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Comment by utexaspunk | Hacker News Reader

It's sort of like the PC User Groups that were more or less rendered redundant by the internet. I remember going to the HAL-PC (Houston Area League of PC Users) monthly general meetings as a kid and there could easily be over a thousand people there when they'd do things like having Microsoft and Lotus come and present their latest versions of Excel/123 in a "shootout". There were great door prizes, too. The internet came and there just wasn't a need for that anymore. It's kind of a shame, though, just because it felt like a real community thing.

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Yeah, broadband basically killed the LAN party scene as well.

As a teenager my friends and I got into hosting occasional LAN parties. The very first were so we could play Doom deathmatch over serial connections lol. But anyhow it was something I really liked.

When I moved halfway across the country I didn't know anyone. I googled around and found the local major LAN parties. I went to one that was hosted every couple of months in a union hall, with around 200 attendees. At the first one I ended up sitting next to a group of chill folks, and they let me know they did their own dozen person party every other Saturday.

So I started attending that, and it resulted in several life long friendships. We've all changed, grown, moved, had kids, etc but most of us are still in touch. Even for the folks that moved away we meet up every summer or two and do a canoe camping trip or such.

Now, to be fair, I've made life long friends purely on the internet as well, but I do miss those old LAN party days. It was a lot of fun staying up until dawn playing rocket arena et all over and over.

Also to be fair the LAN parties were not hospitable to women, especially the larger ones. On the rare occasion they did try it out they'd get hounded by the least socially aware idiots in the room, and no one else really did anything about it (including myself, as I didn't understand these dynamics at that age).

These days with discord and everything some of that vibe is back in the purely online context, but still I don't think there will ever really be anything like those in person events.

LAN parties were cool, imo and led to interesting things like this pic that's been on the interwebs for a very long time.

https://assetsio.reedpopcdn.com/duct-taped_gamer_1.jpg?width...

I still have a 48-port Cisco Switch that we used for these, back in the day. It's 10/100, so that far back. ;)

Yeah, we never taped anyone to the ceiling but that was very much the vibe of our regular little 12 person group. The host lived at his parents house (college student) and they had an addition on the side of the garage that we packed into.

A big deal for us was pooling money to buy a 24 port 10 mbit switch back when those were new and fancy. Such a huge improvement over having to shut down the whole party and redo coax connections because one person in the middle of the line wanted to leave early.

I was the IT connection. I worked with the gear daily, so it was easy to borrow gear or just MitM it when it was headed for the dumpster.

I kept it because memories, but it's a big ass rack switch, so it may go the way of the dodo someday.

We had women at our LAN parties in the 2000s, usually GFs or girls from the friend group. Not many played games so they'd just hang out and socialise amongst themselves or maybe play a console if there was one. So much fun.

Yeah, the only woman that showed up to that smaller dozen person regular event was my gf. Once.

I kinda understated what I was saying in the above because I didn't wanna get hounded by the basement dweller crowd, but the reality at the bigger events was pretty ugly. The only girl that ever showed up was the daughter of one of the organizers. Only a couple women showed up otherwise.

One story I can mention is from a different party I went to in a town not far away. This was a big bigger of an event, around 300 people and only run once a year. I only recall a woman showing up once.

That event held a 1v1 quake tourney with a modest cash prize. This woman was good. She smoked everyone easily. This was a bit of a shock because a couple people at that event had competed at quakecon and such.

The entire time she was at the event there was this mob surrounding her PC of... well, imagine the least socially aware and hygienic dudes that would show up to an early 00's LAN party. Didn't matter what she was doing or trying to play, they endlessly pestered her and tried to chat her up. If she walked across the room to get a coke you could see half the room openly staring at her turning their heads. Stuff like that.

Unsurprisingly she didn't return for the second day or any future event.

it's truly sad. i keep waiting for a trend reversal where people would instead prefer real life interaction because everyone's exhausted by the soulessness of zoom & screens. i really think it's coming, but i keep miscalculating when

You basically don't attend the public sessions at events to learn things you couldn't learn otherwise. At least keynotes are almost always streamed and companies give out very little in the way of datasheets and other printed information which is all available online anyway.

Yeah, there are breakout sessions, and they're a good way to have some focused time on something you're interested in. But anyone who regularly goes to conferences will tell you it's mostly about the hallway track.

IRL events similar to E3 are still happening but worldwide and at a smaller scale. For example John Romero attended such an even in my insignificant EU country. It was awesome and not as expensive as E3 but of course much smaller so it couldn't cover as much as E3.

It's happening here, where I'm at (smallish city in the PNW). I've started going to a near-weekly board game meetup where we inevitably talk about more than games (computers, sometimes news of the day). It's not a large group but it's about the same size as the Linux/UNIX groups I participated in a few decades ago.

> it's truly sad. i keep waiting for a trend reversal where people would instead prefer real life interaction because everyone's exhausted by the soulessness of zoom & screens. i really think it's coming, but i keep miscalculating when

I don't think this is a "trend," so much as the environment changing in unhealthy ways that we're not adapted for.

It's like a tree whose seeds will only germinate if the ground is just the right conditions, if the climate changes and those conditions no longer occur, it's not all the sudden going to start making seeds that germinate in other conditions. It's just going to fail to reproduce.

If the past, there was a lot more necessity to going out of the house, which has a lot of important side-effects, because you couldn't accomplish certain goals any other way. Technology provides easier and more isolating ways of achieving those goals, removing the necessity of going out. Now the needed side-effect are activities that require will, but people aren't set up as well to pursue them directly. That means most people won't do them or won't do them as consistently.

An example is exercise. Everyone got enough when there was no option except to walk everywhere. Now it's an option, so people are much less healthy due to lack of exercise.

I went to a bar last week, it was like a sports bar except the TV screens were hooked up to consoles and the patrons were playing Mario cart etc, with more dedicated spaces upstairs on a mezzanine including a few PCs

one of my favorite hangouts in my neighborhood is a barcade that hosts only indie cabinets

I think it's trending that way, but there are still going to be niche interest groups where you're almost certainly not going to have enough other members in your geographic vicinity to have in-person meetings. In the 1990s if you lived in a 10,000 person town you'd be lucky to find 4 other people in your age group with such niche interests as, say, personal computers or video games. Obviously those two things are quite widespread now, but there are new things that are just as niche as those once were.

I lived near a town of less than 2000 in the 90s and there were a lot more than 4 people in my age group who played video games. I had four kids in my class who were into computers enough to reinstall Windows, set up networks, and swap ISA/AGP/PCI cards with each other. I lived near a bigger "city" of 30,000 that had swap-meets and 200 person LAN parties, though I think they might have only gotten 50 or 60 participants in the mid-90s.

Might have been different for different age groups though.

Totally not exhausted and please don't pepper that idea into HR's head.

If you need friends, feel free to do so outside of work. I'd be happy to meet up with you outside of work. Lots of folks in your area will.

But, let people who enjoy remote work continue to do so without trying to muck it up. Please.

There are still meetups of various sorts but I don't really disagree. The days of the Boston Computer Society having offices and renting out Symphony Hall to have Steve Jobs basically do a reprise of the NeXT launch are long gone.

This happened a lot. 2600 Magazine had locations for meet ups with ones fellow hackers. I, personally, wrote in and had them remove 2 locations, since people stopped showing up to them after the evolution of information we're in now.

Ironic, imo. It all started with BBSes, turned into personal meets, then went right back to digital, because of ease of use and features not supported with the BBS style of community.

I miss BBSes some days. It was a fun time.

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