These Web elegies are starting to become a real drag to read. And I don't mean to come across as flippant in saying this. I feel a sort of concern for the spirit of the authors of these kind of pieces, which are becoming more and more commonplace.
The web I want back is the one powered by real people making real things. But rather than complain about it I think I’d rather be one of the people who is still here, making things.
From what I've seen, a lot - I'd say most - of the communities that existed outside of the major platforms have dried up or ended (the famous/infamous bodybuilding forum apparently just went down). Web forum communities, mailing list communities, communities built around an individuals website (it sounds strange to say now, but this was pretty common a couple of decades ago). Even the offline meeting sites like Couchsurfing and Meetup are a shadow of what they were in their heyday (about 15 years or so ago).
The actual number of people actively using the internet is much higher, yet the number of people outside of a few small social media silos are much lower. So I can only surmise that these social media silos are giving the vast majority - almost everyone - what they want (those gratifying instant hits). It's just sad to know that there's apparently only a tiny sliver of humanity interested in venturing off the main path and interacting with people outside of these silos.
Places that largely can’t be indexed by google.
My hope is that eventually these groups migrate to matrix, but we’ll see.
It kind of is though. Maybe not with discord specifically, because it’s a closed platform. but communities on open ones like matrix are just as much part of the web as any forum.
It’s not a big platform with all users in one space. There are dedicated communities with passionate people talking, sharing ideas, helping each other out.
Would you’ve considered IRC chat rooms on freenode part of the web?
For IRC, absolutely not. IRC (1988) even predates the web (1989). Freenode offered a web-based gateway that ran on their servers, that doesn't make IRC a web protocol.
As for the rest it's slightly fuzzier since in practice they rely on HTTP, but you can't just use a normal web browser to interface with them. You have to run a specialized client that understands the protocol to interact with them. The practicality of the firstparty clients for these platforms/protocols (or in Discord's case the only one you're officially allowed to use) being shipped in a web browser doesn't make the systems "part of the web". The server doesn't give you HTML that you can see in any browser, you make API requests for JSON in a non-W3C-standardized format and interpret it with specialized software. You can't send someone a URL to a message and have them be able to open it in any web browser without additional software.
You actually can with discord and with certain matrix clients as well.
The clients for those protocols are built on top of web technologies, even if the protocols may not be.
That would discount IRC from being part of the web though.
But that is exactly what it wasn't. Discord is a proprietary walled-garden like too many others today. I tried to access a forum there once and it demanded both registration and a phone number. No thanks. That's not the open Internet.
The open communities were defined by the openness. Using standard protocols like SMTP, NNTP, HTTP (on public websites, not walled gardens).
What forum? Was it the one where they couldn't figure out how many days there were in a week?
I would say that is simply because bodybuilding sucks and everyone with half a brain has moved to other activities like crossfit or similar that allows you to have a nice body that you can actually do something with instead of a useless one :)
More seriously this is not my experience. Two of the websites I visit the most in 2024 are the "traditionnal participative type", ie, privately owned, not social medias but with membership and comments and stuff. One is using a custom cms based on rails and has been launched in 1998, the other one is only 15y old but is running vbulletin.
And I still encounter many websites like this. Last time I had an issue with my Piaggio motorbike, I found a vespa dedicated web forum that was really helpful and active.
I think there are lots of people deep in social medias, reddit and discord and some who are fed up by this stuff and stay out of it. The issue is that privately owned websites cost money to run usually or are very stripped of customization/features/storage and moderation is a burden so you need very motivated people to keep the light on compared to say, a discord or reddit community that can stay online for months/years while the initial admins/founders aren't even connecting to it anymore.
"I miss when the internet was an international gathering place, not a carefully guarded forum for communicating misinformation-free messaging about foreign policy and corporate life in the United States of America, England and Wales. I had a friend from China."
I don't think so
>It seems pretty easy to find communities these days.
Outside of HN and a few niche subreddits, I can't think of many. Most good communities I'm part of are off the web on things like Discord which isn't addressable by search engines.
Today it's something else, such as knowing discords through word of mouth, knowing groups on other platforms, etc. If you're not getting through this knowledge filter, you need to try harder or accept not being in there.
HN can remain public and high quality due to strong moderation and an "ugly", text-only, imageless, emojiless UI that scares away "noise"-people.
But in the end, all my feeble "what if's" collapse, and I end up agreeing with you.
Why does Gen-Z like Discord? No advertising, no enshittification, just a simple solution to a common problem.
It's just modern AIM, but AIM wasn't blamed for "killing" forums. AIM and forums coexisted because they serve different purposes.
That's the problem with Discord. As an AIM replacement, it's fine, because no one cares about being able to access other peoples' ephemeral private chats. But when large communities discuss things, it's very useful for that information to be publicly available and accessible from a search engine, and Discord prevents that, locking it all away from any outsiders. If your group really wants to be secret and private for some reason, I guess that's fine, but if you're a group discussing, for instance, bicycle maintenance tips, why do you want to keep others from seeing this helpful info? And why do you want to keep others out? Specialty subreddits don't have this problem.
These communities were pushed onto discord because there isn't a better place for them.
The regional live music discord I'm in would be much better served by being on a web forum but running a forum costs money. Or they could use facebook but not everyone in the community has/wants a facebook account. Not everyone uses reddit/twitter/insert your favorite social media.
> why do you want to keep others from seeing this helpful info?
How paranoid would one have to be to think people are moving to discord to be malicious? The garden doesn't have walls to keep you out, the walls are to keep the advertisers/bots out.
These days, Reddit seems to be the best option available (unfortunately).
