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Comment by rezmason | Hacker News Reader

Nerds needed support in the nineties, and they need support today. Our error was in accepting the success and fame of a few representative nerds as evidence that nerds were overcoming these challenges collectively. We allowed in people who never faced the challenges nerds face to identify as nerds— why turn down a friend?— and they've now made society worse for everyone, in our name. In a single blow they've amplified anti-intellectualism and squandered the faith people thought they were investing in us.

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I don't think that struggle is really the defining feature here. If anything, many of the most toxic people I can think of in geeky circles are precisely the people who still have a chip on their shoulder about something that happened in middle school.

I think it's simpler than that: we sold out.

Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable. But once tech became a powerhouse of investment, it became taken over by investors, financiers, and the kind of geeks who would play ball with them.

Some of them drank the kool-aid and became financiers themselves, corrupted by the same forces that corrupt bankers or politicians. Some of them sold out because hey, ping-pong table in the office, that's pretty cool! evil never has ping-pong tables! Some of them sold out because times are hard and they wanted a job. And some of them don't realize they have sold out, because tech culture does a very good job of propagandizing selling out as a virtue.

> I think it's simpler than that: we sold out.

> Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable

For me it was tech in the 90’s and 00’s so I think the real explanation is even simpler: we grew up.

It’s very easy to be pure of intention and intellectual curiosity when mom fills the fridge.

A lot of the people I recall interacting with on Usenet in the mid 1990s were very much grown up, graduated, far away from “mom”, and employed as developers or uni staff somewhere. However, they still enjoyed hacking, either out of pure fun or FOSS idealism, and without monetary reward very much in mind. I think that the OP is on to something when he says that the economic environment changed, and this led to nerd things being seen through a much more mercenary lens.

Even the major “news for nerds” site in the early years of the new millennium, Slashdot, where there was awareness that FOSS was now fueling major economic growth, did not yet have the same overwhelming culture of startups, venture capital, megacorps, and hustling as the venue we’re conversing on now.

> awareness that FOSS was now fueling major economic growth, did not yet have the same overwhelming culture of startups, venture capital, megacorps, and hustling as the venue we’re conversing on now.

I don't think it was a change. Both things existed in parallel, with a little bit of crossover. The startup/VC/megacorp thing just won out, that's all. And nobody ever really doubted that it would, once it was visible.

My take while reading OP was that the author simply grew up. When young and idealistic it's easy to believe the utopian marketing. In reality, business is the same as it's always been.

I do think politics has gotten worse in the "post-truth era". And tech certainly enabled that. It's hard to blame anyone in particular, though. One thing we see in the show "Connections" is that it's always hard to predict the consequences of new technology. Even seeing it coming, it's not fair to believe tech workers should have saved us from the rightward swing.

I feel like "business is the same as it's always been [so things aren't getting worse]" is kind of like saying "I'm smoking exactly as much as I have for the past 20 years, how can I only just have cancer now?" It's not that the problem is new, it's that the disease is degenerative.

>Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable. But once tech became a powerhouse of investment, it became taken over by investors, financiers, and the kind of geeks who would play ball with them.

I don't think that was the case. Go and read the stories of the founders of companies like Apple, Atari, Adobe and others from that era and you will find they all took investments to get started.

I think the GP was talking about tech in a more general sense, not just "companies".

The old Internet was definitely my support network, I met a lot of people I could relate to back then, totally different from "IRL people". The Internet is the opposite of that for me now. Where did all the weirdo super-introvert nerds go? Do they all feel as lonely as I do?

Niche forums and gaming communities? HN? They've grown up, some have become braiwashed by corporate culture, some have wives, kids, dogs, cats, mortgages.

The grand irony of remote work is I have way more time and money than I did back then, except the net is 'dead' now.

> Where did all the weirdo super-introvert nerds go?

Private discords, away from the normies.

Nah, that's just kids; adults don't have time for following a Discord per every topic they're interested in.

Then again, adult life has a way of sucking nerdiness out of people, so maybe OP's right in a way.

some nerds have private slack or zulip instances

> adults don't have time for following a Discord per every topic they're interested in.

Funny, I do just that, despite having a bunch of pets and a full-time job - I follow at least 30 game-specific discords. You must be thinking of people compulsively checking notifications like a social media addict?

I feel sorry for anyone who uses Discord like that. Thankfully, you don't have to since many communities now have mini-wikis inside of the Discord to organize the FAQ/common knowledge.

lol not discord. we are in IRC.

