I actually made plenty of friends commenting, in the early days of the Internet, but it wasn't just commenting. It was that a comment on a message board would lead to following them on LiveJournal, which would lead to AIM chats, which would lead to volunteer positions and real-life meetups and being invited to their weddings and a job referral to Google in the late-00s.
I've got plenty of friends now. Most are not the ones I met online; that was a phase of our life that has largely passed us by, though I keep up with a couple. I still comment on things, but it leads to more shallow relationships if any, but perhaps that's because I'm not really looking for friends anymore.
But I think that the bigger reason I'm reconsidering commenting online is: I can never be sure if the other person is real anymore. And even if they are, it often doesn't feel like they're debating in good faith. A lot of recent Reddit comment threads have really felt like I'm arguing with an AI or Russian troll farm. Social media now feels like a propaganda cesspool rather than something where people come together to share disparate views.
jchw · 3h ago
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.
_mu · 1h ago
> I think this is just a natural consequence of structuring everything around engagement.
Agree - for me this leads to the conclusion that some services should not be run for-profit, or at least they should be run for public benefit. Similar to how governments in some countries own part of the railway.
ggm · 2h ago
I simultaneously think this is true and a massive contradiction. A right and a left winger posting on a thread about J6 would both come away convinced of their rectitude, despite actively disagreeing about everything. There is almost no boundary of agreement over facts or intent, just an active disagreement online.
nostrademons · 1h ago
Selection bias is the most powerful force known to man, or life for that matter. An Internet where every voice is represented is an Internet with billions and billions of ways for selection bias to make you happy.
bdangubic · 1h ago
I disagree :)
awesome_dude · 2h ago
It could also be that, that's the kind of world we really live in.
Most of the discourse that we see is where groups of people are intersecting that wouldn't really meet in the real world because of the echo chambers we keep.
The Americans are often saying that they only see that crank uncle, or their liberal nephew or niece, at thanksgiving, and, honestly, it's the same for the rest of us around the world - we're normally only exposed to the very different viewpoints at family gatherings.
IRL we try to avoid conflict, and try not to associate with people that hold views that are vastly different to our own, so much so it's considered "unprofessional" to have the discussions at work that would show how different everyone's (political) viewpoints are in the workplace.
jchw · 1h ago
Social media exposes us to more viewpoints than we would normally see, but I think there is actually a such thing as too much. Online communities have the same kind of issue, they really need to strike a balance between being too much of a "circle jerk", and being too fractured and conflict-ridden to have productive discussion. What I think is interesting, though, is that due to the way social media platforms work, you can actually have both a massive circle jerk amongst people that agree with each-other, and constant, unending, vile conflict between people who do not, due to algorithmic feeds. (If anything, they both wind up feeding into each-other.)
IRL I think people are often more empathetic and sympathetic, and I think that this environment leads to less polarized opinions even when our exposure to viewpoints is relatively limited. That said, lately, IRL socialization has become quite limited, especially after the COVID-19 lockdowns. Online interactions are just not really the same... especially not limited to text, over heavily manipulated platforms like Twitter/Facebook/etc.
Seems a bit contradictory I'm sure, but if the problems of socializing on the Internet were simple and easy to understand, we wouldn't have to talk about it so much :)
awesome_dude · 1h ago
> IRL I think people are often more empathetic and sympathetic, and I think that this environment leads to less polarized opinions even when our exposure to viewpoints is relatively limited.
I mean, I hear what you're saying, but the only real difference between IRL and online discussions is that online people can get heated at each other without any fear of physical violence.
That limiting factor for IRL prevents people from being more frank about their position on whatever.
Speaking as someone that has been public on various political positions in the past, I've seen the polarised views forever.
I mean, history is littered with stories about polarised sections of societies inflicting actual violence with one another - American examples might be the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the Vietnam war, Drug use (and it's policing alleged as being a way to break up communities that oppose the ruling community)
Oh, I should also point out, people like Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher, Trump, etc, don't come into power in a vacuum, they have vast communities of supporters that believe that they are right, and the communities that they oppose are wrong (same goes for the communities that they oppose, vast groups of people that believe they are right and the community that they oppose is wrong)
jchw · 1h ago
I think that it's actually not an IRL vs Internet discussion dichotomy FWIW, that oversimplifies things a bit too much. For example, I think sympathy and empathy increases as you go from public interaction in major social platform -> 1-on-1 direct message -> audio call -> video call -> IRL private conversation. Many reasons really. Public interactions have public scrutiny, it often is more of a performance than an authentic social interaction. Text conversations are low bandwidth. All internet conversation carries the burden that things you say may be recorded and used against you. And of course, seeing and hearing a human on the other end just naturally will increase empathy.
