321–330 of 340 posts
If the internet were a bar that got boring, then you’d find a new bar. Too bad there isn’t a new internet, separate from the old, to explore and rebuild freely.
But this is also a problem, nobody wants to live in a ghost town...
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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…
I remember playing at a single server on CoD4 online. Because you went to the same server you didn't flame, because you would be playing with the same people the next time... And lots came from that. I went to two LAN parties eventually with people from that server, after playing together and talking on TS for hours. It was a lot of fun and I miss that sense of community in games. Now I click a button in League or Fo…
And yeah I've tried games with matchmaking, mostly Dota and CS:GO but they are only good fun if you have friends going into a game, otherwise it feels like 9/10 times you end up with as you said, people that are awful to eachother.
These still exist. Plus now you can load them into Tux Guitar to figure out how incorrect they are without even bothering to learn them.
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What's 'toxic'?
Toxic usually means full of assholes. People will get super mad at you and swear at you and say very bad things in general if you make one little mistake or don't know something. If you are a noob, prepared to get treated like shit and told you should die violently in real life. Much like you'd hear about a toxic environment at home or in a poisonous mine, it's a very dangerous and bad place to be. In some games, whe…
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> 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. That is an amazingly good point - its very easy to be lost and lonely in a crowd.
Mayhaps not perfectly applicable, but your last line reminded me of this: > Sheridan: Once during the war, my fighter was disabled. I sat there, radio out, power out, for eight hours, which seemed like eight years. I didn't think I'd ever see another living being. Well, I was rescued, obviously, but.. I'll never forget that.. feeling of helplessness. I, I never thought there could be anything worse than being all alo…
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Am I the only one who is totally confused by discourse? Maybe it's because rhe demo instance was reset way to often or something but I've never really seen a really working discourse instance. (I think both Mozilla and Canonical (has?) run one but they weren't to active either IIRC. Anyone has examples of a working discourse community?
The subject matter may not appeal to some on HN, but here's an installation I set up at a previous employer over three years ago, that is thriving: https://discourse.biologos.org/
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Am I the only one who is totally confused by discourse? Maybe it's because rhe demo instance was reset way to often or something but I've never really seen a really working discourse instance. (I think both Mozilla and Canonical (has?) run one but they weren't to active either IIRC. Anyone has examples of a working discourse community?
- https://discourse.mozilla.org/latest - https://platform.github.community/latest - https://forum.golangbridge.org/
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Toxic usually means full of assholes. People will get super mad at you and swear at you and say very bad things in general if you make one little mistake or don't know something. If you are a noob, prepared to get treated like shit and told you should die violently in real life. Much like you'd hear about a toxic environment at home or in a poisonous mine, it's a very dangerous and bad place to be. In some games, whe…
Ok, so normal gaming experience in those kind of games. Take Dota, which wastes the time (40+ mins, compared to the 20-30) of 4 players if one is an idiot. Of course you'll get flamed for it.
Left is a group of people that react very angry very quickly, even out of the game.
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> Let's please at least take a moment to appreciate what's been gained for humanity as a whole The ability to interact faster? It’s a big wash: positive and negative. It’s hard to see the internet as objectively good for humanity.
> It’s hard to see the internet as objectively good for humanity. You could say the same about the automobile.
I'd like for millennials to comment on this.
On forums getting to know the groups members and it's in-jokes has the advantage of giving interactions a sense of scale or place, in that you roughly know who the people you're talking to are and have a degree of rapport or common interests, while still being pseudonymous and the freedom that brings is I think part of what made them appealing and special. Forums can also become somewhat clique-ey and insular if new blood isn't rotated through, or can die out if the topic is too narrow to keep them active.
More content stream based social media (Instagram, Facebook, Reddit for the most part) has less of a focus around specific topics and discussing them and more presenting content and reacting to it. This results in people both tailoring what they make to generate hits, and interactions with other users being rather fleeting if you're not already connected to them, as the pool of people you're interacting with is often too large and unfocused to see those people again.
I'd say there are some exceptions though, such as subreddits that stay in a sweet spot of user numbers or Discord channels and Twitch channels for example. Additionally 4Chan is somewhat of a blend of the content stream and a forum system.
Part of the reason it's going this way is that the content stream approach is better-suited to advertisement and appealing to larger audiences. In school a surprising number of people would browse through the front page of Reddit never going into subreddits or commenting for example. I would guess Lurkers like that make up a good portion of users now, and I think advertisers and site builders will tailor to them.
In general a slight shift from the internet being a space for collaboration between people to a place for companies to sell things seems to have happened. A small example is game maps, servers and skins going from being things people made and shared with each other to something companies sell.