Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like a too online person with too online friends. About ten years ago, I had an experience that pointed out the too online nature of people (in that case, myself).

It’s all in the culture of the social media bubble they’re in. I was on Reddit a lot. Reddit had just gone through the Great Hate of Hipsters (with their skinny jeans and ear gauges) and had moved on to a new target: Atheists.

The scorned atheist was (perhaps is?) stereotypically a nerdy young man with, notably, an affection for fedoras and pride in “euphoric” quotes.

All right, so I spent all this time on Reddit and it was clear to me: Americans think fedoras are weird and American girls can’t stand them. I don’t have a predilection for hats personally so this wasn’t a big deal but good to know. But I was a nerdy young man.

Then one day I was traveling with a group of friends, mostly girls, and we walked by a hat store. Completely confusingly, the girls were highly enthusiastic about us boys wearing the hats. Some of them specifically picked out the much hated fedora! For me!

I said something about atheist-kid-something and they looked at me confused till one of them said “oh it’s some Reddit thing; forget it, just try it on” and life just moved on.

So what was the deal? I’d assumed some highly-specific online view of a highly-specific online community was a property of society. It wasn’t. It’s a property of the people who are part of the highly-specific online community.

Anyway, I think this writer’s friends are part of some highly specific community with some kind of Twitter-like norms. And this supposed change in society is just a change in her local group.

> I’d assumed some highly-specific online view of a highly-specific online community was a property of society. It wasn’t. It’s a property of the people who are part of the highly-specific online community.

That's an interesting way to put it, I think this happens a lot. But sometimes I think an opinion from a highly-specific online community escapes their bubble and becomes a reality in other groups, and sometimes this is sad.

For example I think there are way too many youngsters these days using the words 'chad' and 'incel' and they truly believe these things are true. Some go as far as saying that you are either born one way or another and there is no way to fix it. The very same thinking pattern caused teenagers to kill each other in multiple instances.

It seems some people just fail to realize that whatever is the norm in their online space is not reality.

I agree, but I think something the hn crowd misses is that a huge chunk of young people are invested in something like your Reddit bubble, or at least that's true with the mostly trans/queer twentysomethings of Seattle that I hang out with.

It's hard to ignore the tread that the younger a group is, the more being too online is just the default. You can't opt-out of the reality distorting effects of algorithmic content consumption when it is replicated by everyone you meet at school. This problem is especially bad with sex and gender relationships because of how well those topics perform on social media.

Its a depressing time to be a kid, and even more so to be a teenager. I think nerds (like you), queer people (like me and the author), and other terminally online people are canaries in the coal mine for what will become the new normal.

Queer in your 20s in Seattle is the prime demographic for a lot of these online subcultures though. If that's your crowd but you dislike the very online mores I definitely feel for you. A lot of the rest of us have the luxury of having friends not in these bubbles.

I have a younger sibling who is in their 20s but not very online and only one or two of their friends are, even though they constantly use social media. I think queer groups tend to be a lot more line than others. Leaving Seattle will probably help too but much of the US is unfriendly to queer folks so there's probably only a handful of other places to go.

Great story and I think you're exactly right.

I think the problem is with Gen-Z and tiktok online unfortunately is their real life more and more these days.

This. I’m on X myself a lot (because everyone else in my circles is, not because I wanted) and it’s just such a bubble. Sometimes I want to just quit it all and touch grass

Haha, I felt the same and never did anything about it. Then this Charlie Kirk fellow got shot and I’d coincidentally clicked on For You on Twitter (I know, first mistake, never do this) moments after and a vague tweet about “can’t believe this something something” had a bloody video of a man getting shot dead in the fucking neck. I remember wondering if I wanted to go through a week, maybe a month, of people tweeting about a guy getting shot and realized I really didn’t.

Stopped. Thanks to that gore poster, I suppose.

But I went back to look maybe a week ago and when I did it was incomprehensible. It was full of in-jokes and references that made no sense to me. Dunks and subtweets that were context free. Strangely a short period away made the whole thing look like an alien culture.

Jeez. Thankfully I carefully avoided almost any and all of that political driven craziness there, as my bubble is just other solopreneurs

Getting to know the neighbours is what helped me in getting out, so perhaps it could help you as well.

Among those with whom I established any contact there's a:

-Doctor in training

-Teacher

-Small business owner doing house renovations

-Telecom company sales representative

-Taxi driver

There's hardly any overlap between them in terms of what they do for a living and it's like that naturally in every place that's not close to some kind of large business like a factory.

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