I hear what you're saying, but I think you are looking at this wrong. I'm not suggesting that IRL social interactions are perfect and Internet ones are hopelessly broken. We have plenty of history to show how IRL social interactions can break down, in small groups or big. What I'm saying is that IRL interactions are better on average than Internet interactions, largely due to the modality and venue that most Internet interactions occur.
Edit: also, it is worth noting that there are definitely robust studies that can back up some of these ideas, which may be a good data point to add into this discussion. That said, I am honestly too lazy to go cite sources right now, to be completely honest with you. (And I know HN is rightly a bit skeptical of psychology studies, since you can pretty much find something to validate anything you want, but there are some actually good and interesting ones.)
awesome_dude · 1h ago
I think that we're going to have to agree to disagree here.
I've definitely had online discussions that were orders of magnitude more productive than the best IRL conversations on similar subjects, because people felt more free to contribute.
It's so much more productive online that I look for communities that discuss those subjects (eg. Twitter when it was good, or Reddit).
I avoid that IRL because it's so poor.
jchw · 24m ago
On an individual level, there's always going to be people whose experiences don't match the average, but I really do believe most Internet conversation isn't particularly productive. I'm not saying I don't have productive Internet conversation, though.
Anyway, it seems like we're at an impasse, but I may as well link some references that back up what I'm trying to say.
I mind less the trolling and argumentation, it's the personal attacks and especially the one-liner 'mic drop' replies that I see so much on Reddit that we see here sometimes as well.
Lots and lots of single sentence replies makes me want to close the entire browser.
novok · 3h ago
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.
balder1991 · 3h ago
Instagram even change the incentives from connecting to friends to be more like a TikTok app, where you scroll mindlessly through reels, because the incentive is only engagement now.
Imustaskforhelp · 1h ago
I think that I can also vouch for things like discord in the fact that it can bring internet friends.
Though I think that two things that I hate is that information there isn't as structured in the sense that someone might come reading this comment after specifically searching for this topic of comment culture.
But the same couldn't be said for things like online forums and as such I can't shake the feeling that if we all collectively stopped commenting on things, it can really move a lot of discourse away that might influence new generation.
I myself have been inspired many times to try something new or think of some idea because of some idea just to try if that make sense. Or seeing someone post some idea that I like and then reading the comments to find nuanced opinion about and maybe I can chime in sometimes helping it.
I feel like commenting system to definitely be one of treasures like wikipedia although I think that the noise:signal ratio is definitely higher in commenting systems (ie. they have more noise than signal)
PaulHoule · 2h ago
Oh the last thing you want is DMs. On every platform I am on that has DMs whether that is Instagram or Mastodon or whatever, I get approached by people who say something like "Hey!" or "How are you doing today" and if I humor them they want to move the conversation on to Signal where there is less of a paper trail. So far as I could tell it is these people
Right now I am trying to deprogram a rather isolated friend who seems to be sucked into this, it is so frickin' hard to get through to a person who has been seduced, has a crush on somebody, and who has accepted a sob story.
If it is not that, there are all the people who are maybe promoting their onlyfans profile or maybe they're just trying to click on a virus, but either way it is awful. I've been cataloging features that are "expressions of hostility" on BlueSky profiles and one of the most common is "No DM" and it is so common and the people who use it are relatively normal otherwise that we don't treat it as a red flag.
If I was starting out a new platform I'd have a ground rule of never supporting DMs because they are a hotbed of fraud and trouble.
novok · 56m ago
Thats a spam problem and solvable by different means. FWIW I never get such experiences and made internet friends even on reddit via the DM system.
For people to develop friendships with each other, they need to be able to have 1:1 or 1:small time with a ton of back and forth, and public comment sections don't lend themselves to 100 deep message threads. Chat rooms do, chat threads do, and DMs do. In real life it happens naturally as people split off into side conversations.
I think the ease of direct connection helps, but there's also a big difference in terms of permanence and frequency/volume. While on IRC people were frequently running bouncers or logging bots that eventually posted to the web, it still felt ephemeral and therefore more authentic. The same goes for Discord - much as the demise of the traditional web-indexed phpBB forum is lamented, I feel that people more frequently act like "themselves" in spaces that don't feel as permanent, regardless of if they actually are or not. Plus, most active IRC and now Discord users just post a lot more messages than, say, an average HN user, so there's a lot more socializing to be done.
For whatever reason, public Discords just don't seem to work the same way as IRC did, though. I've had great luck seeding Discord servers with friends from elsewhere (real life, forums, shared activities, etc.) and making friends as the group grows, but I've never really jumped into a random Discord and made a friend the way I did on IRC. I can't really figure out what the difference is, but it's one of the little things I miss that I haven't been able to put a finger on.
