I kissed comment culture goodbye | Hacker News Reader

I kissed comment culture goodbye

sustainableviews.substack.com

257 pointsspyckie2211 comments

I actually made plenty of friends commenting, in the early days of the Internet, but it wasn't just commenting. It was that a comment on a message board would lead to following them on LiveJournal, which would lead to AIM chats, which would lead to volunteer positions and real-life meetups and being invited to their weddings and a job referral to Google in the late-00s.

I've got plenty of friends now. Most are not the ones I met online; that was a phase of our life that has largely passed us by, though I keep up with a couple. I still comment on things, but it leads to more shallow relationships if any, but perhaps that's because I'm not really looking for friends anymore.

But I think that the bigger reason I'm reconsidering commenting online is: I can never be sure if the other person is real anymore. And even if they are, it often doesn't feel like they're debating in good faith. A lot of recent Reddit comment threads have really felt like I'm arguing with an AI or Russian troll farm. Social media now feels like a propaganda cesspool rather than something where people come together to share disparate views.

Yeah I second this. You need a social media structure that follows this. HN doesn't build for it because there is no private message or comment reply notification infra. Other news websites and youtube comments are even worse. Reddit also is a bit like HN in that regard where the main unit of social media is the community / news post, but you could make it work to make internet friends because it has PMs and focused communities.

Instagram, X, & old school forums etc lend themselves to it a bit more, but it's probably the chat / watering hole ones like discord and IRC that lend themselves the most to making internet friends. All the other ones you need to reach out specifically and it can be difficult.

Instagram even change the incentives from connecting to friends to be more like a TikTok app, where you scroll mindlessly through reels, because the incentive is only engagement now.

Oh the last thing you want is DMs. On every platform I am on that has DMs whether that is Instagram or Mastodon or whatever, I get approached by people who say something like "Hey!" or "How are you doing today" and if I humor them they want to move the conversation on to Signal where there is less of a paper trail. So far as I could tell it is these people

https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2025-02-08

Right now I am trying to deprogram a rather isolated friend who seems to be sucked into this, it is so frickin' hard to get through to a person who has been seduced, has a crush on somebody, and who has accepted a sob story.

If it is not that, there are all the people who are maybe promoting their onlyfans profile or maybe they're just trying to click on a virus, but either way it is awful. I've been cataloging features that are "expressions of hostility" on BlueSky profiles and one of the most common is "No DM" and it is so common and the people who use it are relatively normal otherwise that we don't treat it as a red flag.

If I was starting out a new platform I'd have a ground rule of never supporting DMs because they are a hotbed of fraud and trouble.

https://archive.is/yv7k4 Readable article

Thats a spam problem and solvable by different means. FWIW I never get such experiences and made internet friends even on reddit via the DM system.

For people to develop friendships with each other, they need to be able to have 1:1 or 1:small time with a ton of back and forth, and public comment sections don't lend themselves to 100 deep message threads. Chat rooms do, chat threads do, and DMs do. In real life it happens naturally as people split off into side conversations.

I think the ease of direct connection helps, but there's also a big difference in terms of permanence and frequency/volume. While on IRC people were frequently running bouncers or logging bots that eventually posted to the web, it still felt ephemeral and therefore more authentic. The same goes for Discord - much as the demise of the traditional web-indexed phpBB forum is lamented, I feel that people more frequently act like "themselves" in spaces that don't feel as permanent, regardless of if they actually are or not. Plus, most active IRC and now Discord users just post a lot more messages than, say, an average HN user, so there's a lot more socializing to be done.

For whatever reason, public Discords just don't seem to work the same way as IRC did, though. I've had great luck seeding Discord servers with friends from elsewhere (real life, forums, shared activities, etc.) and making friends as the group grows, but I've never really jumped into a random Discord and made a friend the way I did on IRC. I can't really figure out what the difference is, but it's one of the little things I miss that I haven't been able to put a finger on.

Overall though, I've made plenty of friends online, even in the last few years and even as I get older and the Internet changes. The original article really didn't resonate with me at all, which actually made it even more thought provoking for me - I can't imagine making 16 years worth of posts without a single direct connection.

I think that I can also vouch for things like discord in the fact that it can bring internet friends.

Though I think that two things that I hate is that information there isn't as structured in the sense that someone might come reading this comment after specifically searching for this topic of comment culture.

But the same couldn't be said for things like online forums and as such I can't shake the feeling that if we all collectively stopped commenting on things, it can really move a lot of discourse away that might influence new generation.

I myself have been inspired many times to try something new or think of some idea because of some idea just to try if that make sense. Or seeing someone post some idea that I like and then reading the comments to find nuanced opinion about and maybe I can chime in sometimes helping it.

I feel like commenting system to definitely be one of treasures like wikipedia although I think that the noise:signal ratio is definitely higher in commenting systems (ie. they have more noise than signal)

The difficulty, I find, is to find yourself a "new" hole; I've been in the same online community for about 20 years now, and while I've dipped my toe into e.g. other Discord servers, it's a one off visit and then I just lose interest because there's people I don't know there.

But this is RL too, if you're looking for a new community, it's easy to feel like an outsider. And it takes energy and / or conscious effort to get a feel for the community, and this can cause friction. After 20 years, where do I find the energy to invest in developing new relationships? How do I find enough interest in a possibly new subject to stick with it?

I feel the same way. Back in the day, I spent a lot of time on namepros and xda developer forums, and a few of the friendships I made there have lasted for years. I still talk to some of those folks weekly, and even meet a couple in person now and then.

It does feel harder to build that kind of connection today. Maybe it’s the anonymity, maybe it’s the sheer volume of noise, or just the way platforms are designed now. The sense of community that used to form around niche forums seems a lot rarer.

Maybe it was also my age. I was a teenager back then and more open to forming those connections.

The entire Internet now is a giant confirmation bias machine, which is impressive considering it also exposes you to unlimited conflicting viewpoints no matter how crazy they are. I think this is just a natural consequence of structuring everything around engagement. Even when you're seeing multiple viewpoints, it's rarely going to be in a positive light.

It could also be that, that's the kind of world we really live in.

Most of the discourse that we see is where groups of people are intersecting that wouldn't really meet in the real world because of the echo chambers we keep.

The Americans are often saying that they only see that crank uncle, or their liberal nephew or niece, at thanksgiving, and, honestly, it's the same for the rest of us around the world - we're normally only exposed to the very different viewpoints at family gatherings.

IRL we try to avoid conflict, and try not to associate with people that hold views that are vastly different to our own, so much so it's considered "unprofessional" to have the discussions at work that would show how different everyone's (political) viewpoints are in the workplace.

Social media exposes us to more viewpoints than we would normally see, but I think there is actually a such thing as too much. Online communities have the same kind of issue, they really need to strike a balance between being too much of a "circle jerk", and being too fractured and conflict-ridden to have productive discussion. What I think is interesting, though, is that due to the way social media platforms work, you can actually have both a massive circle jerk amongst people that agree with each-other, and constant, unending, vile conflict between people who do not, due to algorithmic feeds. (If anything, they both wind up feeding into each-other.)

IRL I think people are often more empathetic and sympathetic, and I think that this environment leads to less polarized opinions even when our exposure to viewpoints is relatively limited. That said, lately, IRL socialization has become quite limited, especially after the COVID-19 lockdowns. Online interactions are just not really the same... especially not limited to text, over heavily manipulated platforms like Twitter/Facebook/etc.

Seems a bit contradictory I'm sure, but if the problems of socializing on the Internet were simple and easy to understand, we wouldn't have to talk about it so much :)

> IRL I think people are often more empathetic and sympathetic, and I think that this environment leads to less polarized opinions even when our exposure to viewpoints is relatively limited.

I mean, I hear what you're saying, but the only real difference between IRL and online discussions is that online people can get heated at each other without any fear of physical violence.

That limiting factor for IRL prevents people from being more frank about their position on whatever.

Speaking as someone that has been public on various political positions in the past, I've seen the polarised views forever.

I mean, history is littered with stories about polarised sections of societies inflicting actual violence with one another - American examples might be the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the Vietnam war, Drug use (and it's policing alleged as being a way to break up communities that oppose the ruling community)

Oh, I should also point out, people like Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher, Trump, etc, don't come into power in a vacuum, they have vast communities of supporters that believe that they are right, and the communities that they oppose are wrong (same goes for the communities that they oppose, vast groups of people that believe they are right and the community that they oppose is wrong)

I think that it's actually not an IRL vs Internet discussion dichotomy FWIW, that oversimplifies things a bit too much. For example, I think sympathy and empathy increases as you go from public interaction in major social platform -> 1-on-1 direct message -> audio call -> video call -> IRL private conversation. Many reasons really. Public interactions have public scrutiny, it often is more of a performance than an authentic social interaction. Text conversations are low bandwidth. All internet conversation carries the burden that things you say may be recorded and used against you. And of course, seeing and hearing a human on the other end just naturally will increase empathy.

