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Comment by throwaway4aday | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure this generalizes to everything. People who cultivate a persona in any sub-culture or domain seem to be a fish out of water when confronted in a different context. Take someone from the rave scene and plop them down in a microbrewery bar and everyone will gawk at the brightly colored fidgety person that has no idea what to order. Take a polished SV entrepreneur and deposit them in an Idaho roadhouse and observe as they struggle to communicate with patrons that don't speak pitch-deck. Extremely online people generally don't practice the skills necessary to communicate well in person like eye contact, conversation, or manners so you'll get predictable results when gathering them in meat-space.

I'm pretty sure a bit of googling will turn up a long history of articles of this nature dating all the way back to the BBS days. Having attended BBS meetups I know that the vibe of these gatherings hasn't changed.

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> People who cultivate a persona in any sub-culture or domain seem to be a fish out of water when confronted in a different context.

It's possible to generalize too much:

1. The size of the different context and the extent to which someone feels like a fish out of water matters. It's one thing to say that someone might feel a bit out of place if they were suddenly dropped into an unfamiliar festival in another country. It's another to say that many people in a particular subculture are almost incapable of having normal human interactions in any offline context.

2. Sub-cultures aren't all equal, and it's possible for certain subcultures to encourage behavior that most people would consider anti-social or unhealthy.

There are sub-cultures and there are insular sub-cultures that form someone's entire identity. These Internet people would be a fish out of water anywhere, whereas the Silicon Valley entrepreneur might just be able to blend in, socialize, and find some common ground in that Idaho roadhouse. You need to have at least some kind of personality and be capable of a little flexibility. The subjects of the article were neither.

I'm fully a raging California leftie now, but whenever I go back East to my rural hick home town full of rifle ranges, defunct coal mines, and Trump flags, I can still pass as a local and somehow manage to not irritate everyone around me. You have to read the room and be adaptable. You have to set aside differences and find / focus on the commonalities. This is not dark wizardry, it's just part of being a N-dimensional human being. I didn't see N-dimensional humans in the article.

Head higher up North. There's still some right leaning stuff, which for some reason SF newspapers like to call Far-right extremism. But when you're actually here, it's probably exactly like your rural rifle-range town.

Then again, some of the leadership of those towns are so far gone that they take obviously nonsense Facebook posts, have their sheriff hold press conferences lying that they've verified the posts, and then expend a ton of time/money/energy looking for "antifa busses" while passing around far-right newsletters encouraging the police to prepare for attacks on officers by these same mythical antifa adherents. Also going so far as to express support for the Washington militia that terrorized the random family of campers who made the mistake of visiting their shitty little town.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/23/revealed-cal...

>I didn't see N-dimensional humans in the article.

I heavily suspect there's a reason for that: the author didn't write them that way.

tbh it seems like the author herself is the one that's the fish out of water. I doubt the people in question are remotely as interesting, avant-garde or important online as the gushing intro suggests, but the rest of it seems to mostly be a story of how a clique were nonplussed by the complete stranger (a female one too!) turning up to their party asking lots of questions about online stuff. Sounds like half the people attending weren't "very online" (the attendees that don't know what the NFT is but are here because a friend invited them, and the scantily-clad girls that aren't normally seen at such events but seem very much to the tastes of the people organizing this one) and the ones that do know about the NFT apparently weren't interested in talking to strangers who aren't buying...

I'm also not sure the world of multiple anime-girl edgelord personas with NFTs necessarily generalises that well to the "very online". She could probably have had a quite different experience at a party of gushingly earnest activists or the sort of nerds who stop being shy and awkward when someone asks them about their favourite MMORPG or open source project.

The article is easier to read when you assume it's a hitpiece and that the author is an unreliable narrator. Not fond of terminally online people either but they are shaping the culture.

Yeah, this is the kind of article that should be written by an open-minded anthropologist, not a Stanford grad intent on being opinionated. Unfortunately, every time a "hit piece" like this gets published, it makes the Internet just a little bit less weird and amenable to interesting subcultures.

It is a magazine and not a journal of anthropology.

I don't think they were necessarily being literal, I think they meant more, "with the mindset of an anthropologist". You don't have to be an anthropologist or submit work to a journal to approach a situation with an open mind and the goal of understanding without passing judgement. But if you're looking to understand what makes a culture tick, they're probably the people to look to for techniques and inspiration.

I agree, it's an old notion, and reads somewhat Gibson-ish. I am enjoying the article. In a way the narrative matters less to me than the fact that it feels like the old days, and I'm glad this kind of zeitgeist is still clacking around the tubes.

BBS meetups weren't really like that. You had young/old mismatched people who could communicate because life wasn't online back then.