Overall though, I've made plenty of friends online, even in the last few years and even as I get older and the Internet changes. The original article really didn't resonate with me at all, which actually made it even more thought provoking for me - I can't imagine making 16 years worth of posts without a single direct connection.
nirui · 1h ago
> It was that a comment on a message board would lead to following them on LiveJournal...
I remember "back in the days"™ many forum software allowed a feature called "signature", it allows you to attach custom pictures and links after each and every post you posted. Many people use this feature to advertise their sites/blogs for others to visit.
Then the feature got weakened by both the social media platforms and forum software, to the point that it's gone and forgotten.
But based on my experience, it was the best place in the old time to do advertisement and SEO. I learned and bookmarked many interesting blogs from those signatures.
Now days, I'll just google it if I need anything, and never look back after I'm done. That's one reason today's Internet is dead to me.
bri3d · 2h ago
I agree with this overall, and I don't think it the notion of making friends online has died, for what it's worth: I've made a lot of friends online from various comment-media in the last 3-5 years. Forums are still the highest friendship to noise ratio, oddly, with Discord in a close second, but I also got my current job off of Hacker News and have made some friends here too.
I also 100% agree that super-wide-scale social media feels like it's dying, though - Instagram, Twitter, and any Reddit with more than a few thousand users are definitely worse by the day, but I never really got a huge amount of value from those spaces anyway. My Twitter account (which in fairness, I think had 1FA with a password from 2008 or so) somehow got taken over by what appear to be drug dealers from Japan and I didn't particularly mourn the loss.
Oddly the only online space I really _miss_ is, of all things, the early days of Xbox Live voice chat. Matchmaking seemed to really heavily favor ping and in turn I'd frequently encounter my neighbors in lobbies. Everyone used a microphone. It was still toxic in terms of various -isms, slurs, and so on, but the trash talking was generally more of an aside and you'd frequently get some genuine small talk and connections while you queued for matches. I've tried it a few times since and while I'm sure part of it is just me getting older, the signal isn't even really there (I think a lot of people are in private party chats in Discord, if they're talking at all) and if it is, the noise ratio is way higher than it used to be.
which seems to postulate that some kind of deliberative process by which "people come together to share disparate views" could solve many of the problems that he points out in
if we could just find the right process but in 2025 it seems dangerously naive today. That is, when people come together to share disparate views online they seem to relish attacking each other and reinforcing tribal identities. I have a lot of problems with this recent Nate Silver editorial
particularly (i) it didn't start on BlueSky but really started on Twitter and Tumblr, and (ii) centrists like Matt Yglesias who pick fights with that kind of leftist or anyone who complains about being bullied by trans people is either doing it to get a rise or drive traffic to their blog. Even if he names it wrong, the phenomenon he's describing is a very real thing and it's particularly harmful to the causes and the individuals that those who participate in it claim to be advocating for.
Telaneo · 2h ago
The 'make friends on the internet' age as it was back then is probably largely over outside of select niches, but I still find fulfilment in commenting and discussing matters within more niche topics. Within those, it's still fairly likely that I'm not actually talking to a bot, and that they're not a complete knobhead who isn't discussing in good faith. Hacker News gets there sometimes, but it can still spill over into the bad discussions that have now flooded mainstream social media.
noosphr · 2h ago
I've always treated comments as about me first and about other people second. If I can't defend my point of view from some online random then I haven't really thought it through. Online discussions are still quite good at ripping bad arguments apart, even if there's rather more vapid noise around than there used to be.
awesome_dude · 2h ago
There's still avenues for connections - I am making "friends" as we speak on reddit with like minded people (specifically politics, people who are sitting roughly in the same point in the spectrum as me)
I've noticed that the demise of twitter has impacted my ability to connect with like minded people - I gave up on mastodon because the ability to stumble upon other people with similar tastes wasn't nearly what I wanted it to be.
Here (HN) I have mostly found wonks and trolls replying directly to me, but I do see a lot of interesting discourse (which is what I'm looking for... right) which will likely lead to connections (eventually)
D13Fd · 1h ago
Are they people, or AI bots? And how can you be sure?
awesome_dude · 4m ago
Does it matter?
coffeecoders · 3h ago
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.
eawgewag · 1h ago
Wow, I enjoyed your comment deeply and it reminded me of 15+ years ago on the internet, where your experience really matched mine. I still am friends to this day with the people I met 15+ years ago. I haven't made an internet friend in over 10 years though.
I personally believe that part of this is due to the upvote/downvote culture of Reddit. We're all incentivized to say something that will attract upvotes. There's a positive side to this -- thanks to this I regularly read really funny, entertaining comments. Genuine genius in the comments section.
