I kissed comment culture goodbye

The entire Internet now is a giant confirmation bias machine, which is impressive considering it also exposes you to unlimited conflicting viewpoints no matter how crazy they are. I think this is just a natural consequence of structuring everything around engagement. Even when you're seeing multiple viewpoints, it's rarely going to be in a positive light.

Yeah I second this. You need a social media structure that follows this. HN doesn't build for it because there is no private message or comment reply notification infra. Other news websites and youtube comments are even worse. Reddit also is a bit like HN in that regard where the main unit of social media is the community / news post, but you could make it work to make internet friends because it has PMs and focused communities.

Instagram, X, & old school forums etc lend themselves to it a bit more, but it's probably the chat / watering hole ones like discord and IRC that lend themselves the most to making internet friends. All the other ones you need to reach out specifically and it can be difficult.

I feel the same way. Back in the day, I spent a lot of time on namepros and xda developer forums, and a few of the friendships I made there have lasted for years. I still talk to some of those folks weekly, and even meet a couple in person now and then.

It does feel harder to build that kind of connection today. Maybe it’s the anonymity, maybe it’s the sheer volume of noise, or just the way platforms are designed now. The sense of community that used to form around niche forums seems a lot rarer.

Maybe it was also my age. I was a teenager back then and more open to forming those connections.

I think that the culture of a given forum plays a huge role.

There are some places where commenting is meaningful because you're a part of some closely-knit, stable community, and you can actually make a dent - actually influence people who matter to you. I know that we geeks are supposed to hate Facebook, but local neighborhood / hobby groups on FB are actually a good example of that.

There are places where it can be meaningful because you're helping others, even if they're complete strangers. This is Stack Exchange, small hobby subreddits, etc - although these communities sometimes devolve into hazing and gatekeeping, at which point, it's just putting others down to feel better about oneself.

But then, there are communities where you comment... just to comment. To scream into the void about politics or whatever. And it's easy to get totally hooked on that, but it accomplishes nothing in the long haul.

HN is an interesting mix of all this. A local group to some, a nerd interest forum for others, and a gatekeeping / venting venue for a minority.

"The only thing I regret is when I get into pointless arguments, usually when I feel that my comment was misunderstood or misinterpreted."

I like that you try to learn from bad arguments, but don't forget, that many misunderstood on purpose, to "win" an argument. Or at least to score cheap karma points or virtual karma points from the audience.

I've found increasingly I'll submit a comment only to go back 30 seconds later and delete it.

Speaking of 4chan, I actually found an IRL friend there through commenting on /g/. We both wanted to try the TOX messenger and its various spin-offs. Then we took it to Steam and now years later we know each other by face and name. We even have various different political views but never argued.

It may be a super low sample size but it's far from impossible. Especially Reddit has DMs/chat and it's way easier since you can contact someone without someone else impersonating the other party. Sometimes you gotta believe you are talking to just another human being. Love that the article in the OP mentions trolling. We all probably had moments where we did not act in the best way we could have.

To all those that act noble in the shroud of anonymity!

Update: The article also says it takes several hundreds of hours. That may be so, but I find the same time needs to be spent IRL to get to know someone. Usually a continuous effort can be just as much as linking a friend a good story and saying hi. People will engage conversation spontaneously when both parties want.

I stumbled across the same pattern by accident after too many years of arguing with others online. These days my commentary is limited to here, and a handful of specialized hobbyist forums where there is still pleasant and informative discussions to be had. The "cozy web". (At least until the LLM spam takes it over, too.)

I probably do that 2-3 times a day. Usually after writing the comment and proofreading it, I'll think about whether it's something I really want to put out there, and sometimes I'll pass.

I’m more in the lurker camp. But sometimes I write a comment or want to reply to something. Every now and then I type a super long comment to simply leave the page before posting. Sometimes it’s the fear of not being clear enough and dreading the reply’s and or downvotes. Or the reason that I don’t want to steer things up with my believes. Don’t know. I have this problem that I generally find social interactions tiresome. Some topics are easy. But I don’t have the energy to start a debate over the internet about some random topic. So I refrain from posting with the feeling that inside I said my piece and move on.

