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Comment by pedrocr | Hacker News Reader

That was my first impression too but I think his point is that the web was already social because people were already using (and still do) out of band mechanisms to socially share web links. The new social web is just using the web itself to stream those previously OOB messages.

This is in contrast to saying that before the social web people used the web individually, looking up information by themselves but not interacting socially about the web.

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That is retconning "social web" to cover every kind of interaction. Applied hindsight-bias. Before the web, there were boards on services like CompuServe, The Source, AOL, and others, that simply had names that you told other people. It's not a new technology to email someone you're going to the mall when before email you would just tell them over the phone or whatever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroactive_continuity

The point isn't that people were being social over email. The point is that people were using email as a social layer on top of the web (i.e., they'd email links around). What we now call the "social web" is just the web as a platform taking over functions that before were performed over other internet technologies like email and IM.

People weren't using the social web before the likes of Facebook and MySpace. You, me and the rest of HN were. But everyone else? No, they were not on forums. Being social on the internet and the web was the purview of geeks. Friendster, MySpace and Facebook changed that.

I don't think so. Anyone that was serious about a particular area, such as a hobby, profession, or social cause was already using forums 10 years ago. Now these people converged to the mainstream sites such as twitter, but they have always shared information on the web since it was created. My wife, for example, doesn't know a thing about computers, but is more active in forums and niche sites than I have ever been.

I know many counterexamples, particularly people who were in their 20's, 30's and older ten years ago. MySpace and Facebook was their first introduction to the social web.

I follow a beekeeping forum, and just yesterday there was a thread about some people noticing they had been on for 10+ years. These are definitely not the young hacker crowd. That predates myspace and is literally just an example that came up yesterday, I'm sure I can find older forums.

And are you really saying that before web forums, all the way back in the very beginning of the web people weren't being social on the web by sharing links through email? Remember, email is the true killer app of the internet, the web is just a nice-to-have. :)

I'm talking trends, not individuals.

Uggggh. No. No.

Yahoo!, AIM, IRC, whatever came before phpBB, Delphi Forums, ICQ, even Livejournal.

These things were pretty common, not just among geeks. I chatted with a 60+ year old grandma I worked with at a department store on ICQ in '98 & '99. All my buddies had AIM, yes, the non-geek buddies.

I know a carpenter active on a carpentry forum in the 1998-2002 era.

And we were in rural Idaho.

What exactly is the argument here? Were people (non-techies) using the web/internet before Facebook/MySpace? Of course. Are considerably more people (non-techies) using it now after Facebook/MySpace? Of course.

That's a function of mobile and broadband, not facebook et al (arguably)

All of my friends had AIM as well. But that was not true of people even five years older. All of those things that you pointed out existed, but they were not the kind of assumption that Facebook is now. Web-based social sites starting with Friendster, then MySpace, and now with Facebook opened up online interactions to most people in the Western world, as opposed to the geeks, or family members of geeks, or the young, or people with special interests.

The point is not that people were not social on the web before. The point is that many, many more people are social on the web now, and that it's becoming an assumption of society. And from what I have witnessed, this is clearly a result of social networking sites.

> that it's becoming an assumption of society.

It was an assumption of general online society in the 90s, as near as I can remember.

You're basically making a non-refutable argument since anyone who responds to you here is going to be an HN commenter whose experience is disqualified by your premises.

At least provide some data to back up your claims.

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