On the other hand, its just to entertain. There's nothing really human or of substance there. Or, what's especially dangerous, to say something that bucks the trend, the status quo, admit an unpopular vulnerability outloud and suddenly you're hit with waves upon waves of downvotes. Not only that but I genuinely believe that the downvotes empowers angry debaters to come in and pick apart whatever it is that you said, just to enjoy the upvotes. I perceive it as a kind of bullying.
At any rate, I don't think these spaces are designed for intimacy. They're designed for memes and funny jokes, not genuine conversations.
novok · 51m ago
It's really the small communities on reddit where you get less of the upvote culture mattering much and the same regular few dozen to hundred people that are interesting.
zoogeny · 3h ago
I know this sounds maybe a bit insane, or even self-aggrandizing but I don't comment on public websites for some benefit to myself. I write with the vague hope that some unique expression of myself makes some tiny difference to this universe.
Every once in a while I have some experience or some a point of view that I don't see reflected anywhere else. One of the benefits of the pseudo-anonymization of sites like Hacker News is that I feel a bit more comfortable stating things that don't really have a place to say anywhere else.
The only thing I regret is when I get into pointless arguments, usually when I feel that my comment was misunderstood or misinterpreted. But even those arguments sometimes force me to consider how to express myself more clearly or to challenge how deeply I hold the belief (or how well I know the subject) that lead me to the comment in the first place.
non_aligned · 3h ago
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.
lukan · 2h ago
"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 misunderstand on purpose, to "win" an argument. Or at least to score cheap karma points or virtual karma points from the audience. So there one can only learn to make arguments in a way that they are harder to be intentionally missunderstood, but those ain't truthfinding skills, they are debate technics.
satisfice · 1h ago
I make comments and read them for substantially the same reason. Although THIS comment I am making now is done primarily to reward the commenter for saying something that made me feel less alone.
A second goal of this comment is to add a point: That I also comment because sometimes saying something makes me feel like I am more than nothing and nobody. I want to feel more than nothing and nobody.
neilv · 2h ago
> I write with the vague hope that some unique expression of myself makes some tiny difference to this universe.
I used to have to talk more on Internet privacy.
Now I feel like enough people are talking about that one, that I usually don't have to.
In more recent years, it's been pointing out the latest wave of thievery in the techbro field -- sneaky lock-in and abuse, surveillance capitalism, growth investment scams, regulatory avoidance "it's an app, judge" scams, blockchain "it's not finance or currency or utterly obvious criminal scheme, judge" scams, and now "it's AI, judge" mass copyright violation.
There's not enough people -- who aren't on the exploitation bandwagon or coattails-riding -- who have the will to notice a problem, and speak up.
Though more speak up on that particular problem, after the window of opportunity closes, and the damage is done, and finally widely recognized. But then there's a new scam, and gotta get onboard the money train while you can.
That ticks me off, and I can type fast.
neko_ranger · 3h ago
I find typing the comment out, then deleting it and not submitting kinda gives my brain the 90% feeling of needing to say something. Only place I don't have to do this is 4chan, where the worst thing to happen is that your comment gets ignored or something mean is said to me (oh dear!)
I unironically just closed this tab before submitting out of habit and reopened it to submit this
eterm · 3h ago
I've found increasingly I'll submit a comment only to go back 30 seconds later and delete it.
abruzzi · 3h ago
I participate in a number of 'old school' forums, never anything like reddit or discord. On those forums, while I have posted on some a fair amount, I actually find that most of the time I spend 15 minutes writing up a post, then delete it. There are a number of reasons I don't hit the submit button. Sometimes its because I see that a lot of other posters will disagree with it, and I don't think they will argue rationally and in good faith; but the most valuable posts I don't submit are when I get to a point in my argument when I realize that I'm wrong or that my opinion or point of view is badly supported or any numer of other things that force me to re-evaluate position. I've probably held that position for a while thinking I'm right, but actually formulating the argument forces me to confront my biases or mistakes.
csin · 1h ago
Sounds like forums are your rubber ducky debugger of life.
anyfoo · 3h ago
I mostly do that when I go "that was a little bit mean of me... do I really need to be mean, what's the point?"
Fortunately, that seems to also have trained me to not write those comments in the first place. I also think much more about what I am trying to actually effect with a comment, not just about what feels good in the particular moment.
One thing that didn't change though is that probably most of my comments are edited at least once, often a few times, right after sending them. And even if it's just swapping out a word, or adding a missing comma. This one here is no exception at all, I just added this paragraph after doing some minor edits.
EvanAnderson · 2h ago
Glad to hear I'm not the only one. I've been doing that a ton on HN lately.
octo888 · 2h ago
[deleted]
dmesg · 3h ago
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.
GolfPopper · 3h ago
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.)
HankStallone · 3h ago
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.
larusso · 2h ago
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.
mingus88 · 3h ago
Comment culture died for me in a different way.