I don't know the exact situation obviously, but isn't it possible that the poster simply wasn't able (or didn't know how) to add the strikethrough, but had the expectation that anyone who knows about this form knows, and the replying commenters were indeed people who did instantly recognize that jumble of characters, and acknowledged it?

Like, I didn't know about that form of the loss meme, but now that I know it's loss if you add strikethrough, I'm pretty sure I'd recognize it even without the strikethrough.

I'm not sure what you're talking about here? What strikethrough? I immediately recognized it in your 2nd line as Loss. This is a culture thing, not an AI thing.

I was gonna try and answer you, but I had the thought that you this could very well be a honeypotting bot trying to find untainted human-human exchanges, because scrapping and training on bot comments would be unproductive...

I dislike that that's my reasoning.

I would look for local( like in your state/city instead of global) or small userbases (so it's unlikely most are bots).

Sadly forums have been out of fashion for more than a decade now. Even more sadly, most of those communities have moved to the closed platform Discord. :/

It's hard. When I was younger and on certain forums and chatrooms my comments made me friends. My closest friends are from a chatroom I was invited to by a friend of a friend in a subculture. 80% of that chatroom was invited to my wedding and 2 of them were my Best Men. But I find that the internet has gotten too big and everyone online just feels so angry and hurt all the time.

This might be me; I am older and have less time. The bar to novelty in my life was a lot lower in my late teens than it is now. But I can't shake the feeling that "something" has changed in the world around me. Every social medium, from the follower-only Mastodons to the heavily algorithmicized Twitter FYP is angry at something or dunking on someone.

(N.B. Sometimes I wonder if this is the nugget of truth behind the wisdom of having kids. That at some point humans become inflexible and recalcitrant but the act of having kids ties your own mood and outlook to the future of humanity as a whole rather than your own crotchety self.)

> Sorry to hear that commenting (including on HN) didn't make this person any friends.

Has HN really helped people connect in this sort of way?

To me, HN has almost always felt anonymous, in the sense that I don't recognize (hardly) any of the users that post (aside from maybe dang). A lot of times, I don't even look at the username.

I think this is a combination of a lack of an avatar that nearly all other social media platforms have (except maybe Reddit, which also feels anonymous for the same reason, but I don't use it much/am not a member), as well as the low contrast username.

HN seems to intentionally deemphasize the author, and draw the focus on the content of the article and comments. Which results in a lack of connection (again, likely by design).

But I've been around for almost 15 years, and can't think of a single person I've connected with outside of HN, and could maybe name less than a handful of users by their username.

Again, not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. Just would be surprised if many people have made friends on HN (unless you're going out of your way/trying to build a network, which I guess some people likely do).

> It has made me a bunch of friends, including some very close in-person ones. I don't think I'm an oddball in that regard!

I've been here over a year and seem to be fairly well recognized at this point, but I don't think I could even confidently name another user in the same city as me.

The key is to reach out in private messages to make a relationship and to be an active poster so other active players would be interested in you. HN makes that effectively impossible, so if that is most of your comment culture time then it's difficult. Most don't realize you need to do active reach outs and be reachable.

My experience is pretty close to yours. I’ve gotten to know a few people via internet fora, and learn a lot. I got the opportunity to join a city commission as a direct result of participating on Nextdoor of all places.

There’s also another category — people like you! I usually stop and read your posts in the same way my dad would a columnist in the paper years ago.

I think the author of the post was looking for something in the wrong place. Which is all good!

There are lots of smaller spaces that have vibrant cultures! There are subreddits that are worth paying attention to, and Facebook groups, and subject-specific PHPBB's.

What hasn't worked out is the no-holds-barred mega-spaces.

2016 is around the time when troll farms and nation states really kicked into high gear their disinformation and FUD campaigns with the express goal of deconstructing unity and common value systems.

It seemed to have worked quite well.

I posit that you do need to seek and understand the ROI, else you will miss out on something better. I generally find great returns from writing comments, though. It is some of the best entertainment value I can find.

The returns aren't constant. There are periods where I no longer see the value and that's when I stop until I see the value again. But if you never find ROI, how does one find the motivation?

What did you find dumb about it?

The mind loves to invent time regret in hindsight: "I should have cleaned the house instead of watching TV", "I should have spent more time with my kids instead of spending so much time at my job", things like that. Is that what you mean?

I’m making a mental note of that.