I hear what you're saying, but I think you are looking at this wrong. I'm not suggesting that IRL social interactions are perfect and Internet ones are hopelessly broken. We have plenty of history to show how IRL social interactions can break down, in small groups or big. What I'm saying is that IRL interactions are better on average than Internet interactions, largely due to the modality and venue that most Internet interactions occur.

Edit: also, it is worth noting that there are definitely robust studies that can back up some of these ideas, which may be a good data point to add into this discussion. That said, I am honestly too lazy to go cite sources right now, to be completely honest with you. (And I know HN is rightly a bit skeptical of psychology studies, since you can pretty much find something to validate anything you want, but there are some actually good and interesting ones.)

I think that we're going to have to agree to disagree here.

I've definitely had online discussions that were orders of magnitude more productive than the best IRL conversations on similar subjects, because people felt more free to contribute.

It's so much more productive online that I look for communities that discuss those subjects (eg. Twitter when it was good, or Reddit).

I avoid that IRL because it's so poor.

On an individual level, there's always going to be people whose experiences don't match the average, but I really do believe most Internet conversation isn't particularly productive. I'm not saying I don't have productive Internet conversation, though.

Anyway, it seems like we're at an impasse, but I may as well link some references that back up what I'm trying to say.

There was this fascinating experiment posted recently to HN, "30 minutes with a stranger": https://pudding.cool/2025/06/hello-stranger/ - conversation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45124003

Publications regarding how people are exposed to opposing viewpoints online and how that influences polarization:

"How digital media drive affective polarization through partisan sorting" https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2207159119

"How Many People Live in Political Bubbles on Social Media?" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244019832705

"Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06297-w

> On an individual level, there's always going to be people whose experiences don't match the average, but I really do believe most Internet conversation isn't particularly productive. I'm not saying I don't have productive Internet conversation, though.

Just wanted to say, as soon as I saw this I clapped my forehead - I'd provided an anecdote as data :(

Tangential, but any individual only knows their 'anecdotal experience'. It is one's golden source. No one knows 'the average'. One can read a science paper or watch a video that purports to present the average opinion, but even then all one knows it's what the paper or video states, as that is the limit of one's personal experience.

> the only real difference between IRL and online discussions is that online people can get heated at each other

Another difference, and a very important one imo, is that online there can be many bots pretending to be real people when in reality they represent a single interest. This can fool many people into thinking some fringe opinion is more normal than it is.

You know what, though? I kind of think you don't even need bots for the "majority opinion" to get widely skewed.

For example, you can find an absolute ballistic lunatic take on Twitter that has 10,000 retweets basically trivially.

Of course, some of that is bots. Maybe someone paid for engagements. It's easy to do so, so it's naturally what a lot of people assume.

Even if it wasn't mostly bots... 10,000 people? It feels like a lot, enough to make us feel like that opinion is at least somewhat validated socially. But in reality, it's just a number. Would we even care who agreed if we knew what types of people they were?

But even if we did still care, all this really tells us is that 10,000 people hit a button. Why? A lot of big creators could say virtually anything and immediately get social validation in return, I strongly doubt that the majority of people interacting really have an actual strong conviction about whatever position is being expressed.

But even if they all really did hold a strong conviction... how many people is 10,000 really? Twitter has several hundred million users. Around 100,000,000 active U.S. users each month. It is still kind of impressive in a sense that 10,000 people saw a post and decided to click a button I guess, but I think our intuition is really broken when it comes to large enough numbers of people; it does not suggest that most people, or even a large minority of people, actually agree with it.

But what about the posts we don't see? The average Twitter user has 770 followers, but that number is highly skewed by very large accounts... One metric I found online, though I couldn't find a good source, suggests that 0.06% of users have over 1,000 followers. There are accounts with millions of followers. Needless to say, the posts that find the most visibility on Twitter are largely curated by a very elite group of users... naturally, the majority of "popular" posts you're going to see are not just random posts that happened to catch on. They're mostly posts that a large account boosted! Naturally this is going to cause all sorts of problems.

You could go on and on and on. The social media Internet is basically a giant false plurality machine. There doesn't need to be bots. There doesn't need to be troll farms. There doesn't need to even be bad actors, malice, disinformation campaigns.

And it's silly, because our brains are obsessed with what "most people" think, and I think there are some rational, logical reasons to care about this, but I don't believe in earnest that this is mostly coming from a rational place. People desperately want to feel belonging, and to feel validated in their opinions. How many people here on Hacker News reply then come back a few minutes later to check and see if the post got upvoted or downvoted? Who doesn't have at least a little bit of a "dopamine rush" when they have a post that gets hugely upvoted on Reddit or Hacker News, or reposted a lot on Twitter/Mastodon/etc.?

Yet, even though we know about this, we don't then earnestly take this into account when we see "popular" opinions. You ever notice how obsessed the social media Internet has become with condemning social taboos? Seems pretty straight-forward to me, it's an easy way to get that "people agree with me" dopamine hit. I'm not even saying that people intentionally do this, either. People unknowingly shape their behavior around what they think will get them that positive attention. I sincerely doubt I am immune from it, I'm sure all of my Hacker News posts wreak of HN-specific self-censorship and intricate codeswitching even though I really try not to do that sort of thing. Hell, scrutinize this paragraph: "Oh, 'social taboos'? Afraid to just say the one we're all thinking of?"

Social media isn't even alone, false pluralities absolutely spread in the real world, too, I just think that social media is really good at doing it faster and more intense than ever before.

Honestly, I just think we care too much about what "everyone" thinks. Imagine the laws if they were based on what the majority of people think they should be. Imagine Wikipedia if the rule for resolving conflicts was a poll of what people think should go in the articles. Even if we really could know what the majority of people truly think, a lot of the time, I'm not sure we should do anything with that information. Do most people really think hard enough about problems to really have an informed opinion on most issues?

I think, instead of focusing on what most people think, we should just simply always seek to do the right thing, and seek to be as "correct" as possible in a world without absolute objective truth. I'm not a politics person, but I think this sort of thing is exactly what abstractions like having representatives is good for... it's kind of unfortunate that in the real world, these systems can wind up being corrupted to the point of being a net negative.

And I think that means we should just do our best to ditch websites like Twitter that are basically as unproductive as possible here. Maybe some Twitter alternatives can do a little better here, particularly ones that allow for smaller groups and communities to have their own spaces, but really I just think the entire "model" is not very good. For all of the faults of structured discussion forums like Hacker News, unstructured social media just doesn't seem to work very well for much other than soaking up attention and moving tons of advertising dollars.

> IRL we try to avoid conflict, and try not to associate with people that hold views that are vastly different to our own...

This is what I love about the Iowa caucus system. It's messy, it's physical, it's real, and you might see social consequences for your stance.

I simultaneously think this is true and a massive contradiction. A right and a left winger posting on a thread about J6 would both come away convinced of their rectitude, despite actively disagreeing about everything. There is almost no boundary of agreement over facts or intent, just an active disagreement online.

Selection bias is the most powerful force known to man, or life for that matter. An Internet where every voice is represented is an Internet with billions and billions of ways for selection bias to make you happy.

> I think this is just a natural consequence of structuring everything around engagement.

Agree - for me this leads to the conclusion that some services should not be run for-profit, or at least they should be run for public benefit. Similar to how governments in some countries own part of the railway.

Doesn't help - even those are heavily biased

User ownership could help, if users know what they want

I’m not against for profit so much as the monetisation of engagement. The web has always had a revenue problem. For a time this was solved by “advertising” and that was massively successful and what we see here is the result of that. There has historically been a reluctance to ask people for money - handling money brings a whole host of other unglamorous problems.

As we saw with Steam the last few weeks.

The people who have always had trouble finding platforms and payment processors also always had trouble finding advertisers. Random demonetization on YouTube is a huge problem, for example.

Porn, piracy and other questionable sites have always had a lot of fun when it comes to finding advertisers, but it does seem like it's gotten worse over time, encompassing many more sites. It also seems like whether an advertiser is concerned about where exactly their algorithmic ads appear is pretty inconsistent, too.

What I think is interesting is that it seems like Japan is less affected by this. I know I've seen major Japanese companies advertising on sites like Pixiv and Misskey, which have both had some trouble with American payment processors. Heck, I'm pretty sure I've seen Ubiquiti ads when browsing Misskey.

I guess the anglosphere Internet is somewhat impacted by the presence of more "puritan" influence than some other global packets of the Internet. Not 100% sure what to make of that.

HN threads usually have a comment demanding socialization and government control of whatever issue is discussed. Usually first or second comment. This time it took until the third comment for somebody to make the demand.

If you want government organized discussion, look no further than listening to the sessions of parliament.

I disagree :)

> The entire Internet now is a giant confirmation bias machine

Then why does it seem that millennials share more opinions worldwide than any prior generation?

Also, doesn’t anyone find it odd that we’re commenting on a post about stopping commenting, without addressing that?

> why does it seem that millennials share more opinions worldwide than any prior generation?

Not to doubt you, but is this actually the case?

I’m old enough to remember BBSes and the early Internet. I’d argue that while there were fewer people on the internet, those that were online shared way more than what most are willing to today. There was a certain level of naivety looking back with hindsight.