I was browsing some thread and someone referenced a meme typed out as :.|:;
The comment had a few replies who recognized the meme. I had no idea what it meant so I asked Claude
Well the AI knew what it was! It was the “loss” meme but the explanation it gave made no sense.
Turns out the meme needs a strike through tag. This turns :.|:; into a four-panel diagram of a web comic.
That’s when I realize that whatever trained Claude stripped out the formatting, and thus the entire meaning of the meme. And the comment I originally saw was a repost bot that also failed to retain the formatting when it reposted it.
And the replies that understood the reference were all reposted by bots.
So who even knows if we CAN make relationships on the internet anymore?
I can’t trust that any comment is actual human expression any more. Or is it just bullshit stripped of any context or meaning
anyfoo · 2h ago
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.
squigz · 2h ago
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.
tptacek · 4h ago
Weird! Sorry to hear that commenting (including on HN) didn't make this person any friends. 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!
Of particular note: comment culture is how I managed to engage with local politics here in Chicagoland, through which I met a ton of my neighbors and got actively involved with campaigns and the local government itself. Those are all in-person relationships that were (and remain) heavily mediated by comments.
Karrot_Kream · 3h ago
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.)
seabass-labrax · 2h ago
I'm no sociologist, but a pet theory of mine is that lots of people have realized that one doesn't necessarily need to listen to others in order to achieve one's goals. For instance, in the past you could write a letter of complaint to a company and have a reasonable chance of getting a personal response, but it can be difficult to even find any contact information now, and any response is likely to come from a script. Companies know they can ignore complaints and pretty much carry on as before. I don't suppose one always liked the personal response but it surely feels better to be listened to.
People who want to discuss things in good faith (which presumably includes you and I) and achieve consensus get bogged down in long and complicated discussions while those who have selfish motivations just do whatever they want largely without any cost. The overlap between people who are 'well-meaning' and 'successful' shrinks, leaving the well-meaning people angry and bitter - not generally at each other, but still sometimes unfortunately.
jader201 · 3h ago
> 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).
tptacek · 3h ago
I've met multiple business partners on HN, and friends I routinely hang out with in Chicago, and people I talk to in private chats most days. I've made more connections here than on any other group besides IRC #hack (a function of how old I was in the 1990s), and that includes the local politics Facebook group in my muni, which has introduced me to over a dozen people I now know IRL.
g-b-r · 2h ago
Well, you're not supposed to chat on Hacker News, there are strict rules on what comments you can make; so you can only make connections by contacting guys in other ways, which can only happen if they did put contact info in their profile page.
But, yes, the way the username is displayed matters as well, I rarely look at it.
novok · 3h ago
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.
zahlman · 3h ago
> 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.
tptacek · 2h ago
For whatever reason, no meetup-type-thing for HN in Chicago has ever stuck or resulted in anything for me. I mostly meet people because they email me (or I email them).
lapcat · 2h ago
> Weird! Sorry to hear that commenting (including on HN) didn't make this person any friends. 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!
Also, Chicago is 3rd most populous city in the United States, which likely helps, because your odds of "meeting" someone online who happens to live in your city is higher than people who live in less populous areas.
tptacek · 2h ago
Totally fair point re: Chicago!
Conclusion: everyone should move to Chicago. Chicago is amazing!
lapcat · 1h ago
> Conclusion: everyone should move to Chicago. Chicago is amazing!
I've actually considered it. However, Chicago appears to be quite expensive, at least where I was looking.
Spooky23 · 3h ago
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!
tptacek · 2h ago
Nextdoor (at least here) is satanic, and still I'm thrilled that it worked out for you. One of the big drums I'm trying to beat is getting message board nerds into active politics through message boards. Well played!
hn_acc1 · 1h ago
For me, the meme that "you learn to hate all your neighbors" was true of nextdoor.
minimaxir · 3h ago
My entire career on tech is thanks to my comments at the bottom of TechCrunch articles in the early 2010s (and I did hang out with the TechCrunch writers once I moved to SF). That was more a time where trolling in comment sections on blogs was more understood to be in good fun.
Comment culture died starting in 2016, as the internet as a whole became more polarized and making maliciously edgy is both commonplace and rewarded. Hacker News is an outlier in that aspect as it avoided that fate.
tptacek · 3h ago
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.
mycall · 2h ago
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.
esafak · 4h ago
It's not really a social activity, but an intellectual one to stay informed about and discuss technology. You can stop visiting if you don't need to keep up. If I were retired, I'd be doing other things.
skydhash · 3h ago
One of the most useful advice I got (forgot the name and the link) is to never got further than two replies deep. Every time I broke that, in hindsight, it was dumb to do so.
__MatrixMan__ · 1h ago
I guess it depends on what you're there to do. Sometimes I want feedback on a thought that's hyperspecific.
