Ask HN: Where do you browse and chat outside of here?

Yeah me too. Another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43409370) expresses a similar dismay at the lack of really engaged discussion.

I have a theory that this phenomenon is largely the result of smartphones and the concomitant constant connection to the internet. Paradoxically, being always connected has made it harder to connect.

It used to be that in order to participate in a real-time conversation, you had to be sitting at your computer. You were ready to chat. You would chat with other people who were also at their computers ready to chat. When you were done you would put up your away message and re-enter the real world.

If you wanted to post on a bulletin board or some other non-real-time forum, again you had to be at your computer. You would post what you wanted to post. When you left and came back later you would check to see if anyone replied and you'd be excited to read their comments. (LiveJournal is the thing that sticks in my mind for this; it was big when I was in college.)

Now, instead of being either online, ready to engage, or offline, engaging in person, people are always half and half. Also, smartphones have driven the proliferation of "notifications", which then have been abused by apps to the point where people are constantly deluged with so many notifications that they can't distinguish the ones they might actually care about. (I've had glimpses of this when I use someone else's tablet or phone for some reason.) Since everyone is assumed to be always reachable, there's no perceived need to say "bye" or indicate when you are temporarily not paying attention to a sync interaction, so those interactions come in unpredictable spurts. And since everyone can always check everything from their phone, responses in async interactions are often dashed off haphazardly. So we get a sort of worst-of-both-worlds mix of sync and async.