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Comment by orthoxerox | Hacker News Reader

> What the author is bemoaning is the loss of the eclectic, bespoke, personal-style of homepage that existed in the early web. These sites still exist of course, they're just a much smaller percentage of the content.

When I stumble upon a Web 1.0 living fossil, it's a delight every time. Someone felt an overpowering need to say something, they made a website about their favorite topic (be that shoelace knots, unsolved mysteries of Ancient Mediterranean literature, their train trip from Europe to North Korea or the CUBIC NATURE OF TIME), wrote everything they wanted to say and mostly stopped.

They didn't enter into a parasocial relationship with millions of people, they didn't try to get rich by producing content, they didn't become slaves to The Algorithm, they didn't ruin the brilliance of their first LPs by producing a dozen more.

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Call me crazy, but bear in mind I love a lot of modern web development marvels (no more tables everywhere) but I kind of miss when a lot of websites copied each other, and they had... tables everywhere, but the reason I miss it was because navigation was insanely consistent! It was also insanely easy to figure out.

One old as heck website that comes to mind for me is 1337.net which I think is more early to mid 2000s I'm not sure if it went back further or not. It's a joke site with l33t speak and what have you, but the fact it's still around is pure entertainment. They have not touched anything about it. I don't even think it has ads? Kudos for keeping it like the Spacejam website.

I’m not fond of people who take ratheism as a major inteeest or even component of their identity, but pocm.info is just lovely.

> ratheism

Is that a misspelling or is there something called "ratheism"?

That’s a particular social phenomenon, as linked to atheism as gospel music is Baptist churches.

I think they meant /r/atheism, the infamous subreddit?

All relationships are parasocial.

I don't think your wife would appreciate that.

(joking, but the point is that non-para-social relationships, "real" ones, exist and can usefully be distinguished)

This works perfectly for my wife.

I once believed in real relationships.

They’re just ideas running through meat.

Not sure I agree with this.

Once you look closely enough, the distinction collapses.

I used to think otherwise, but that was largely based on a refusal to look, knowing that if I did, the perceived reality would fall apart, and the naked nothing would be revealed.

If you define a term differently from most other people, it's on you to make the translations.

If you're a solipsist, it doesn't matter, but then nothing does.

What do you mean by parasocial here?

Bidirectional channel.

TCP.

But with respect to the shared net. The experience that makes a dent in the fabric of reality as shared or known by all, personalizes the universe to a subdomain.

Once I had the words. Now that’s gone too.

For sure, but I think the confusion here is that that's more or less the opposite of how most people use it.

Like for me, the way I experience parasocial relationships most vividly is in educational YouTubers with a particular niche. I'll binge their videos and then they become emblematic of that domain of knowledge to me. And I'll have little imagined chats with them when I have ideas about that domain, where they generally take the opposite side of a view I might be developing and debate me. But really this is just the voice I've always talked to in my head wearing a mask, I don't know who these people are.

To borrow your analogy, they're sending unicast datagrams, and I'm sending TCP to their same address, but there's a firewall rule remapping it to localhost.

If the words come to you, I'm still listening, but there's 0 Pascals of pressure.

only those where only one party knows the other exists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

But some are more parasocial than others.

No, some are simply social.

If all X are Y then Y is meaningless when talking about X

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