> Then why does it seem that millennials share more opinions worldwide than any prior generation?

That seems sort of tangential to me.

> Also, doesn’t anyone find it odd that we’re commenting on a post about stopping commenting, without addressing that?

Not at all. I used to comment in a variety of different places across the Internet: discussion forums, image boards, random blogs, Reddit, Digg, etc. The vast majority of places I used to comment have deteriorated significantly or are simply significantly less amenable to actual discourse than they used to be.

Hacker News is weird because it feels like an exception. Not the only exception remaining, perhaps not even the best depending on your tastes, but certainly one of them.

Enjoy it while it lasts? sigh

>Then why does it seem that millennials share more opinions worldwide than any prior generation

Do you mean "share" as in they're in agreement with each other more often, or share as in they post their opinions online more? I assumed the former initially, but as I read other replies I started to question it.

Everyone is A/B testing everything blind. KPIs without Human feedback leads to dystopia.

The 'make friends on the internet' age as it was back then is probably largely over outside of select niches, but I still find fulfilment in commenting and discussing matters within more niche topics. Within those, it's still fairly likely that I'm not actually talking to a bot, and that they're not a complete knobhead who isn't discussing in good faith. Hacker News gets there sometimes, but it can still spill over into the bad discussions that have now flooded mainstream social media.

I've always treated comments as about me first and about other people second. If I can't defend my point of view from some online random then I haven't really thought it through. Online discussions are still quite good at ripping bad arguments apart, even if there's rather more vapid noise around than there used to be.

There's still avenues for connections - I am making "friends" as we speak on reddit with like minded people (specifically politics, people who are sitting roughly in the same point in the spectrum as me)

I've noticed that the demise of twitter has impacted my ability to connect with like minded people - I gave up on mastodon because the ability to stumble upon other people with similar tastes wasn't nearly what I wanted it to be.

Here (HN) I have mostly found wonks and trolls replying directly to me, but I do see a lot of interesting discourse (which is what I'm looking for... right) which will likely lead to connections (eventually)

Are they people, or AI bots? And how can you be sure?

Does it matter?

I agree with this overall, and I don't think it the notion of making friends online has died, for what it's worth: I've made a lot of friends online from various comment-media in the last 3-5 years. Forums are still the highest friendship to noise ratio, oddly, with Discord in a close second, but I also got my current job off of Hacker News and have made some friends here too.

I also 100% agree that super-wide-scale social media feels like it's dying, though - Instagram, Twitter, and any Reddit with more than a few thousand users are definitely worse by the day, but I never really got a huge amount of value from those spaces anyway. My Twitter account (which in fairness, I think had 1FA with a password from 2008 or so) somehow got taken over by what appear to be drug dealers from Japan and I didn't particularly mourn the loss.

Oddly the only online space I really _miss_ is, of all things, the early days of Xbox Live voice chat. Matchmaking seemed to really heavily favor ping and in turn I'd frequently encounter my neighbors in lobbies. Everyone used a microphone. It was still toxic in terms of various -isms, slurs, and so on, but the trash talking was generally more of an aside and you'd frequently get some genuine small talk and connections while you queued for matches. I've tried it a few times since and while I'm sure part of it is just me getting older, the signal isn't even really there (I think a lot of people are in private party chats in Discord, if they're talking at all) and if it is, the noise ratio is way higher than it used to be.

Habermas wrote a ponderous two-volume book titled

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

which seems to postulate that some kind of deliberative process by which "people come together to share disparate views" could solve many of the problems that he points out in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book)

if we could just find the right process but in 2025 it seems dangerously naive today. That is, when people come together to share disparate views online they seem to relish attacking each other and reinforcing tribal identities. I have a lot of problems with this recent Nate Silver editorial

https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-is-blueskyism

particularly (i) it didn't start on BlueSky but really started on Twitter and Tumblr, and (ii) centrists like Matt Yglesias who pick fights with that kind of leftist or anyone who complains about being bullied by trans people is either doing it to get a rise or drive traffic to their blog. Even if he names it wrong, the phenomenon he's describing is a very real thing and it's particularly harmful to the causes and the individuals that those who participate in it claim to be advocating for.

I mind less the trolling and argumentation, it's the personal attacks and especially the one-liner 'mic drop' replies that I see so much on Reddit that we see here sometimes as well.

Lots and lots of single sentence replies makes me want to close the entire browser.

And the repetitive memes. I mean that's memes, but still, half of a Reddit comment section is predictable.

I really wonder why that's the case, because I only ever see it on Reddit. You're very right, and it annoys me to no end how repetitive, corny, and omnipresent the joking is. This is always the case whenever someone posts with a good question; good answers are inevitably buried at the bottom.

Wow, I enjoyed your comment deeply and it reminded me of 15+ years ago on the internet, where your experience really matched mine. I still am friends to this day with the people I met 15+ years ago. I haven't made an internet friend in over 10 years though.

I personally believe that part of this is due to the upvote/downvote culture of Reddit. We're all incentivized to say something that will attract upvotes. There's a positive side to this -- thanks to this I regularly read really funny, entertaining comments. Genuine genius in the comments section.

On the other hand, its just to entertain. There's nothing really human or of substance there. Or, what's especially dangerous, to say something that bucks the trend, the status quo, admit an unpopular vulnerability outloud and suddenly you're hit with waves upon waves of downvotes. Not only that but I genuinely believe that the downvotes empowers angry debaters to come in and pick apart whatever it is that you said, just to enjoy the upvotes. I perceive it as a kind of bullying.

At any rate, I don't think these spaces are designed for intimacy. They're designed for memes and funny jokes, not genuine conversations.

It's really the small communities on reddit where you get less of the upvote culture mattering much and the same regular few dozen to hundred people that are interesting.

> It was that a comment on a message board would lead to following them on LiveJournal...

I remember "back in the days"™ many forum software allowed a feature called "signature", it allows you to attach custom pictures and links after each and every post you posted. Many people use this feature to advertise their sites/blogs for others to visit.

Then the feature got weakened by both the social media platforms and forum software, to the point that it's gone and forgotten.

But based on my experience, it was the best place in the old time to do advertisement and SEO. I learned and bookmarked many interesting blogs from those signatures.

Now days, I'll just google it if I need anything, and never look back after I'm done. That's one reason today's Internet is dead to me.

since we are on the topic, here is a tutorial on how to write internet comments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_QmvZRS85U

For me, this highlights that knowledge gating some things really does have benefits for community- even though the internet really should be accessible for all, it was experientially better for us when it was people like us.

Dropping by reddit for 30 seconds is a great way to expend dignity talking to AI bots.

I know this sounds maybe a bit insane, or even self-aggrandizing but I don't comment on public websites for some benefit to myself. I write with the vague hope that some unique expression of myself makes some tiny difference to this universe.

Every once in a while I have some experience or some a point of view that I don't see reflected anywhere else. One of the benefits of the pseudo-anonymization of sites like Hacker News is that I feel a bit more comfortable stating things that don't really have a place to say anywhere else.

The only thing I regret is when I get into pointless arguments, usually when I feel that my comment was misunderstood or misinterpreted. But even those arguments sometimes force me to consider how to express myself more clearly or to challenge how deeply I hold the belief (or how well I know the subject) that lead me to the comment in the first place.

I think that the culture of a given forum plays a huge role.

There are some places where commenting is meaningful because you're a part of some closely-knit, stable community, and you can actually make a dent - actually influence people who matter to you. I know that we geeks are supposed to hate Facebook, but local neighborhood / hobby groups on FB are actually a good example of that.

There are places where it can be meaningful because you're helping others, even if they're complete strangers. This is Stack Exchange, small hobby subreddits, etc - although these communities sometimes devolve into hazing and gatekeeping, at which point, it's just putting others down to feel better about oneself.

But then, there are communities where you comment... just to comment. To scream into the void about politics or whatever. And it's easy to get totally hooked on that, but it accomplishes nothing in the long haul.

HN is an interesting mix of all this. A local group to some, a nerd interest forum for others, and a gatekeeping / venting venue for a minority.

"The only thing I regret is when I get into pointless arguments, usually when I feel that my comment was misunderstood or misinterpreted."

I like that you try to learn from bad arguments, but don't forget, that many misunderstand on purpose, to "win" an argument. Or at least to score cheap karma points or virtual karma points from the audience. So there one can only learn to make arguments in a way that they are harder to be intentionally missunderstood, but those ain't truthfinding skills, they are debate technics.

Simple rule:

If I'm still in the argument, it's not pointless.

If it's pointless, I am not arguing.

My FUTURE self might think it was pointless. But it can get stuffed...

Yeah, man misunderstand comments, that is true.

But many people of the Internet are also unable to make a logic argument and explaining the conflict they just said leads nowhere. One of them often gets down voted to hell and half the time it's not the person who said the stupid thing.

I left reddit exactly because of this, but I also find that somewhat on HN. Most comments I start typing I actually discard and move on because I can smell it already.

On the other hand many people post wrong things, are corrected, and then get defensive telling they were misunderstood and use gymnastics to say they were actually correct and the other is a troll

> I write with the vague hope that some unique expression of myself makes some tiny difference to this universe.