I could wander around town and strike up conversations with strangers and years would pass before I found somebody with the specific set of interests. But there in the depths I can find somebody else who is actually looking to talk about the same niche thing.
I don't know if friends is the right word, I only rarely meet them again later. But for a brief time we were a some kind of partner.
Telaneo · 2h ago
This is probably correct the instant you get a whiff of bad faith or differing fundamental principles that you aren't going to be able to change, and if you do try, it'll devolve into an argument, but I've been involved in significantly longer threads that were just people asking for advice who had a lot of questions that weren't easily answerable with a google search, as well as deeper discussions that were genuinely made in good faith and made me question some of my assumptions. The latter is quite rare, but they certainly are a thing.
9rx · 3h ago
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?
anonymars · 2h ago
You are blessed if you have never spent half-hours of precious mental energy pissing into the wind for a back-and-forth stalemate comment thread.
I'm on the train right now, I probably spent five minutes phrasing this comment (and if it feels like five it was likely ten) meanwhile I had a book I was going to try and finish and instead I squandered the ride on Internet junk food.
So to answer your question: yes, but no.
9rx · 2h ago
I've certainly spend half-hours of precious mental energy writing a comment because I was having fun writing it. Like watching TV from before, perhaps cleaning the house instead would have been a better use of the time, but It is what was enjoyable in the moment, and sometimes you can allow yourself to have some fun doing arbitrary things. I don't really see that as being dumb, but to each their own, I suppose.
balder1991 · 3h ago
I’m making a mental note of that.
rufus_foreman · 2h ago
"A rule that is almost always valid: never refute or answer a critic, no matter how preposterous the criticism may be. Do not let the critic teach you the cloth, as they say in bullfighting circles. Never charge the cloth, even if the critic resorts to actual misquotation."
-- William S. Burroughs, "The Western Lands"
gooodvibes · 3h ago
> That scares me. All of that social activity with zero ROI.
We really don't need to assign ROI to every single thing we do.
And I don't think comment culture takes away from any of the activites that lead to more meaningful relationships. Like, how do you imagine this works - "I'm not going to comment on this tech blog post while I'm having my cofee this morning so that later this week I can meet with people at a local book club"? One has nothing to do with the other.
9rx · 3h ago
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?
ikesau · 3h ago
Yeah, mostly anonymous commenting tyranny-of-the-nitpickers is really unfulfilling.
I miss phpBB as the dominant mode of internet socialization. Communities with norms, in-jokes, reputation. Take me back!
nirui · 1h ago
> Broadly speaking, the online platforms we use are not built for connection; they are built for engagement. This is universally true for all internet spaces, from stories to newsfeeds, for the intellectual and the plebian alike.
It wasn't always like this, and the I feel the whole "engagement" blame is misplaced.
You don't post comments for engagement, you post it for recognition. And people post selfies on social media not to farm engagement, but to attract attention.
The engagement part come after it. Someone welcomed the content you posted, it's positive feedback from there. The social media platforms wants to farm engagement for profit, you, or rather most people at least, don't.
The connection part on the other hand, is your own effort, it don't happen automatically. Platforms are just a place, a pub, for people to gather, you need to do the work to find friends.
Read it; it's only a few paragraphs. If I could, I would distill that warning into the guidelines of any serious forum.
Not just because it fits my lived experience. But because one of the people in thread who disagreed — a prolific developer who sought friends on the internet — later killed themselves because of the internet.
hn_acc1 · 1h ago
Depends on the topic - for politics, seems reasonable. When I'm following a few FB groups for a specific car model, because all the latest stuff seems to show up there, it's not quite as bad.
mindwok · 2h ago
Thanks for sharing that. Interestingly holds up in the way many people (including myself) use LLMs sometimes. It's a conversation with yourself.
eawgewag · 1h ago
Wow, wonderful. Thank you
fsckboy · 3h ago
i'll tell you what my shrink tells me: you're not commenting, you're looking for friends, for the feeling of connection or community.
stop thinking about the nature of comments, the content, the responses you get. start thinking about the thoughts/emotions that come up when trying to make connections irl.
Esophagus4 · 3h ago
When I fit this pattern over my comments and irl connections, I get something like:
I have some pretty strongly held, but also probably divisive opinions, that I’m afraid would push people away from me if I voiced them to my irl people.
So the thought / emotion is feeling limited irl, and feeling less limited in an anonymous Internet forum. And even occasionally validated in an Internet forum when you find someone that agrees with you. (Or sometimes, when I’m proven wrong, I get something to think about for a little bit.)
Interesting thought exercise, thanks.
JSR_FDED · 3h ago
When I comment I’m engaging with the content - not trying to make connections.
