on the site, reducing the likelihood or effectiveness of offshoots or schisms that have been a common feature of other large Web forums.

I'd tend strongly to agree.

For a long time I resisted the pull of avatars, and thought of them as gimmicky. (This coming from the mailing list / Usenet tradition in large part.)

But having used forums in which avatars are and are not used (G+, Diaspora, and Mastadon amongst the former, HN, Reddit, and Tildes amongst the latter), I feel a palpable difference between the two. Most of us are sufficiently visually-oriented to pick up on a symbolic representation (avatars need not be photographs or faces), and there's a more rapid assimilation of these than there is of just a textual tag.

I've also noticed on platforms / cultures in which changing the visible handle / avatar combination is fairly common (this seems to be the case on Mastodon especially) that this is disruptive. Yes, there's a persistent user name, but changing the associated image and handle ... breaks that recognition. On balance I rather dislike it.

I'd had a brief experience on a site in which serial pseudonymity and a lack of long-term persistent identity was a norm (Imzy). That I think was one of several ultimately fatal mechanisms for the platform --- it was shut down after about a year.

That's definitely a factor. On Reddit I've met a few people who I've had some correspondence with after one of us messaged the other.

But on old forums there was also the fact that the communities were so small that just hanging out a bit lets you get to know all the regulars. The closest I get to that nowadays is probably guilds in MMOs. There's also Discord, but that's a constant rolling conversation which reminds me of IRC, which was never really my cup of tea.

HN sort of straddles old forums and new social media.

I think a large part of what made people so recognizable was avatars and signatures. It's a bit of a shame they went away.

I disagree, I think avatars/signatures added a lot of noise to the conversation and made it harder to follow. I like HN's approach where if you want to check someone's profile, it exists, but it requires a small amount of effort (one click).

These kinds of long-lived communities also generate a lot of unique culture. Not really possible when it's just your own thing (unless you're a genius or just incredibly creative)

This resonates.

I've been running a Mastodon instance for a while and it's largely full of furries, and largely connected to other furry instances; when someone using a photo of their face as an icon replies to me, it always feels like An Outsider barging in.

I feel that posts on forums are more elaborate. People there are not afraid of writing/reading long block of texts, IMO the information in forums is more specialized and of higher quality. On the other hand, on social networks is not unusual to come across comments like: "Too much text", "TLDR?", etc.

Forums don't reward immediacy.

to me this is huge. HN, Reddit, twitter all encourage (or enforce) strict limits on post size. This seems to encourage a conversational aproach to discussion, and discourage longer discourse. HN certainly does have long posts, and I appreciate that, especially when it comes from someone with real world experience in a field under discussion. But something about forums seems to give people permission to give more detailed responses. I've read magazine article length posts on topics such as palladium printing or ARP 2500 schematics that have been amazingly informative, and weren't even topic starter posts but rather detailed answers to simple questions asked by a less knowledgable forum member.

In the real world, I'd rather read a book than have a conversation, so this appeals to me.

Experience on social media where one adopts a policy of blocking those who respond in that manner is markedly improved.

One of my Reddit handles has a policy (advertised in the name) of blocking idiots. I've yet to take that to the high extreme, but I'd really like to go through a number of subs and just start blocking users whose contributions are trivial and see what happens.

Many redditors have commented on the utility of blocking high-karma users. Up to a certain point, karma is a measure of quality. Beyond that, it's simply pandering and prolificity.

(HN is at least somewhat better in this regard.)

There are de-facto communities in Twitter, so that still exists. Like, if you follow municipal politics you'll see a very consistent list of names and faces, for example, since that tends to be a pretty small sandbox unless you live in a huge city.

Blocking is a poor substitute for down-votes and moderation, but the trolls will get blocked and frozen out of that pseudocommunity.

Few people want to join a small community with an entrenched social hierarchy though. In the microblogging world there's also a hierarchy, but the old guard gets pushed aside, replaced, or made irrelevant more often. Newcomers have a more immediate shot at "greatness".

Well that's sort of the thing too, forums grew slowly. This is why they were able to have stable communities.

A rapid through-flux of people is extremely destabilizing, and arguably a large part of why there are so few stable communities on the Internet today.

Weird coincidence but I have to share. I just checked your profile - you’ve only had this account for a couple of months. Despite that, I recognize your name and look forward to reading you. Heck, you’re quite literally the kind of community you’re talking about.

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