281–290 of 319 posts
I don't want to be a Stanford art major who describes people they meet in passive-aggressive terms like, "clear skin and dead, vacant eyes".
That was my biggest takeaway. I didn't realize I was reading a hit piece, but maybe that's my fault.
> I don’t want to be anything like these people. I don’t want to be an internet person. I love this. I got a similar vibe from people who were "too good at IRC," way back in the day. They had a constant, sarcastic, tired energy about them. They had difficulty being genuine about anything. They knew so much and yet they were so stuck in their life somehow. And that sucked the life out of them. It's like they were too…
Flagged the post as I don't think a person engaging in the behaviour discussed in this[0] thread needs a greater audience or needs to be paid any attention whatsoever. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893781
Flagged the post as I don't think a person engaging in the behaviour discussed in this[0] thread needs a greater audience or needs to be paid any attention whatsoever. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893781
I'm pretty sure this generalizes to everything. People who cultivate a persona in any sub-culture or domain seem to be a fish out of water when confronted in a different context. Take someone from the rave scene and plop them down in a microbrewery bar and everyone will gawk at the brightly colored fidgety person that has no idea what to order. Take a polished SV entrepreneur and deposit them in an Idaho roadhouse an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say it's pathetic. People try and get power/control/ a sense of meaning anywhere they can. This man probably didn't have a great life and found his only refuge and belonging to be in IRC. The alternative may have been to confront harsh reality and realize you're nobody to noone.
It's exactly like Reddit power mods, or that one guy that edits half of wikipedia or whatever the statistic is. It's pathetic to some people, sure, but if it isn't hurting anyone and the person chooses that life, not simply falls into it for lack of options, what's the harm? It's power in a place they are comfortable with. The issue is when that impacts actual human relationships, or is turned for purposes that are (…
In my experience even the "respectable" cliques are like this too. Artists, journalists, the honest-to-god English aristocracy. Any scene of "cool" people ends up being kind of pathetic once you get close enough to see the details, however many drugs they're taking or pictures they're putting up in galleries or whatever.
I thought this sounded familiar, and sure enough[1]. Edit: To make it explicit, which Palladium notably fails to do: this person is a reactionary and has a history of encouraging young girls to commit suicide. [1]: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=founder-of-milady-nft-proje...
Palladium is a Thiel-backed rightwing propaganda outlet that insists it's "non partisan". It's a shame to see t shared here
Earlier quoted context omitted.
BBS meetups are filled with BBS people who may seem mismatched to outsiders, but their community is the BBS, and for some, their life is online on the BBS
What do they talk about online? It seems that the reason they BBS is that that in-person meetups (or even plain IM/email chat) don't work for them.
Even people who had internet access back then used BBSs to communicate with people near them on topics that were either local or which generally interested them.
Most boards had spaces which allowed general discussion of anything, even if the BBS was created with a specific subject in mind (computers, warez, occult stuff, photography, etc).
Lots of the people I saw at meetups were a bit on the shy/awkward side, which wasn't too uncommon for people who were into computers in general those days, but they were able to get along fine at meetups because they already knew many (if not most) of the other people there. They'd spent hours talking, and debating, and sharing ideas with them. They could go to a meetup and talk about all the same things they talked about online and they already had some idea of how people would react to them.
A local BBS was a great place to meet friends because it gave people a safe space to get to know each other at their own pace with carefully chosen words before being forced into real-time face to face interaction, and once they already had relationships established the transition to hanging out in real life was made much easier.