Noumenon72 · 3h ago
The thing about having engaged conversations with smart people about things I'm interested in is that I enjoy that more than having friends. If I were trying to make friends rather than substitute for them, I sure wouldn't do it by anon commenting.
balder1991 · 3h ago
Except on LinkedIn where 99% of comments are self promotion.
bhaney · 3h ago
> I’ve benefited incredibly from commenting.
> It has made me a (mostly) better person.
> All of that social activity with zero ROI.
Sorry you didn't make friends from it, but "zero ROI" seems pretty at odds with the rest of your results.
corytheboyd · 14m ago
I like my comments, they’re little droppings of my thoughts at the time that I can go back to. I delete many of them, if they get a single downvote, or if I think about them for 10 minutes after and decide not to have them permanently recorded. They don’t run my life, and it’s only HN and lobsters I leave them on. I just don’t assign much of my life’s purpose to these farts in the wind, and turns out it’s fine.
iambateman · 3h ago
Commenting on HN helps me figure out what I think…in addition to learning what others think.
Maybe 20% of the time I don’t actually submit the comment because I read it and decide I have nothing substantial to say.
But the commenting is at least as formative and useful as the articles.
spacebuffer · 2h ago
Anyone know any forums where you can be sure you're talking to humans and feel like you're in a close knit community?
I am not talking about reddit subs, maybe something more niche, even for hobbies outside computing.
The only place where I felt in company of real humans is a couple of niche IRC channels, where someone without fail always asks me how my day is going whenever I join, I am looking for places like that.
RiverCrochet · 1h ago
The only 100% certain way to know you're talking to humans is to see, hear, and smell them face to face.
Given AI, bots, and desire to make Internet properties collect identification data of all users to make sure they're adults (even though their ISPs already do), I feel like your new, exciting and culture-driver Internet spaces of the future are going to be more like private clubs if trends continue.
They won't be accessible until you physically check in with the admin at a public place, or attending a "Meet-N-Greet" type function. This will make them local-first, and such clubs/forums will have to master the art of developing and networking with other local chapters.
Things operated like this before the Internet, and that's where the real people are probably going to end up back to, because the Internet is becoming as boring and tamed as the capital-intensive corporate-driven phone and TV networks of yesteryear.
Should surveillance increase, I can even see the typical social function of the Internet being nothing more than an events calendar and payment processor, and no other real chat or interaction happening within it.
dmbche · 2h ago
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).
mostlysimilar · 2h ago
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. :/
jbjbjbjb · 3h ago
Small but organised communities that are on Twitch and YouTube live streams seem to counter that “series of one-offs” the author is talking about.
I often watch YouTube live streamed sports watchalongs and have become familiar with the regular super chat contributors that are read out. Similarly on Twitch there are many regular streamers with small communities and regular chatters.
Karrot_Kream · 3h ago
Good point. I find some of the healthiest communities I'm part of online are influencer or game streamer communities.
binary132 · 2h ago
I saw this thread and felt the need to comment pointlessly on it without aggrandizing the act of commenting simply to make some kind of point about the content but here I am making it out to be something important and meaningful when it isn’t oops how silly of me
Raztuf · 4h ago
Nobody dares commenting eh ?
kelseyfrog · 2h ago
> Comment culture requires your social energy.
It actually doesn't anymore. LLMs can transform you into Diogenes in a mech suit.
You can minimize your expended energy, maintain emotional cool-ness (vital to being perceived as 'winning' to the audience), and ultimately turn every discussion into a war of attrition. If your opponent is getting emotional heated and burnt out, they eventually drop out.
If you get off on winning online arguments, it turns comment culture into an asymmetric warfare. We're going to I expect this to destroy forums. Ideologies and untreated anti-social personality disorders cannot, at scale, co-exist with the commons.
maxbond · 2h ago
"Behold! A man," he declared, gesturing to a featherless ChatGPT.
dmbche · 2h ago
No they can't
No comments yet
beeflet · 2h ago
Writing comments just takes too much time, which is why I don't do it anymore.
sneak · 3h ago
A lot of my more important (to me/IMHO) blog posts started out as seed crystal HN comments that I developed into full articles.
mehulashah · 3h ago
Oh dear. Should I comment on this?
komali2 · 3h ago
I'm addicted to commenting on the internet. I was like, top 1% of comment karma on reddit something like 10 years ago, not because I was popular, but I think just out of sheer volume of comments getting 10-100 upvotes. Then to twitter, much shorter dopamine loop but a much worse comment experience because the threading is shit and it's impossible to know whose talking to who about what and there's a character limit. I was trying to break both addictions so I thought I'd try a "lower engagement" platform like Hacker News, and lo and behold, addicted here. Thank god they throttled my posting here, or I'd probably post at just as high a volume as I did back in the day on reddit.