I used to have to talk more on Internet privacy.

Now I feel like enough people are talking about that one, that I usually don't have to.

In more recent years, it's been pointing out the latest wave of thievery in the techbro field -- sneaky lock-in and abuse, surveillance capitalism, growth investment scams, regulatory avoidance "it's an app, judge" scams, blockchain "it's not finance or currency or utterly obvious criminal scheme, judge" scams, and now "it's AI, judge" mass copyright violation.

There's not enough people -- who aren't on the exploitation bandwagon or coattails-riding -- who have the will to notice a problem, and speak up.

Though more speak up on that particular problem, after the window of opportunity closes, and the damage is done, and finally widely recognized. But then there's a new scam, and gotta get onboard the money train while you can.

That ticks me off, and I can type fast.

I make comments and read them for substantially the same reason. Although THIS comment I am making now is done primarily to reward the commenter for saying something that made me feel less alone.

A second goal of this comment is to add a point: That I also comment because sometimes saying something makes me feel like I am more than nothing and nobody. I want to feel more than nothing and nobody.

We all do, isn't that the point of public expression, everywhere?

Slashdot had a decent comment system where moderation points were assigned at random and a comment could be marked as insightful, troll, etc. This helped sustain discourse and resisted some of the usual “hive mind” pile ons that are common on reddit and here.

I think we are all pretty aware of how the up and down arrows are supposed to be used versus how they get used.

For content that doesn’t trigger an emotional response: the arrows are used appropriately, highlighting comments and silencing less useful discussion. HN is incredibly useful for discussion on non-controversial, almost mundane, topics.

However it all comes undone for any topic that carries emotional baggage. Where up and down arrows are clearly used as “like” and “dislike” buttons regardless of the facts or merit presented in each comment. Instead commenting becomes an exercise in PR. The first clue is the comment count. HN has some very predictable patterns in comment counts.

Platform operators may not be willing to change this as “hive mind” and “liked” content helps visitation, even if it doesn’t help discourse. The consequence of inaction however is that topic experts are pushed out by mobbing, because invariably not everything is sunshine and roses.

Why did Slashdot die?

In short, death by acquisition by dice.com

It slid into irrelevance as the early internet exploded around it and it became an angryish nerd oasis. Reddit easily outscoped it, and HN had the attraction of VC money sloshing behind the scenes.

Slashdot, the site, still lives as a fossil from 10-15 years ago. It must be popular enough to pay its bills.

That's probably the real reason, but I think their redesign didn't help either.

The /. redesign wasn't as brutal as that which Digg had, but it was certainly something that stopped me visiting so often.

I just looked and saw to my surprise I still have an account there, the last few comments were made in 2014, 2012, 2011. So maybe I did return later after all.

The resistance was the straw, but by then it was already descending from an interesting site frequented by people like Bruce Perens, John Carmack, Wil Wheaton etc, to just more of the same. Taco leaving was another point, I forget if that was before or after the redesign.

There’s was a significant amount of Randian right wing group think too, which tended to spiral away

Ultimately though it was tacos blog, and that type of site doesn’t scale and retain the quality.

Don't forget Digg, it was quite big in its time.

"Angryish nerd oasis" sounds like the same thing that happened to Reddit, so perhaps Slashdot wasn't actually uniquely good. Perhaps it will also happen to HN and lobsters.

It's already happening to HN and Lobsters is going through some internal fighting now. Compare conversations 10 years ago here to now and you can see how much angrier the site has become.

> HN had the attraction of VC money sloshing behind the scenes.

Not to forget Paul Graham’s tales of founder hero myths. Who wouldn't want to call themselves a “hacker”?

Terrible mobile-first or "web 2.0" redesign.

I left because the people there became worse and worse. There is a side of tech culture I find utterly repugnant, and it gradually became most of the site.

I have no idea if others had the same reason. I hear more about its user interface, but that change didn't bother me.

Beta

I left Slashdot for HN...but I didn't leave Slashdot because of HN. I was frustrated with Slashdot and was actively seeking alternatives. About 2 days after I discovered HN existed, I was done forever with Slashdot.

Among other frustrations (including some really vile comments), I felt like the world was bursting with interesting tech news, and Slashdot was just not keeping up. The publish rate was too slow (maybe 10-13 stories a day), and the %age of stories I found interesting had dropped considerably from a few years previous.

I wasn't a fan of the redesign, but it was content that drove me to seek alternatives.

Dont forget metamoderation, which altered the distribution of points, and the ability to filter per comment moderation type. Truly ahead of time.

“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

— Mark Twain

> However it all comes undone for any topic that carries emotional baggage.

It all comes undone if people abandon the entity because of enshittification.

This might sound crazy, but what if we're hitting some sort of hardware limitation, like too many people are sharing a single phone line, and Slashdot is innovative, but is like near best case solution when we're still sharing the same phone line? It's hard to explain what I'm trying to say.

Like when your mom picks up the phone and it kicks you off the dial-up internet. Except these days, it's like 4 pancakes of getting kicked off since Cloudflare entered in the scene, 5 pancakes if you're in the EU, and sure, let's throw in Anubis the catgirl just to be extra safe with the computers.

What do you consider as "emotional baggage"? Is it possible that content which triggers negative emotional reactions in people is useless content merely designed to trigger negative emotional reactions in people?

I find typing the comment out, then deleting it and not submitting kinda gives my brain the 90% feeling of needing to say something. Only place I don't have to do this is 4chan, where the worst thing to happen is that your comment gets ignored or something mean is said to me (oh dear!)

I unironically just closed this tab before submitting out of habit and reopened it to submit this

I've found increasingly I'll submit a comment only to go back 30 seconds later and delete it.

I mostly do that when I go "that was a little bit mean of me... do I really need to be mean, what's the point?"

Fortunately, that seems to also have trained me to not write those comments in the first place. I also think much more about what I am trying to actually effect with a comment, not just about what feels good in the particular moment.

One thing that didn't change though is that probably most of my comments are edited at least once, often a few times, right after sending them. And even if it's just swapping out a word, or adding a missing comma. This one here is no exception at all, I just added this paragraph after doing some minor edits.

I participate in a number of 'old school' forums, never anything like reddit or discord. On those forums, while I have posted on some a fair amount, I actually find that most of the time I spend 15 minutes writing up a post, then delete it. There are a number of reasons I don't hit the submit button. Sometimes its because I see that a lot of other posters will disagree with it, and I don't think they will argue rationally and in good faith; but the most valuable posts I don't submit are when I get to a point in my argument when I realize that I'm wrong or that my opinion or point of view is badly supported or any numer of other things that force me to re-evaluate position. I've probably held that position for a while thinking I'm right, but actually formulating the argument forces me to confront my biases or mistakes.

Sounds like forums are your rubber ducky debugger of life.

[deleted]

Glad to hear I'm not the only one. I've been doing that a ton on HN lately.

I probably do that 2-3 times a day. Usually after writing the comment and proofreading it, I'll think about whether it's something I really want to put out there, and sometimes I'll pass.

Speaking of 4chan, I actually found an IRL friend there through commenting on /g/. We both wanted to try the TOX messenger and its various spin-offs. Then we took it to Steam and now years later we know each other by face and name. We even have various different political views but never argued.

It may be a super low sample size but it's far from impossible. Especially Reddit has DMs/chat and it's way easier since you can contact someone without someone else impersonating the other party. Sometimes you gotta believe you are talking to just another human being. Love that the article in the OP mentions trolling. We all probably had moments where we did not act in the best way we could have.

To all those that act noble in the shroud of anonymity!

Update: The article also says it takes several hundreds of hours. That may be so, but I find the same time needs to be spent IRL to get to know someone. Usually a continuous effort can be just as much as linking a friend a good story and saying hi. People will engage conversation spontaneously when both parties want.

I stumbled across the same pattern by accident after too many years of arguing with others online. These days my commentary is limited to here, and a handful of specialized hobbyist forums where there is still pleasant and informative discussions to be had. The "cozy web". (At least until the LLM spam takes it over, too.)

I’m more in the lurker camp. But sometimes I write a comment or want to reply to something. Every now and then I type a super long comment to simply leave the page before posting. Sometimes it’s the fear of not being clear enough and dreading the reply’s and or downvotes. Or the reason that I don’t want to steer things up with my believes. Don’t know. I have this problem that I generally find social interactions tiresome. Some topics are easy. But I don’t have the energy to start a debate over the internet about some random topic. So I refrain from posting with the feeling that inside I said my piece and move on.

Comment culture died for me in a different way.

I was browsing some thread and someone referenced a meme typed out as :.|:;

The comment had a few replies who recognized the meme. I had no idea what it meant so I asked Claude

Well the AI knew what it was! It was the “loss” meme but the explanation it gave made no sense.

Turns out the meme needs a strike through tag. This turns :.|:; into a four-panel diagram of a web comic.

That’s when I realize that whatever trained Claude stripped out the formatting, and thus the entire meaning of the meme. And the comment I originally saw was a repost bot that also failed to retain the formatting when it reposted it.

