Hacker News Reader

Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

With old chat programs and forums I was talking to real people over a long span of time. On the modern platforms I’m just talking to the internet. It feels very different.

In 2024 I was looking for a place to see the eclipse, and someone I knew from a forum 20 years ago told me I could come to his house, as it was going right over it. It was my first time meeting him in person, despite having known him for 20 years. We don’t talk as often anymore, but for many years we talked everyday. I probably talked to him more than anyone else I knew for a good 5-10 years. I don’t feel like that stuff happens when people are just blasting out memes.

View on HN

That sort of connection making is happening in varying degrees of private discord servers today. You join the public discord it, you spend time with strangers, if you're likeable you eventually get told about less advertised public servers, or invite-only servers, and you go down a bit of a rabbit hole of loosely interconnected communities. Eventually you find communities that you settle into.

Good filters make for good communities. 20 years ago, being on the internet at all was pre-selecting for certain types of people. That's basically not true anymore. Today, the filters end up being invite systems.

I guess that’s sort of what happened with the forums. I was on a decently large one and eventually became a mod. Then a bunch of the mods and admins had their own smaller forums. I ended up being an admin on several of those. Over the years there were migrations and things.

However, nothing was “private”. Some of the smaller forums still had members who never found their way to the bigger hub forum.

I’ve never used Discord and the idea of starting that process and everything being like prohibition era speakeasies is more than I want to deal with at this stage of life. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I always had the impression that Discord was for voice chat? I liked that forums didn’t required everyone to be online at the same time. Fun when they were, but still useful when they weren’t.

Discord is more analogous to IRC than voice chat. There's a constant set of channels/chats where people are chatting and then also voice/video channels.

now it also has threaded channels so it went full loop into a forum

Many discord servers don't even have voice channels and are just collections of text chat channels.

Even BBSes were filters for people, live chats and group gaming. Digital communications hasn't basically changed at all.

20 years ago I'd be a brand new teenager with plenty of time, let alone energy to browse hundreds of random discord servers to dig through the mud to find the gold.

Fast forward a few life nut-busters, I now lack the time and energy to do such a thing. Is there a trick to break the cycle, or is this literally my first "old man yells at cloud" moment?

One thing that often gets overlooked is that 25 years ago, “the Internet” was essentially educated people from North America and Western Europe, with everyone else being a rounding error.

This made it very easy to connect on a level beyond just memes. Users had a lot in common personally, and that’s why they were able to engage on a personal level.

Today, the majority of the world’s population is online, and memes are often the only cultural language shared by all users in a community. Beyond that lie vast cultural chasms that make any deeper interactions nearly impossible.

Eternal September just kept happening day after day for 25 years.

To be fair, the Eternal September is also what created that huge tsunami of money, that has made so many tech people wealthy.

> Today, the majority of the world’s population is online, and memes are often the only cultural language shared by all users in a community

I've always wondered how sure of this are we actually? Particularly now in the age of easy bot activity too. I buy that a significant % of population is online but I'd hazard at a decent guess that the majority are passively online content rather than actively engage in it so how truly online is the world in a representative sense?

It feels to me that you still have to be a bit non-average to interact online in much the same way as it used to be

I'm thinking out loud with this one, but memes tend to be a comedic way to relate to the topic in my eyes. Comedy tends to be lower friction, so it stands to reason memes would be a good shibboleth for an online community.

Now, in the modern age, you have 'creators' who make the memes and are the original posters, but you also have easy mechanisms for sharing already-created content. Sharing content is _SOMEWHAT_ akin to the original meme creation since you're putting skin in the game and standing behind the meme's sentiment. Akin to wearing liberty spikes to show you're part of a punk community. You didn't create 'liberty spikes,' you're just representing them. In using the sharing button, I think average people can interact online in a much different way than it used to be.

At some point in the 2010s, there was a definite shift towards social media and search engines started to narrow their results. The internet of twenty five years ago was a lot more fun.

This is what I quite like about Mastodon, since it's not inserting random users' posts into my feed (only people I follow, and then posts that they boost) you tend to have that experience much more like the chat and forums of old where you find a reasonably small group of active users who you mostly interact with.

Of course, 'influencer' kind of people tend to not like it because it's a lot harder to amass a huge following, but I'm fine with that!

One of the interesting things about how people socialize is that we tend to be less honest with those we're closest to, and more honest with people who have no impact on our bottom line.

Counter-intuitively this means we end up having better conversation with strangers than our closest friends and family. Which makes platforms like Facebook a lost cause for connection.

I've had the same experience. Many of my best friends have been found on forums.

In the past reputation matters. Accounts like "Endwokeness" would never work, because people would just make fun of him. "Why is he so obsessed with trans people?" "Does he have a job?". His whole persona would become an inside joke. You also can't just spam low effort opening post, because it will just be removed, so if he for example wants to hate on gay people he needs to write whole essays about it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com