BBS meetups are filled with BBS people who may seem mismatched to outsiders, but their community is the BBS, and for some, their life is online on the BBS

What do they talk about online? It seems that the reason they BBS is that that in-person meetups (or even plain IM/email chat) don't work for them.

In my experience most people who joined a BBS didn't have any problems with email or IM, but at that time most didn't have access to either of those things outside of the BBS systems they used.

Even people who had internet access back then used BBSs to communicate with people near them on topics that were either local or which generally interested them.

Most boards had spaces which allowed general discussion of anything, even if the BBS was created with a specific subject in mind (computers, warez, occult stuff, photography, etc).

Lots of the people I saw at meetups were a bit on the shy/awkward side, which wasn't too uncommon for people who were into computers in general those days, but they were able to get along fine at meetups because they already knew many (if not most) of the other people there. They'd spent hours talking, and debating, and sharing ideas with them. They could go to a meetup and talk about all the same things they talked about online and they already had some idea of how people would react to them.

A local BBS was a great place to meet friends because it gave people a safe space to get to know each other at their own pace with carefully chosen words before being forced into real-time face to face interaction, and once they already had relationships established the transition to hanging out in real life was made much easier.

I remember being a young 14 year old going to BBS meetups full of big bearded Unix and radio wizards, was definitely awkward AF.

I remember the family type bbses with different people of all ages male/female but I also remember my hacker group meetup where 4 of us shared a 6 pack. Each bbs was it's own scene

Our BBS meetups ("bashes" in our lingo) were a wide range of outside the mainstream people.

Teenagers with nerdish interests (me and my crowd), hippie physicists from the local university, BDSM people, swingers (a lot of swingers, probably party people by nature), a few Hitler-was-right Nazis here and there, some pagan types, conspiracy theorists, gay & lesbian folks, and on and on. There was a some overlap in the crowds, and at the bashes everyone mixed and matched just fine. Fun was had by all.

I later dated someone from those bashes for a few years, and a couple of people from back then are good friends to this day. Still in touch with a few more, all of whom are doing interesting things.

I can't help but think it might be more like putting a married person in a singles bar.

In other words, you might make choices how to behave in the situation that you might not have made earlier in life.

I've noticed many of my friends have mindfully chosen more things in their life. They have chosen relationships and behaviors, or more importantly avoided certain relationships and behaviors to allow other things.

Probably a side-effect of growing up in a place where I disagreed with basically everyone around me but still got along, but, you can plop me basically anywhere with any group of people and I’m going to have a good time.

I'm an internet person who would do well in all scenarios you mentioned, but those are likely exceptions to the rule.

I can imagine places I would stand out - but it's within other niche subcultures like a Biker Bar or homeless encampment.

I'm sorry, are you making some sort of offensive joke or do you really think the world works in such stereotypes and prejudices?

Rave people are "brightly colored and fidgety" ?? A polished entrepreneur is incapable of ordering in a low class bar?

Jesus F Christ.

I think you need to get in more. These types of characters certainly exist, and incongruous juxtapositions are often entertaining and sometimes enlightening.

people are also prismatic in identity and adaptation. though, playing against type is also commonly performative. you're both suggesting a kind of simplistic human form

You're right, instead of using hyperbole to emphasize their point they should have just highlighted how every human being is complex and nuanced instead. Surely that would have done it.

The point as it stands is inappropriate and ultimately wrong. Or are you saying rationalization of poorly-thought-out lines of argument trumps respecting people in all their complexity?

Nothing I've said precludes the possibility of a prismatic and adaptive identity, nor surprising your audience.

Nor did I say having a deep, single or inflexible identity or persona is necessarily a bad thing.

You're missing the point; the hyperbole is used to illustrate how "person of Domain A" and "person of Domain B" may not have even basic levels of overlap within a given domain.

No, that point is clear, it's just callous and disrespectful.

I'm intentionally using extreme examples of people who are highly committed to the scene they have embedded themselves in just like TFA interviewed the most extreme members of "internet people" they could find. Take a minute to think before immediately reacting with your anti-bias bias.

Most ravers I know are perfectly capable of ordering a beer. If they're getting stared at in that scenario it's purely due to their appearance and mannerisms, not their inability to interact socially.

Raves are social events by definition. So someone who goes to them is likely to have at least some capacity for in-person interaction.

(Beer is often sold at raves btw - although many really serious raver types won't touch alcohol at a rave.)

I enjoy how you jump to the defense of ravers and entrepreneurs and in the same sentence call a roadhouse located in Idaho "low class". There's something very poetic about this cognitive dissonance.

It's funny how the most "holier than thou" people are usually the biggest hypocrites as well.

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. If it were just one comment, I'd post a warning instead, but you've been doing it a lot, and it seems to have been a problem for years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20753535 (Aug 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20330020 (July 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18621993 (Dec 2018)

That's not cool.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

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