And the replies that understood the reference were all reposted by bots.

So who even knows if we CAN make relationships on the internet anymore?

I can’t trust that any comment is actual human expression any more. Or is it just bullshit stripped of any context or meaning

I'm not sure what you're talking about here? What strikethrough? I immediately recognized it in your 2nd line as Loss. This is a culture thing, not an AI thing.

Claude tried to explain the meme but without the horizontal bar, it was not 4-panel. It contradicted itself explaining the dots. It makes no sense:

• : (one person standing) • :| (two people, one standing, one lying down) • :| (two people standing) • ; (one person standing, one lying down)

So I had to look up the meme, saw that the entire representation relies on a strike through. That’s how you get one person in 1 panel. That’s how you get four panels at all.

Sure, if you have seen the meme without formatting, you would recognize it. You probably have seen bots reposting without the right formatting it just like I did.

Or you didn’t. Who can say for sure? That’s my entire point. Comment sections are dead

It's true that nobody can say for sure, but bots reposting the loss meme somehow strikes me less likely as some people reposting the loss meme. And an entirely ASCII-representation (ignoring the strikethrough) is extremely easy to post, so could make this a relatively common off-shoot of the meme that many would recognize, strikethrough or not.

Why do you think they were all bots?

I think you're being overdramatic. Googling "loss meme text" brings up a Tumblr post with this exact text - admittedly when you visit the page itself, you get the strikethrough, but if I wanted to share this meme and saw only the text in the Google results, I would share that confident that other people who know the meme would get it. I suspect other people would too.

Why are you getting hung up on Claude's response? How is this an issue with comment culture and not the LLM?

I didn't even remember whether it had a strikethrough or not but recognized it. It's nothing to do with bots, it's simple human pattern recognition. That rough sequence of characters is really only used in comments for that meme. Plus that it would've been placed in a certain context, making it even easier to recognize, which your comment didn't even have but it was still recognizable.

I don't know the exact situation obviously, but isn't it possible that the poster simply wasn't able (or didn't know how) to add the strikethrough, but had the expectation that anyone who knows about this form knows, and the replying commenters were indeed people who did instantly recognize that jumble of characters, and acknowledged it?

Like, I didn't know about that form of the loss meme, but now that I know it's loss if you add strikethrough, I'm pretty sure I'd recognize it even without the strikethrough.

Yea, I was able to tell what it was without the strike-through. It's not necessary. In fact, it's one of those memes where the meme itself is about recognizing it in super obscure formats so that's where my mind and most peoples' minds who are familiar with it would go to. I HIGHLY doubt it's a bot thing.

It’s wild how a single missing tag can collapse the whole meaning. It really underscores how fragile context is in this digital realm. Makes you wonder if we’ve lost our ability for an authentic connection… or just spearheading into an echo chamber where you never know if it’s a human or a bot…

To be fair, "the loss meme as minimalistic ASCII art ad absurdum" is a pretty extreme form. It's basically tailor-made to be below the threshold of recognition, while still evoking familiarity once you know what it is. It's almost certainly the answer to a self-imposed challenge of how one could make the meme with the absolute minimum of ASCII-only characters.

I'm not sure anyone would recognize this as the loss meme to begin with, unless they got context-hints like "this is a popular meme", strikethrough or not. So, yes, that context is extremely fragile here, but that's because this was made to be barely viable in the first place, not because that's a general quality of any content in the digital realm...

That's not to go against your wider point (to which I have no opinion either way), I'm just not sure this is significant for that.

So do you think it is completely normal to recognize :̶.̶|̶:̶;̶ as a meme, but then it is completely unreasonable to recognize just :.|:; and it should definitely be AI bots? Really?

To convert the comic to :̶.̶|̶:̶;̶ is a very very distance, to remove the strikethrough is nothing.

On the note of alienation in commenting, this perspective is the strongest one I've heard yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26640203.

Read it; it's only a few paragraphs. If I could, I would distill that warning into the guidelines of any serious forum.

Not just because it fits my lived experience. But because one of the people in thread who disagreed — a prolific developer who sought friends on the internet — later killed themselves because of the internet.

Thanks for sharing that. Interestingly holds up in the way many people (including myself) use LLMs sometimes. It's a conversation with yourself.

Wow, wonderful. Thank you

Depends on the topic - for politics, seems reasonable. When I'm following a few FB groups for a specific car model, because all the latest stuff seems to show up there, it's not quite as bad.

I mostly agree with the post, and believe we should work on that, but I disagree strongly with this last point...

> This is also the fundamental mistake people make about the online world being a place where "discourse" can change anyone's internal landscape. It cannot, because it every discourse on the internet is by definition completely a subset of the ego of the single individual.

Discussion on the Internet absolutely can change someone's "internal landscape" - I have constantly learned new things and grown as a person just reading comments on HN... like the one you linked. :) Does it happen over night, or just reading a comment and a flip gets switched? Generally not. But you read things, you reflect on them, you grow over time.

Reading HN is fun—a firehose of insights and intellectual candy.

But it's not work. Personal growth ("internal landscape") requires work; unfun human interaction oftentimes. Online discourse doesn't force this work; despite downvotes, flags, and angry text, it's all still in our heads and at our leisure. Whereas in-person or 1:1s force us to maintain empathy and listen— real work[1] that online spaces can only suggest, not enforce.

You could recreate that experience by researching, considering, reflecting and then interacting, but that's different work you impose on yourself. It's outside of the free online watercooler which has little power to change us beyond the ego we've invested in it.

The top commenter above, for example, used internet comments as the beginning of real-life friendships; they did the real work afterwards. Similarly, my original comment was looking more for like-minds, than to change minds; it summarizes an experience for those who've lived it but lack words for it. Though I believe my take is truth, I'm content to have my fun at one point, and do the work at another. Today, I felt like showing my work :)

[1] As a manager, this is a chunk of my job!

I think there's some truth to what you're saying - personal growth is work, and you have to be willing to put in that work. But I don't really see any reason why the medium has anything to do with it; plenty of people refuse to grow IRL too, just as some do online as well.

> Whereas in-person or 1:1s force us to maintain empathy and listen

How I wish this were true!

Weird! Sorry to hear that commenting (including on HN) didn't make this person any friends. It has made me a bunch of friends, including some very close in-person ones. I don't think I'm an oddball in that regard!

Of particular note: comment culture is how I managed to engage with local politics here in Chicagoland, through which I met a ton of my neighbors and got actively involved with campaigns and the local government itself. Those are all in-person relationships that were (and remain) heavily mediated by comments.

My experience is pretty close to yours. I’ve gotten to know a few people via internet fora, and learn a lot. I got the opportunity to join a city commission as a direct result of participating on Nextdoor of all places.

There’s also another category — people like you! I usually stop and read your posts in the same way my dad would a columnist in the paper years ago.

I think the author of the post was looking for something in the wrong place. Which is all good!

Nextdoor (at least here) is satanic, and still I'm thrilled that it worked out for you. One of the big drums I'm trying to beat is getting message board nerds into active politics through message boards. Well played!

For me, the meme that "you learn to hate all your neighbors" was true of nextdoor.

It's hard. When I was younger and on certain forums and chatrooms my comments made me friends. My closest friends are from a chatroom I was invited to by a friend of a friend in a subculture. 80% of that chatroom was invited to my wedding and 2 of them were my Best Men. But I find that the internet has gotten too big and everyone online just feels so angry and hurt all the time.

This might be me; I am older and have less time. The bar to novelty in my life was a lot lower in my late teens than it is now. But I can't shake the feeling that "something" has changed in the world around me. Every social medium, from the follower-only Mastodons to the heavily algorithmicized Twitter FYP is angry at something or dunking on someone.

(N.B. Sometimes I wonder if this is the nugget of truth behind the wisdom of having kids. That at some point humans become inflexible and recalcitrant but the act of having kids ties your own mood and outlook to the future of humanity as a whole rather than your own crotchety self.)

I'm no sociologist, but a pet theory of mine is that lots of people have realized that one doesn't necessarily need to listen to others in order to achieve one's goals. For instance, in the past you could write a letter of complaint to a company and have a reasonable chance of getting a personal response, but it can be difficult to even find any contact information now, and any response is likely to come from a script. Companies know they can ignore complaints and pretty much carry on as before. I don't suppose one always liked the personal response but it surely feels better to be listened to.

People who want to discuss things in good faith (which presumably includes you and I) and achieve consensus get bogged down in long and complicated discussions while those who have selfish motivations just do whatever they want largely without any cost. The overlap between people who are 'well-meaning' and 'successful' shrinks, leaving the well-meaning people angry and bitter - not generally at each other, but still sometimes unfortunately.

> It has made me a bunch of friends, including some very close in-person ones. I don't think I'm an oddball in that regard!

I've been here over a year and seem to be fairly well recognized at this point, but I don't think I could even confidently name another user in the same city as me.

For whatever reason, no meetup-type-thing for HN in Chicago has ever stuck or resulted in anything for me. I mostly meet people because they email me (or I email them).

I hope you didn't encrypt those emails /s.