Back during better days, we had lots of independent forums running software like PhpBB, which served this purpose well. For some reason that I don't really understand, back then (when computers were less powerful and efficient than now) that worked well enough, but now everyone's screaming about hosting costs and how expensive it is to run even a single bulletin board on the internet so they turn to Discord when they don't like Reddit. Why hosting costs apparently weren't such a big deal 15-20 years ago with crappier hardware and much less storage space, I honestly don't know.
Communities generally don't need their content to be indexable. People in the community can use Discords search feature. Indexable content is only a benefit to people outside the community.
So why should these communities move away from discord to help you? Especially given that you do not respect their interests.
Do you get what I'm saying?
> Why hosting costs apparently weren't such a big deal 15-20 years ago?
It's not that hosting costs are so much higher now. In the 2020s I ran a forum for ~10$ a year but then I realized exposing my home IP was a bad idea. Then I ran the forum for $50 a year and... no one but me used it.
Recently one of my friends paid $500 to set up a forum using a dedicated provider /w a support plan. Fingers crossed it sees more activity than mine did.
So you can still host a forum pretty cheap but it requires trading in your personal time or paying $500 and given most Americans don't have $500 liquid you would need donations/organization (which requires more of your personal time).
It's not impossible but it's not super easy either.
>Do you get what I'm saying?
No, I don't. I guess these "communities" don't want any new members, because if I can't find them with a search, I'll likely never know about them.
P.s. not every community recruits primarily through the internet.
Back in the so called "golden days", I actually hosted a forum with a friend. His uncle offered his old office PC(bought at a bargain) and internet with fixed IP for us to tinker with. Our tiny forum has local kids and some "supervising adults" doing moderation. Many of our international members were mostly on dialup, so even if we didn't have lovely CDN, the slowness was accepted as normal thing. We did not face much spamming, grifting and any trouble makers were policed out immediately by moderators.
In present days, I am very afraid to put something online, because if the moderators are not vigilant, I could very well expect a police letter by a week or two asking about certain type fo contents and my infra provider banning or null routing my forum. It was easy back in days, now the risks are too high and trouble makers have more resources than well intent folks.
It is starting to change, for me, Discord has being going downhill for a couple of years.
Client updates are becoming more common and more buggy, as if we were on a beta channel. Marketing for Nitro is becoming more agressive, and now, there are "Quests", which are essentially ad banners for games.
It has always been possible to create communities, or break away and do something different. I really like ActivityPub, but it does not really change the dynamic.
With all of that said, sometimes getting a fancy new notebook makes you more likely to draw/write, which seems to be essentially what Dave is experiencing. Nothing wrong with that!
I only remember a handful of HN usernames and absolutely zero handles from elsewhere.
Forums used to have large avatars and signatures you could customize and communities were much more tightly-knit. I imagine that's what Discord and VRChat do now.
> I only remember a handful of HN usernames and absolutely zero handles from elsewhere.
Same. It's strange that in terms of interpersonal communication, we appear to be worse off than where were 25 years ago with AIM and e-mail. Back then it was common to carry on pretty deep conversations and relationships with people from all over the world. Part of my nightly routine was going over the day with my friends (both near and far). I would send long e-mail to my distant friends on their birthday, talking about all the things that had happened in my life, and they would do the same. I'd even keep in contact for years with pen pals I had met all over the world.
There's no reason this couldn't be done today, but I suppose most people prefer the much shallower interactions we have now.
That's a feature. HN is expressly built to encourage high-quality content in the comments - by removing or discouraging things that tend to bring poor content with them. Not showing up/down-votes counts, not allowing avatars and discouraging lengthy signatures, not showing previews of images linked, not allowing to reply immediately to comments (and the length of "immediately" getting longer the deeper the thread) - the HN is coded this way to encourage sticking to guidelines and making thoughtful comments focused on informative, interesting content.
It does make HN a worse place for building interpersonal relations, no question about it - but it also eliminates or blocks many of the enshitiffication vectors. Not all of them, and we do see changes over time in what's acceptable, going in the direction that some will dislike, but I think the fact that HN still existing in relatively constant form almost 20 years later shows that the strategy works, to an extent.
Again, I mean no offense but humans only have 2,207,520,000 seconds on average. You can be goddamn right I'll take all the help I can allocating this precious resource called time.
Example output from this article:
> The author reflects on their early experiences in Silicon Valley, feeling at home among peers in the tech world but later realizing that many influential figures, including gatekeepers and executives, lacked a deep understanding of software. This disconnect was disheartening, as key decision-makers often misunderstood the potential and intricacies of the technology they were overseeing. Despite this, the author celebrates the web for its ability to connect people globally with shared interests and expertise, yearning for a return to a time when the internet was a space for meaningful connections and innovation. They also express enthusiasm for their current blogging on platforms like WordPress and Mastodon, envisioning future improvements and business potential.
(it's worth reading for me so I'll read)
I'll happily dump an 80 page patent or court ruling into chatgpt for a summary. But if an actual human wrote a few hundred word personal blog post, I'd rather read it.
But I'd rather delegate mundane cognitive effort and prioritize spending it on more important uses.
Come to think of it, I'll write a bookmark or Tampermonkey script to summarize pages according to my prompt.
edit: Here we go! A bookmark to open a new tab asking ChatGPT to summarize current tab URL:
javascript:window.open('https://chatgpt.com/?q=summarize this page in 2 paragraphs%3A %27+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href),%27_blank%27);Just like Abstract section in scientific articles. I wouldn't call those silly.
Just be aware that comments on HN are subject to all sorts of opinions skewed by bias and sycophantism, the same way Reddit or Mastodon silos tend to be. I think a lot of users think HN has some sort of immunity to that, so the tribalism tends to be strong and stubborn.