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Comment by TFNA | Hacker News Reader

Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people. You could meet cool new people (even occasionally IRL friends) from forums and blogs, and they were a hub for discussion for real-life communities like music-band fandom or travel subcultures.

Besides the deleterious nature of engagement-maximizing social media today, I think another aspect of the problem is that there is less connection to real-life socializing simply because that has collapsed in so many countries.

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This is a big part of it for me. The old Internet was full of individuals sharing deep passion--whether on a personal website or on a forum. There was a sense of connecting to another human being.

This is the only forum-style site I regularly interact with, and I must admit that I rarely try to remember another username here. The effect is that I interact with ideas, not people. And there is some deep connection between behaviors I might label as addiction and a felt sense of isolation.

The internet is still full of individuals sharing deep passion for all sorts of things, but only within the walls of invite-only communities you have to go out of your way to find (Discord servers, private forums) and/or make a financial commitment towards (Patreon).

Or at least it was, before LLM "enthusiasts" started leaking into these otherwise hermetic communities and overrunning formerly safe spaces with mass-produced low-effort content nobody wants to see, particularly when anyone else could prompt the exact same thing into existence.

For me the difference today is that most people sharing their passions are now doing for The Algorithm. It's a far cry from the scrappy days of the early web where people just posted stuff because they thought it was cool. I'm not saying their passion is any less, more just that is so much noise. People are now "creators" and are pressured to constantly create.

Don't go on sites with "creators" then. When people say this they're talking about like 5 websites. They're not "the Internet" at all.

Why do you assume a hobby or interest still has a significant presence on the non-algorithmified open web?

For travel-related hobbies, for instance, there is no longer any kind of significant open-web scene where people just share stuff to help others or because it is cool. (Yes, you can set up your own blog, but pretty much none of your peers will ever see it.) The community might be using a variety of apps beyond your "like 5 websites", but all those apps are designed around phones and minimize text content, and so they are just as pathological as "sites with 'creators'".

I'm not sure what exactly a travel-related hobby app might even be for (other than e.g. a map and a calendar, but there are FOSS ones), but isn't this exactly demonstrating the "creator" mentality? You can make your blog as you like it with text, images, videos, etc. Share it with people in your social circle who are interested. Maybe others will find it too some day if you want it to be open. But if you can't send them a link, they're not really your peer, are they? And if they won't click a link, they weren't interested.

Let me give you long-haul bicycle travel as an example: back when there was an active blogging scene, people sharing route tips and bike-build breakdowns could be sure that a decent amount of other people would find it and benefit from it: the blogs got picked up by search engines and were readily findable, and there was still a culture of using the open web.

Today, no one you will see the content that you posted to help other people out. Google began deprioritizing personal blogs a decade ago already, and now a whole generation has come up that doesn't know the open web is a thing. When people look for tips in this hobby, it is overwhelmingly on phone apps like Komoot or PolarSteps, on the general image-based social media like YouTube or Instagram, or (already for an older-skewing crowd that still uses browsers) on the big for-profit website Bikepacking.com that grew by using its SEO-fu to wipe out the non-profit-driven scene.

There is a community around this hobby, one with a lot of IRL interaction, and people do enjoy that feeling of community. But claiming that people "aren't really your peer" if they don't use the old open web that we knew, is just cutting yourself off from that.

Ha, yes I wanted to keep my comment short without trying to cover every base, but figured I might get this comment. Of course such sites still exist, but still a different phenomena when that was the entire internet. There are a lot of interesting people who run YouTube channels that be so cool to see a GeoCities-type site from, for example.

Even 25 years ago being “too online” - back then it was icq, livejournal, and forums - was already destructive as hell and always led to some pretty cringe outcomes. At least these days some people make a career out of it, back then it was purely negative

It wasn't purely negative for everyone. I still maintain ties with several people I hung out with on an IRC channel in the 2000s, and a couple of fellow heavy commenters on one blog in the same decade. Granted, this was aided by the fact that we were all in Europe and all traveled regularly, so we could do the IRL interaction that solidifies friendships.

Today, if one is heavily online, many platforms no longer offer a space where one can tell a fellow user, "I'll be in your town soon, let's meet up", or even if it does, the general culture has changed away from that.

> Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people. You could meet cool new people (even occasionally IRL friends) from forums and blogs

My experience has been the opposite. The people I knew who got seriously addicted to the internet a couple decades ago were mostly not thriving online among cool other people. They were getting dragged down into swirling cesspools of the time.

4chan has been around for over 20 years. A lot of the gaming communities and forums were toxic and brutal back then. There were social news sites, content mills, and personality cults back then too.

I think there’s some glorification of the past that happens in these threads. The old internet was full of toxic and addictive things, too. It was just less common to be immerse in it because you had to go to a physical computer and, if you go back far enough, dial up and occupy the house phone line. There were natural limits to how exposed most people would get.