Do you think it would be different though if you didn't create and post your own content? It certainly seems that contributing to discourse with just comments is quite limiting to creating deep enough social connections.

The key is to reach out in private messages to make a relationship and to be an active poster so other active players would be interested in you. HN makes that effectively impossible, so if that is most of your comment culture time then it's difficult. Most don't realize you need to do active reach outs and be reachable.

> Sorry to hear that commenting (including on HN) didn't make this person any friends.

Has HN really helped people connect in this sort of way?

To me, HN has almost always felt anonymous, in the sense that I don't recognize (hardly) any of the users that post (aside from maybe dang). A lot of times, I don't even look at the username.

I think this is a combination of a lack of an avatar that nearly all other social media platforms have (except maybe Reddit, which also feels anonymous for the same reason, but I don't use it much/am not a member), as well as the low contrast username.

HN seems to intentionally deemphasize the author, and draw the focus on the content of the article and comments. Which results in a lack of connection (again, likely by design).

But I've been around for almost 15 years, and can't think of a single person I've connected with outside of HN, and could maybe name less than a handful of users by their username.

Again, not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. Just would be surprised if many people have made friends on HN (unless you're going out of your way/trying to build a network, which I guess some people likely do).

I've met multiple business partners on HN, and friends I routinely hang out with in Chicago, and people I talk to in private chats most days. I've made more connections here than on any other group besides IRC #hack (a function of how old I was in the 1990s), and that includes the local politics Facebook group in my muni, which has introduced me to over a dozen people I now know IRL.

Well, you're not supposed to chat on Hacker News, there are strict rules on what comments you can make; so you can only make connections by contacting guys in other ways, which can only happen if they did put contact info in their profile page.

But, yes, the way the username is displayed matters as well, I rarely look at it.

> Weird! Sorry to hear that commenting (including on HN) didn't make this person any friends. It has made me a bunch of friends, including some very close in-person ones. I don't think I'm an oddball in that regard!

You're #1 in karma on HN, so you are a kind of oddball: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Also, Chicago is 3rd most populous city in the United States, which likely helps, because your odds of "meeting" someone online who happens to live in your city is higher than people who live in less populous areas.

Totally fair point re: Chicago!

Conclusion: everyone should move to Chicago. Chicago is amazing!

> Conclusion: everyone should move to Chicago. Chicago is amazing!

I've actually considered it. However, Chicago appears to be quite expensive, at least where I was looking.

I'm addicted to commenting on the internet. I was like, top 1% of comment karma on reddit something like 10 years ago, not because I was popular, but I think just out of sheer volume of comments getting 10-100 upvotes. Then to twitter, much shorter dopamine loop but a much worse comment experience because the threading is shit and it's impossible to know whose talking to who about what and there's a character limit. I was trying to break both addictions so I thought I'd try a "lower engagement" platform like Hacker News, and lo and behold, addicted here. Thank god they throttled my posting here, or I'd probably post at just as high a volume as I did back in the day on reddit.

Anyway like the author I often wonder, why tf am I commenting? I don't recognize any of you, even though I've had very pleasant interactions and have learned some interesting things here and there from you (like yesterday I learned about claude sub-agents), but it isn't what draws me. It's some kind of compulsion. Dopamine hits from replies? I do love talking to people IRL as well, so maybe it's just that? My friends tried to get me back into world of warcraft and an hour after logging in all I'd done was sat in a capital city arguing with people in Trade chat. Bizarre compulsion.

I don't understand ROI thinking but what frequently breaks my addiction is remembering that my comments are adding value to some rich bastard's wallet at probably no return to me, maybe harm. At least on reddit and twitter. HN isn't so bad, I mostly have good interactions here, but I'm an addict so what is useful to some is to me, falling off the wagon. Which is what I'm doing right now :P

This sounds right to me: most of the comments I've written, on most sites, haven't been useful to me socially. The people I was talking to were strangers and remained strangers. But sometimes the act of commenting helped me understand something; sometimes my comments helped other people understand something; and sometimes, very often, reading other people's comments helped me understand something. So it's not valuable for socializing, but it is valuable for other things.

That said, there's another problem with comment culture that seems worth mentioning. I seem to have gotten good at expressing thoughts that fit in a comment. That gives me a false sense of competence; but when I need to write something longer, like a blog post several pages long, the structure just completely falls apart. And writing a book I can't even imagine. It seems writing at different lengths is essentially different skills, which need to be practiced separately. And if that's the case, then as Annie Dillard says, why not just write something long to begin with? I'm actually thinking of that now.

I want you to know I read this comment and appreciated it.

I have just finished writing a book. It took fifty-five months from its inception. Twenty-four months since I signed the contract, and I was thirteen months late. I have written books before, and this was a book on something that I am pretty much the only authority on (my own methods of working), but still it was a slog. This book is the last one. Never again. It's so overwhelming to me. I felt like some hermit building a church on an island.

I got the final proofs of the thing, today. It's a wonderful sense of accomplishment. But, no, never again!

> But sometimes the act of commenting helped me understand something;

I write many more comments that never get posted. The act of writing forces clarification of thought which I find very useful.

for me, commenting is a test to see if i 've gone crazy, or of there still are people out there who would agree to my point.

> So it's not valuable for socializing, but it is valuable for other things.

I think what you described up to this point is a valuable form of socializing—exchanging information. So maybe “comment culture” isn’t absolutely valuable, but I guess that makes it no different than other forms of socialization; dependent on how useful the interaction is to the parties involved.

marginalia_nu put it well elsewhere

> It shouldn't be taken as a replacement for having a social life, but can be a very good complement if your social life isn't as intellectually stimulating as you would like.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45147454

And it looks like this is where the author of this blog post erred.

Your last part about long-form writing is interesting and one of the consequences of frequent commenting, microblogging and short-form communications in general that I can relate to. The two practices do feel separate. I figure they’re about as distinct from one another as a conversation is to a lecture.

It's not really a social activity, but an intellectual one to stay informed about and discuss technology. You can stop visiting if you don't need to keep up. If I were retired, I'd be doing other things.

My entire career on tech is thanks to my comments at the bottom of TechCrunch articles in the early 2010s (and I did hang out with the TechCrunch writers once I moved to SF). That was more a time where trolling in comment sections on blogs was more understood to be in good fun.

Comment culture died starting in 2016, as the internet as a whole became more polarized and making maliciously edgy is both commonplace and rewarded. Hacker News is an outlier in that aspect as it avoided that fate.

There are lots of smaller spaces that have vibrant cultures! There are subreddits that are worth paying attention to, and Facebook groups, and subject-specific PHPBB's.

What hasn't worked out is the no-holds-barred mega-spaces.

2016 is around the time when troll farms and nation states really kicked into high gear their disinformation and FUD campaigns with the express goal of deconstructing unity and common value systems.

It seemed to have worked quite well.

One of the most useful advice I got (forgot the name and the link) is to never got further than two replies deep. Every time I broke that, in hindsight, it was dumb to do so.

I’m making a mental note of that.

What did you find dumb about it?

The mind loves to invent time regret in hindsight: "I should have cleaned the house instead of watching TV", "I should have spent more time with my kids instead of spending so much time at my job", things like that. Is that what you mean?

You are blessed if you have never spent half-hours of precious mental energy pissing into the wind for a back-and-forth stalemate comment thread.

I'm on the train right now, I probably spent five minutes phrasing this comment (and if it feels like five it was likely ten) meanwhile I had a book I was going to try and finish and instead I squandered the ride on Internet junk food.

So to answer your question: yes, but no.

I've certainly spend half-hours of precious mental energy writing a comment because I was having fun writing it. Like watching TV from before, perhaps cleaning the house instead would have been a better use of the time, but It is what was enjoyable in the moment, and sometimes you can allow yourself to have some fun doing arbitrary things. I don't really see that as being dumb, but to each their own, I suppose.

This is probably correct the instant you get a whiff of bad faith or differing fundamental principles that you aren't going to be able to change, and if you do try, it'll devolve into an argument, but I've been involved in significantly longer threads that were just people asking for advice who had a lot of questions that weren't easily answerable with a google search, as well as deeper discussions that were genuinely made in good faith and made me question some of my assumptions. The latter is quite rare, but they certainly are a thing.

"A rule that is almost always valid: never refute or answer a critic, no matter how preposterous the criticism may be. Do not let the critic teach you the cloth, as they say in bullfighting circles. Never charge the cloth, even if the critic resorts to actual misquotation."

-- William S. Burroughs, "The Western Lands"

I guess it depends on what you're there to do. Sometimes I want feedback on a thought that's hyperspecific.

I could wander around town and strike up conversations with strangers and years would pass before I found somebody with the specific set of interests. But there in the depths I can find somebody else who is actually looking to talk about the same niche thing.

I don't know if friends is the right word, I only rarely meet them again later. But for a brief time we were a some kind of partner.

> I’ve benefited incredibly from commenting.

> It has made me a (mostly) better person.

> All of that social activity with zero ROI.

Sorry you didn't make friends from it, but "zero ROI" seems pretty at odds with the rest of your results.