Where? I miss IRC so badly, but don't know where to go there.

Same. I'm just 'floating around' now. Good times in #startups ages ago.

Liberal chat. We're also on discord and Mastodon.

Libera chat*

I run a small network, but this might come across as advertising. It’s been running for 20 years now.

People come and go, but its wild how the community spirit largely remains, even with significant changes in the lifestyle of the people that have been frequenting the network for a large segment of that time.

anyway, the network is:

* ircs://irc.darkscience.net:6697/darkscience

* https://darkscience.net

* https://www.darkscience.net/webirc/

As others mentioned, there are Discord and IRC pockets. I'm in a Fediverse community with a bunch of nerds, and many of us just met in person at this week's Handmade conference.

You can watch the entire conference here. I want to disclaim that not every attendee and talk is nerdy. It's more that this is a space where nerds are thriving.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2306676590 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2307512869

> As others mentioned, there are Discord and IRC pockets.

Ah, discord, the proprietary service that demands a phone number just to be able to read anything (so I've never been able to).

Basically the exact opposite of IRC.

Most likely

1. Fear and embarrassment. Back then the expectation was that online you were anonymous, today you constantly hear about doxxing. People were also less aware of the consequences.Even if it's unlikely for some random person, that doesn't help introverts.

2. Outnumbered. Back then the internet was mostly weird people, so most posts including the popular ones were weird. Today, "new" and "random" are filled with spam, and "popular" is filled with posts upvoted by "normies". Weird posts and posters are still here, but they're obscured by the noise.

3. Feedback. People imitate what they see, and feel more comfortable following trends. When "normal" people see weird posts, they become weird and make weird posts. When weird people see weird posts, they feel safer and make weird posts. When normal people see non-weird posts, they make non-weird posts. When weird people don't see weird posts, they feel embarrassed making weird posts, so post non-weird or not at all.

I think 3 is the biggest factor, caused by 2. As other people mentioned, "weird" people are still on servers that are private or otherwise hidden from the mainstream (preventing 2 and 3). 1 is probably not a big factor, instead it explains why less people show their face or post identifying details.

> Back then the expectation was that online you were anonymous [...] Back then the internet was mostly weird people, so most posts including the popular ones were weird.

What years are you referring to when you say "back then"? In the early 90s, which was "the old Internet" for me, the best contributors to discussions on the newsgroups I followed (comp.lang.c, etc.) weren't anonymous; they were well-educated people who used their real names, including academics whose signatures included URLs like http://example.edu/~jsmith. And their posts weren't weird, at least not on the newsgroups I followed.

The cohort immediately after you described - those geeks grew up along with growth of videogame market, IMs, and birth of multi-player gaming on the Internet. People who were still geeks, and learned from all those academics and realname adults, but who also had to come up with nicknames early on, and got used to pseudonymity this way.

"weird" isn't a good description. Specifically, most people on the internet back then were well-educated computer nerds, so the typical post would be more relatable to those on HN and arguably (according to those on HN) "higher quality".

These people aren't "weird" in a bad way, but in a "different than the average (less-educated, less tech-oriented) person" way.

The anonymity part probably isn't correct. But I get the impression people back then were a lot more open, at least hearing about dating sites, chat-roulette, old YouTube channels, and internet friends who met IRL in the 90s/2000s. Although I know a lot of people post on Facebook and Twitter, so maybe that hasn't changed either.

My dad had a simpler take: The early Internet was filtered essentially by wealth and intelligence. You had to have a (relatively) expensive setup, and you had to be the type to be "on the bleeding edge" of technology. That didn't necessarily mean you were a "nerd" or "weird". This group included researchers at government labs, university professors, military, etc... Anywhere where the Internet had early adoption was over-represented. I remember NASA and CERN as significant fractions of the entire Internet in the earliest days!

I remember debates on the talk.origins usenet newsgroup with very highly educated priests, some at the highest levels of the church. These people wouldn't give me the time of day now!

In some sense it's the same filter that a University admissions process applies, and companies like Google try to reproduce.

They've needed support since antiquity. I recall Tycho Brahe getting into an argument with his serfs after he was made a lord that eventually went to court. What's changed is that it no longer requires extravagant wealth to produce one.

I mean, when there's enough financial incentive, all the gatekeeping in the world won't stop the wave of people hoping to get rich. They'll pay off many of the nerds who were thought to be resistant to such means.

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