> You could meet cool new people

My first date was a guy with fake photos. Ten dates later I settled for a married guy cheating on his wife. He eventually divorced but then I left him.

Username checks out. /s

Sorry, but teenage me, growing up late 90s, wildly disagrees with this statement.

It's always been addictive and destructive. I was staying up past 3am to talk to my American friends, knowing I'd have to get up at 7am to get to school.

Painting the past with such a rose brush does not help anyone.

I was staying up till 3 am listening to my iPod and reading books without internet then going to school at 7

I do think the internet was less bad back then (but still bad) and i also think sometimes teenagers just be teenagers

You kids and your iPods. ;-)

> so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people

That still exists. Except now it's not in IRC or BBSes but in Discord "servers" instead.

Discord servers skew towards a very young demographic. One of the striking things about the early-millennium blog scene was how much quality long-form-text interaction it facilitated among relatively older people: the average age around a lot of blogs on topics like the arts or literature was like 40 or 50.

I think for people that age now, the internet is a much lonelier place.

Yep... back then, the internet was a way people would discuss and organize their real world interests and activities, like clubs and usergroups would organize their next meeting... and then meet, off the internet.

Now, it's all just online drivel that never turns into anything else.

I use the Internet about how I used to 30 years ago.

I chat with friends. Sometimes, I make a new friend or lose track of one. On rare occasion we get together to do whatever it is that we have a common interest in. That used to be IRC.

I learn new shit by interacting with people I don't know at all. Sometimes, that means hanging out in much more anonymous places (like HN) and sharing ideas. That used to be Usenet.

I learn other stuff by Googling things and otherwise conducting research. That used to be AltaVista; nowadays, it's often an LLM.

I order pizzas. (I just ordered pizzas, in fact.)

How do you make new IRL friends now in 2026? Where are you hanging out online where there is a culture of people not only revealing their location and age (which platforms and individual internet users have become more guarded about), but even meeting up with other users?

Not OP, and I will assume you ask about making irl friends online: niche multiplayer videogames always were the best way to make irl friends. I still have a few friends from a web game where you had to coordinate 5-10 people for ~1h a day (and enemies could counter if they chose to connect around the same time) that I played from 2004 to 2013 (with breaks in between). Later it has mostly Hoi4 and civ6 (which are now less niche, but the mp communities used to be extremely niche before ~2020) (civ6 still is). I have a friend who I've met through another because they played on a SWTOR roleplay server together. Also, now that I remember, a friend of mine turned 40 a year ago, and I was surprised of the younger friends (less than 30) he made. They told me they met through WoW classic, managed to find out they lived close from each other, and decided to hang out/play RPGs (pen and paper) together.

How I do it:

My local IRL friends are some folks I met during my days as a BBS sysop ~35 years ago.

My far away IRL friends are folks online where we felt motivated to treat eachother as friends instead of dangerous randos.

(Risky? Perhaps. We're all simply too old to give a shit.)

That's still not answering my question. Where do you make those "far away IRL friends"? Most commercial platforms today discourage (because it is bad for engagement) users from building close ties with individual other users even if said users are willing to let their guard down. The user base of open and easily findable non-commercial platforms has collapsed. Your posts are dangling some kind of 2026 Shangri-La before HN readers, and you can understand my skepticism.

Reddit. Discord. HN. (Definitely not Facebook. That whole thing is resolutely toxic.)

I do not care what the platform encourages or discourages. If others do care and this precludes friendship, then: So it is.

You have seriously made contacts on Reddit or HN that have led to meeting people IRL when you visit their regions or they visit yours? Even way back when IRL meetups between users of internet forums were common, Reddit was already famous for having a culture where that wasn't at all likely due to the design of the site.

As for HN, there is no DM feature and only a minority of users give any contact info in their profiles. In over a decade here, I have never seen one user passing contact info to another user in public.

Of course I have. I've flown and driven many thousands of miles to hang out with some of these folks. We've even planned and executed public events together. We help eachother out. When the distance is great and we want to borrow, lend, or trade some small stuff, we spend a few dollars and send it in the mail.

It'd be pretty great if we all lived closer, but we do not. We've all got our reasons to live wherever we individually live.

I've also made other, more-temporary friendships online in recent years. When they're nearby it's actually pretty easy, upon recognizing that things click well-enough, to go out for drinks with other friends, or sushi, or whatever. It isn't necessary to commit to keeping a friend forever in order to make these minor moves and put a face with their words and just hang out for a bit.

For HN in particular, there are ways to initiate out-of-band comms. It's not exactly rocket surgery to just drop an email address (a throwaway one? a real one? sure!) here in a comment, or leave a clue in a bio, or even to do both things to validate who's who and connect.

It works for me, and I'm somewhat private about what I share here. Meanwhile, some users here are very public about who they are and don't hide behind a pseudonym at all. It's OK. Both types fit.

There's nothing that would motivate me to lie about this stuff. I do not stand to gain or to lose anything whether you believe me or not. :)

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