> That scares me. All of that social activity with zero ROI.

We really don't need to assign ROI to every single thing we do.

And I don't think comment culture takes away from any of the activites that lead to more meaningful relationships. Like, how do you imagine this works - "I'm not going to comment on this tech blog post while I'm having my cofee this morning so that later this week I can meet with people at a local book club"? One has nothing to do with the other.

I posit that you do need to seek and understand the ROI, else you will miss out on something better. I generally find great returns from writing comments, though. It is some of the best entertainment value I can find.

The returns aren't constant. There are periods where I no longer see the value and that's when I stop until I see the value again. But if you never find ROI, how does one find the motivation?

I think HN is one of the worthwhile places to participate in. It's sort of what LinkedIn wishes it was in many ways, drawing all sorts of big names and subject matter experts to participate and connect without all the business suits and insights on B2B sales.

It shouldn't be taken as a replacement for having a social life, but can be a very good complement if your social life isn't as intellectually stimulating as you would like.

i'll tell you what my shrink tells me: you're not commenting, you're looking for friends, for the feeling of connection or community.

stop thinking about the nature of comments, the content, the responses you get. start thinking about the thoughts/emotions that come up when trying to make connections irl.

When I fit this pattern over my comments and irl connections, I get something like:

I have some pretty strongly held, but also probably divisive opinions, that I’m afraid would push people away from me if I voiced them to my irl people.

So the thought / emotion is feeling limited irl, and feeling less limited in an anonymous Internet forum. And even occasionally validated in an Internet forum when you find someone that agrees with you. (Or sometimes, when I’m proven wrong, I get something to think about for a little bit.)

Interesting thought exercise, thanks.

Yeah, mostly anonymous commenting tyranny-of-the-nitpickers is really unfulfilling.

I miss phpBB as the dominant mode of internet socialization. Communities with norms, in-jokes, reputation. Take me back!

comment culture is an adventure for me it's teaching me how to be a better writer, by bieng able to see the responses to various styles of dialog, which is generaly impossible to do in the rural environment that surrounds me most of the time, and realy makes a difference when I venture into the city or have to engage beurocratic institutions, lawyers, bankers, and others working in more structured environments, devoid of wild and domesticated animals ,heavy equipment, perhaps simultaneously, which is the sort of thing that when included into general conversation in the form of "what have you been.up to", tends to derail conversations in an irecoverable way, so the internet gives me a place to test how that all works. thanks ,by the way

When I comment I’m engaging with the content - not trying to make connections.

Except on LinkedIn where 99% of comments are self promotion.

The thing about having engaged conversations with smart people about things I'm interested in is that I enjoy that more than having friends. If I were trying to make friends rather than substitute for them, I sure wouldn't do it by anon commenting.

Agreed. I met my late wife on social media. You could definitely make friends on things like forums, but the people on modern social media platforms are different; there's a complete, pervasive lack of trust among today's users.

In the 90s and into the mid-aughts, we would give out our names, phone numbers, and addresses no problem. It's a world where cryptocurrency could sprout because it was built around chat rooms and forums with like-minded individuals, or individuals working/playing in particular niches. Today, most people seem to assume giving your address is something only an idiot would do, or that times have changed drastically so it was fine then but stupid now.

I think we live in a world now where people are conditioned to no longer speak to each other. This is a world where Jesus would be very strange indeed, even if we do find ourselves under a nominally Christian nationalist government. Imagine letting a stranger into your house, or even talking to a stranger in a parking lot. There will, for sure, be no kind of foot-washing.

I agree this is largely conditioning coming from the gamification of socializing brought on by social media and other websites to drive engagement. I don't think the average Internet user would be like this without conditioning by big technology companies. I think it can be beaten by recognizing it as a harmful addiction, and an addiction that can be pretty tough to beat. Government and tech companies aren't going to fix it; it's something you have to want to fix for yourself.

It's not just comments but the entire concept of virtual life. We lived many lives through a glass which made amazing things possible without any of the physical consequences. But AI is putting all this to death, because talking to a machine is not (virtual) social activity, and every question has been answered. It s becoming a slowly rising trend of people returning to the physical world only to find most people hunched over their phones. Things are happening, change is good

Is anyone old enough to have taken part in BBS culture? You had handles, so it was somewhat anonymous, and you argued heatedly, but teens and adults alike made real life friends that last lifetimes.

There's something different about social media culture and polarization, and it's not as much the polarization as something else.

I think it's the volume. Maybe I'm an elitist but there's something niche about agreeing to disagree. And building communities in other ways even when disagreeing.

My guess is it's due to two things.

The first is persona-centric rather than topic-centric spaces. The former emphasizes individual posters and attention to them; the latter, topics.

The second is upvoting and downvoting. As I've returned to traditional forums a bit, it's been refreshing to have the content of the posts be at the forefront, rather than the popularity. Reaction emoji usually suffice to me to fill the role of upvoting and downvoting.

Anonymity helps too, although I suspect it's mostly those other two things.

What traditional forums-that-are-not-HN are you returning to ?

I really understand the author's point of view, because it really reflects my perception of the ever-degrading internet.

What were interesting ways to share interests, hobbies, projects and free knowledge degraded post-social media into a cesspool of engagement, with the exception being the AI generated jesus or cat pictures.

Pretty much everything else went to shit and is created to make you mad, because that's when you talk or click the most.

A couple years ago when I was targeted by APT28 the first time, I decided that the only healthy internet time is around twice a day for a couple minutes and that should be it. So I introduced the toilet rule: I only use social media on the toilet, and I don't even have the passwords on another device.

This way I guarantee the same level of content quality that social media expects me to have, without the emotional aftermath when the bots try to reinforce you in their absolutist beliefs of why killing someone is actually okay.

It's great, I can fully recommend it. I've never been more productive.

A lot of my more important (to me/IMHO) blog posts started out as seed crystal HN comments that I developed into full articles.

> I’ve benefited incredibly from commenting.

> All of that social activity with zero ROI.

Pick one

> Broadly speaking, the online platforms we use are not built for connection; they are built for engagement. This is universally true for all internet spaces, from stories to newsfeeds, for the intellectual and the plebian alike.

It wasn't always like this, and the I feel the whole "engagement" blame is misplaced.

You don't post comments for engagement, you post it for recognition. And people post selfies on social media not to farm engagement, but to attract attention.

The engagement part come after it. Someone welcomed the content you posted, it's positive feedback from there. The social media platforms wants to farm engagement for profit, you, or rather most people at least, don't.

The connection part on the other hand, is your own effort, it don't happen automatically. Platforms are just a place, a pub, for people to gather, you need to do the work to find friends.

Commenting probably bothers me the least on a list of things I think are bad about the internet. Comments are one of the few places you can still read about topic X and then see "well, here's topic Y". This is about the only thing making the internet a world wide web and not a world wide expanse of tiny unconnected islands. Search engines are not effective at making these connections anymore, and AI makes the connection but hides it.

As for the worst thing, I think it's that you can have "kittens playing" and "terrorist attack" posts right next to each other. That can't be a good way to view what's going on.

Commenting on HN helps me figure out what I think…in addition to learning what others think.

Maybe 20% of the time I don’t actually submit the comment because I read it and decide I have nothing substantial to say.

But the commenting is at least as formative and useful as the articles.

I've also been commenting a lot over the past decade. Partly for practicing my writing, like OP, partly to help maintain balance within the social order by shedding light on alternative perspectives which were often overlooked.

But now as my comments are likely being fed into AI for training for profit by specific individuals, it doesn't feel the same. I'm getting a stronger urge to keep my expertise to myself.

Also, the benefits of good writing aren't as great anymore. I still kind of benefit in terms of practicing my tough typing... It's valuable to be able to type AI prompts quickly.

I only recently learned that I have a severe case of ADD. It has helped me with a lot of work related things such as the need to fix problems. As a result of that if there's a problem I work on it until its resolved, which has benefited me greatly during my career.

But for every positive case there are just as many negative ones. I have an intrinsic need to answer questions and will often spend an inordinate amount of time doing so, when in fact I could have used that time far more productively.

I’ve been thinking a bit on how to improve discourse between disagreeing people and how the quick response style of comment sections don’t lend themselves to serious debate.

One idea I have is to mimic Lincoln–Douglas debates where two people debate each other in a fixed format and with structured time for rebuttal. The hope being by slowing down rebuttal the response becomes more mindful.

In general though I think its the speed and low quality of response leading to dissatisfaction of comment platforms.

Doing comments since the BBS days, it was never about meeting people in person, rather discussing stuff with similar liked minds, even if there is plenty of trolling as well.

Oh wow, the argument was not expected but also very compelling, I'd been wanting to quit commenting as it's a big waste of time and often leaves me sour, as you almost always comment in disagreement or engage in tough debates and so on. It rarely feels good.

But seeing it as a bad ROI in terms of social interactions that don't create any social bond, that's quite true. You spend all this time "socializing", and yet gain no social connection from it.

This started out well, but then there are other aspects to consider :

Discord, unlike IRC, is killing forums. And is on the Deep Web, meaning that all the lore, all the knowledge is lost to anyone searching for it, including Internet Archive crawlers.

