Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

nymag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 340 posts

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#201

Post by newsbinator »

jonreem wrote: post #132
gkoberger wrote: post #44

I think a lot of people here are missing the point. Yeah, there's a lot more content to consume now. However, it doesn't feel like a community... it feels more like watching reruns on TBS. I remember making actual friends on message boards. Friends I eventually met in the real world. I don't think relationships like that are really formed anymore. Most of social media now is a broadcast, not a conversation. People (m…

Join a discord server for a relatively niche interest that you have and not only will you meet many others with similarly deep interest in a water cooler format but you will be able to work on your hobby much more effectively with a close community of like minded people. Discord is a place that still has conversations and communities, not broadcasts and celebrities.

How would you find these communities?

This is particularly hard if you're not interested in gaming (beyond the N64 level).

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#202

Post by salvar »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #200
salvar wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So there's no such thing as toxic behaviour in your mind?

How could you possibly get that impression from what was written? The claim was the complete opposite that almost any objectionable behavior is labelled as "toxic". It is hence about as undescriptive as "liberal" is in American politics. That term many years ago had a well-defined narrow meaning but is now far removed from that (or like "literally" often meaning "figuratively" in common use ).

I got the impression when OP immediately dismissed anything called "toxic" as a "thought-terminating cliché".

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#203

Post by apatters »

gkoberger wrote: post #44

I think a lot of people here are missing the point. Yeah, there's a lot more content to consume now. However, it doesn't feel like a community... it feels more like watching reruns on TBS. I remember making actual friends on message boards. Friends I eventually met in the real world. I don't think relationships like that are really formed anymore. Most of social media now is a broadcast, not a conversation. People (m…

It's definitely changed and it happened slowly so we didn't notice at first. In the 90s and the early aughts the social fabric of the Internet was comprised of a number of small communities, each of which had a distinct membership and culture.

By the 2010's the big players had come along and supplanted these Internet communities. Facebook talks all the time about its "community" but it's more like a theme park which gets visited by billions of people, and your friends all hang out around one ride but so do a thousand other randoms. You'd have to be a PR spokesperson to look at that and call it a community.

All the big social networks employ this model of throwing everyone into the same arena but humans aren't wired to feel at home in that environment, so we get all these weird side effects like social media causing depression, loneliness, and the angst expressed by this writer.

Reddit is the only one that hearkens back to the old days a bit -- each community has local moderators and a somewhat distinct culture, but the corporate overlord is still there sanitizing, monetizing, and occasionally messing with people's posts.

I think the language issue is especially interesting, did we fail to recognize that our communities were dying because we lack a word for the thing that supplanted them?

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#205

Post by pmlnr »

mseebach wrote: post #149
gkoberger wrote: post #44

I think a lot of people here are missing the point. Yeah, there's a lot more content to consume now. However, it doesn't feel like a community... it feels more like watching reruns on TBS. I remember making actual friends on message boards. Friends I eventually met in the real world. I don't think relationships like that are really formed anymore. Most of social media now is a broadcast, not a conversation. People (m…

I think a major factor is the fact that the internet is now mainstream. In the early days, you had something in common with everybody, simply by being on the internet. The place was silly with people absolutely floored by the idea that they were casually chatting with someone halfway across the continent, something only possible on very expensive phone calls until then. Everybody was also, by necessity, an early tech…

Internet data connection might be mainstream, but Internet, as in websites, blogs, genuine, independent content, is really not.

There are places where the internet is Facebook. I remember times when the internet was a blue E on the desktop, but at least that really did take people to the internet, and not a walled garden.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#206

Post by pmlnr »

frio wrote: post #95
y2bd wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much how I felt as a long-time TF2 player super excited for Overwatch to come out, and then very sad once I realized what kind of game it was. You grab your friends and play Overwatch, while you play TF2 and meet your friends. And also a parallel, TF2 obviously still exists, but all of the servers I used to play on are gone now. Haven’t found anything else quite yet. FFXIV actually was super enjoyable…

This is a thing that's bugged me for a long time: the death of dedicated game servers. Game servers had to be run by communities, and they were gateways and feeding grounds for those communities. However, games don't typically use dedicated servers anymore; they use matchmaking. You're right -- matchmaking means you gather your friends first. More insidiously, it means you probably won't see the same players again, a…

They are not dead, but their numbers certainly diminished. There are still UT99, Jedi Knight II servers out there.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#207

Post by newsbinator »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #28

He's just old. Go to Tumblr, Facebook groups, Instagram. There's thousands of places to waste your time with vapid, unyielding streams of barely entertaining content. I recently spent hours going through bad geography memes. Geography. Memes. Or you could go old-school. Fark.com is still around, as is SomethingAwful. Reddit has tons of content. And if you're not at work and looking for a horrifying thrill ride, 4chan…

I may be wrong on this, but lately I find the Reddit hivemind has gone into overdrive. On any given sub, you're either "with us" or "against us".

It's gotten to the point that making a perfectly benign comment that couldn't possibly be seen as taking a side or disagreeing with anyone's opinion is insta-downvoted or attacked, assuming it's not parroting whatever the sub's current talking points are.

I'm not even referring to the political/news subreddits, which would be understandably partisan. Other subs that used to be about the topic at hand have started coalescing into us/them teams.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#208

Post by mseebach »

maltalex wrote: post #199
mseebach wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a major factor is the fact that the internet is now mainstream. In the early days, you had something in common with everybody, simply by being on the internet. The place was silly with people absolutely floored by the idea that they were casually chatting with someone halfway across the continent, something only possible on very expensive phone calls until then. Everybody was also, by necessity, an early tech…

There’s still some of that in IRC. IRC clients serve as a barrier that filters out a surprising number of people.

Just like in the real world: You don't go out on the street to meet people, you use the street to get to the place where the people you're likely to enjoy meeting are likely to be. IRC might be one such place, but there are many others - HN is one, even if not directly social in nature.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#209

Post by CM30 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #82
itchynosedev wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now it sounds more like an elitist club. Weren’t most of forums free for all?

Yes, but there were only a few people around and they were tech savvy and often entrepreneural especially in tech forums... Now when a forum gets any sort of uptake, it is jumped on by marketers and other spammers. So elitist, I guess but it was automatically back then I guess.

Good moderation feels like a better solution than invites or elitism here. Have the forum open to anyone, but be ruthless when it comes to removing low quality content or marketing spam in any form. Maybe even set things like signature links or certain aspects of the post formatting to be only accessible to those with 5 or more posts, and have any first post with a link in sent for moderator approval.

Human moderation always wins out over technical solutions and elitism.

Post reply on HN