And in addition to that it's a platform, so people using it are collaborating with totalitarian extremists that are turning our countries into (uncool) cyberpunk dystopias.

Anyone know any forums where you can be sure you're talking to humans and feel like you're in a close knit community?

I am not talking about reddit subs, maybe something more niche, even for hobbies outside computing.

The only place where I felt in company of real humans is a couple of niche IRC channels, where someone without fail always asks me how my day is going whenever I join, I am looking for places like that.

Sadly forums have been out of fashion for more than a decade now. Even more sadly, most of those communities have moved to the closed platform Discord. :/

I was gonna try and answer you, but I had the thought that you this could very well be a honeypotting bot trying to find untainted human-human exchanges, because scrapping and training on bot comments would be unproductive...

I dislike that that's my reasoning.

I would look for local( like in your state/city instead of global) or small userbases (so it's unlikely most are bots).

The only 100% certain way to know you're talking to humans is to see, hear, and smell them face to face.

Given AI, bots, and desire to make Internet properties collect identification data of all users to make sure they're adults (even though their ISPs already do), I feel like your new, exciting and culture-driver Internet spaces of the future are going to be more like private clubs if trends continue.

They won't be accessible until you physically check in with the admin at a public place, or attending a "Meet-N-Greet" type function. This will make them local-first, and such clubs/forums will have to master the art of developing and networking with other local chapters.

Things operated like this before the Internet, and that's where the real people are probably going to end up back to, because the Internet is becoming as boring and tamed as the capital-intensive corporate-driven phone and TV networks of yesteryear.

Should surveillance increase, I can even see the typical social function of the Internet being nothing more than an events calendar and payment processor, and no other real chat or interaction happening within it.

I made a bunch of friends during the early internet (ok, not that early: during the phpbb forums era), some of which I even met in real life. From other countries than mine, too!

But I think I've aged and the internet has changed too. Today, I have the friends I need in real life, and I don't make friends online. Not sure if it's me or the world has changed, or both. Probably mostly me.

I found this interesting: "part of an elite society of people who put their voice out there instead of lurked." I never think of people who just read comments without posting. I grew up before the internet so the nearest equivalent was writing to newspaper letters pages, and anyone who did that regularly was a bit lonely or strange but certainly not elite.

Small but organised communities that are on Twitch and YouTube live streams seem to counter that “series of one-offs” the author is talking about.

I often watch YouTube live streamed sports watchalongs and have become familiar with the regular super chat contributors that are read out. Similarly on Twitch there are many regular streamers with small communities and regular chatters.

Good point. I find some of the healthiest communities I'm part of online are influencer or game streamer communities.

Nobody dares commenting eh ?

I saw this thread and felt the need to comment pointlessly on it without aggrandizing the act of commenting simply to make some kind of point about the content but here I am making it out to be something important and meaningful when it isn’t oops how silly of me

I should quit myself, I've been on HN and various websites commenting for years if not decades; top 100 commenter on one big popular website.

But it's shallow and self-aggrandizing, because I comment, hit post, and... never look at it again because what if I'm actually held to account on what I just said?

But also, nobody's ever read a comment and thought "whoa I need to get to know this person better!" and reached out - but that's normal because I never read a comment and have that thought.

Publishing my opinion is great, that's why so many people have blogs and twitter and such as well, it's their own soapbox. But conversing over comments, not so much.

HN's issue is that you don't get notifications if someone replied to you. Someone may reply to you, you may reply to them again, but who knows if they read it and reply again? Reddit's issue is that I ignore notifications.

Forums were great 15-20 years ago, I'd go there several times a day, go through ALL the unread posts, read everything, reply, and there would be actual conversations going. But also usually not one to one, so you'd rarely stand alone in any discussions.

But for me, that time has passed. I haven't been to these forums in ages (and I run them, lol), I just don't read long posts, especially from people I know who write long posts, the personal conversations have mostly died out and moved to Discord or private chats - because over time, people shared too much, were too trusting, and got hurt because of it.

TL;DR, I'm still on the internet but it's a husk of the mid 2000s - or at least my experience thereof is, the generation following will probably say the same in 20 years time. It matters more what time in your life you are than the online communities themselves I think.

I still do it, but as harm reduction, I never read the replies to my comments

Commenting is great. Reading replies and replying, not so much. I just fire off comments left and right, and never check back to see if anyone engaged. It's soothing without being aggravating.

> Comment culture requires your social energy.

It actually doesn't anymore. LLMs can transform you into Diogenes in a mech suit.

You can minimize your expended energy, maintain emotional cool-ness (vital to being perceived as 'winning' to the audience), and ultimately turn every discussion into a war of attrition. If your opponent is getting emotional heated and burnt out, they eventually drop out.

If you get off on winning online arguments, it turns comment culture into an asymmetric warfare. We're going to I expect this to destroy forums. Ideologies and untreated anti-social personality disorders cannot, at scale, co-exist with the commons.

No they can't

"Behold! A man," he declared, gesturing to a featherless ChatGPT.

> We're going to I expect this to

Is this another instance where a strikethrough was supposed to be placed

Oh dear. Should I comment on this?

I agree with the author on the positive side of commenting. In addition to every they said, it learns you to accept being proven wrong, learn how ignorant you are, and is a great introspection tool.

The point of commenting is not being social or a socialite. The best comments are questions - asking others, questioning yourself.

Looking back at some of my comments, some were clearly toxic and I know why: it was time when things weren't going my way at work (cause most of my comment activity is in tech-related forums). It reminds me when I was bullied at school, which made me at times not the nicest brother. Took me too long to notice I had this tendency.

But their reasoning then becomes unsound: "All of that social activity with zero ROI." They throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It seems that the author belong to the same regeneration as mine, so they might be in that period of their life - the "forties blues" or "middle age crisis" (1). This doesn't "invalidate" this post, except for the false dichotomy between Internet acquaintances and IRL friends. It is a warning to be heard, at a time when we see more and more smartphone zombies in the streets.

(1) it becomes really ironic when you been looking at teens and their identity crisis with a patronizing eye in your thirties-forties and then you experience it a second time yourself.

Expecting commenting to make you friend like connections is the Ur internet faux pas

If it's some specialized niche forum, it's very possible.

Even more if it's a discussion forum, instead of wall of temporal comments.

HN doesn't qualify for either, but there probably exist active places that qualify.

The expectation that Internet social spaces are massive "town square" style spaces where strangers interact but remain strangers is recent, circa maybe 2012. We can go back and forth about the precise year but early online spaces like BBSs, Usenet, IRC and traditional forums were relatively small and close knit. Couples holding real marriage ceremonies in the multiplayer role playing game where they met is a tradition older than the term "MMORPG" (they were getting married in eg LambdaMOO).

Everyone comes to online social space looking for some kind of connection, friendship or otherwise.

Writing comments just takes too much time, which is why I don't do it anymore.

I can't remember the last time I commented on an internet forum

sadly agree, as a gymrat girl in my early 20s it's hard to find friends online, everyone asks me to send a few pictures as soon as we start talking ૮₍•᷄ ༝ •᷅₎ა

This post made me want to comment again

Gotosay: Come to HN for the comments...

Even just yesterday I had a constructive reply where we were initially snarky and reconciled to a good outcome. That’s not representative, perhaps 1/3 of the outcomes when I’m commenting here, and 1/10th on broader social media.

I struggle with comments, where I try to be succinct and to the point. I’ve been soft-banned on HN – to the mods credit they worked with me to restore my account, and had good intentions.

Commenters and moderators tend to favor vague, long-winded language and double-entendre over direct & succinct comments.

Hence my frequent downvotes and soft-bans.

I never regret not commenting.

I like my comments, they’re little droppings of my thoughts at the time that I can go back to. I delete many of them, if they get a single downvote, or if I think about them for 10 minutes after and decide not to have them permanently recorded. They don’t run my life, and it’s only HN and lobsters I leave them on. I just don’t assign much of my life’s purpose to these farts in the wind, and turns out it’s fine.

comments to IRC to beer catchups were a thing in past.

dumb movie, comment people are some the richest in the world

private communities is where it's at, like Discord

yeah me too. never commented since. life is awesome

I’m convinced

> All of that social activity with zero ROI. At first, I thought that I needed to change my commenting habits, and, you know, try to make connections. But the more I considered how to make friends in comment culture, the more I realized that it wasn’t just my own social ineptitude. Comment culture has a problem. Systemically, it produces an internet of strangers.

I can't tell if Hacker News is less affected by this, or if it lends itself to parasocial relationships, but I've started to recognize a few other users who seem to frequently read and comment on the same topics that I do.

I don't think these will blossom into friendships, but many friendships of mine have started with frequenting the same location or event until you see who else is usually there, and then introducing yourself.

If this kind of comment-acquaintance is common on HN though, it probably comes back (as always) to the self-selecting user base, the text-only interface, and of course, the moderation. Because I certainly haven't experienced it on Reddit, Twitter, or Meta platforms.

I comment to get downvotes and it mostly works.

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