Anyway like the author I often wonder, why tf am I commenting? I don't recognize any of you, even though I've had very pleasant interactions and have learned some interesting things here and there from you (like yesterday I learned about claude sub-agents), but it isn't what draws me. It's some kind of compulsion. Dopamine hits from replies? I do love talking to people IRL as well, so maybe it's just that? My friends tried to get me back into world of warcraft and an hour after logging in all I'd done was sat in a capital city arguing with people in Trade chat. Bizarre compulsion.
I don't understand ROI thinking but what frequently breaks my addiction is remembering that my comments are adding value to some rich bastard's wallet at probably no return to me, maybe harm. At least on reddit and twitter. HN isn't so bad, I mostly have good interactions here, but I'm an addict so what is useful to some is to me, falling off the wagon. Which is what I'm doing right now :P
1shooner · 3h ago
I never regret not commenting.
tonymet · 3h ago
Even just yesterday I had a constructive reply where we were initially snarky and reconciled to a good outcome. That’s not representative, perhaps 1/3 of the outcomes when I’m commenting here, and 1/10th on broader social media.
I struggle with comments, where I try to be succinct and to the point. I’ve been soft-banned on HN – to the mods credit they worked with me to restore my account, and had good intentions.
Commenters and moderators tend to favor vague, long-winded language and double-entendre over direct & succinct comments.
Hence my frequent downvotes and soft-bans.
jongjong · 1h ago
I've also been commenting a lot over the past decade. Partly for practicing my writing, like OP, partly to help maintain balance within the social order by shedding light on alternative perspectives which were often overlooked.
But now as my comments are likely being fed into AI for training for profit by specific individuals, it doesn't feel the same. I'm getting a stronger urge to keep my expertise to myself.
Also, the benefits of good writing aren't as great anymore. I still kind of benefit in terms of practicing my tough typing... It's valuable to be able to type AI prompts quickly.
letwhile · 3h ago
yeah me too. never commented since. life is awesome
chriscrisby · 3h ago
I’m convinced
the_af · 3h ago
I made a bunch of friends during the early internet (ok, not that early: during the phpbb forums era), some of which I even met in real life. From other countries than mine, too!
But I think I've aged and the internet has changed too. Today, I have the friends I need in real life, and I don't make friends online. Not sure if it's me or the world has changed, or both. Probably mostly me.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 3h ago
I still do it, but as harm reduction, I never read the replies to my comments
metalman · 3h ago
comment culture is an adventure for me
it's teaching me how to be a better writer, by bieng able to see the responses to various styles of dialog, which is generaly impossible to do in the rural environment that surrounds me most of the time, and realy makes a difference when I venture into the city or have to engage beurocratic institutions, lawyers, bankers, and others working in more structured environments, devoid of wild and domesticated animals ,heavy equipment, perhaps simultaneously, which is the sort of thing that when included into general conversation in the form of "what have you been.up to", tends to derail conversations in an irecoverable way, so the internet gives me a place to test how that all works.
thanks ,by the way
bowsamic · 3h ago
Expecting commenting to make you friend like connections is the Ur internet faux pas
maxbond · 2h ago
The expectation that Internet social spaces are massive "town square" style spaces where strangers interact but remain strangers is recent, circa maybe 2012. We can go back and forth about the precise year but early online spaces like BBSs, Usenet, IRC and traditional forums were relatively small and close knit. Couples holding real marriage ceremonies in the multiplayer role playing game where they met is a tradition older than the term "MMORPG" (they were getting married in eg LambdaMOO).
Everyone comes to online social space looking for some kind of connection, friendship or otherwise.
marcosdumay · 3h ago
If it's some specialized niche forum, it's very possible.
Even more if it's a discussion forum, instead of wall of temporal comments.
HN doesn't qualify for either, but there probably exist active places that qualify.
yesfitz · 3h ago
> All of that social activity with zero ROI. At first, I thought that I needed to change my commenting habits, and, you know, try to make connections. But the more I considered how to make friends in comment culture, the more I realized that it wasn’t just my own social ineptitude. Comment culture has a problem. Systemically, it produces an internet of strangers.
I can't tell if Hacker News is less affected by this, or if it lends itself to parasocial relationships, but I've started to recognize a few other users who seem to frequently read and comment on the same topics that I do.
I don't think these will blossom into friendships, but many friendships of mine have started with frequenting the same location or event until you see who else is usually there, and then introducing yourself.
If this kind of comment-acquaintance is common on HN though, it probably comes back (as always) to the self-selecting user base, the text-only interface, and of course, the moderation. Because I certainly haven't experienced it on Reddit, Twitter, or Meta platforms.
iphone_elegance · 2h ago
dumb movie, comment people are some the richest in the world
I've got plenty of friends now. Most are not the ones I met online; that was a phase of our life that has largely passed us by, though I keep up with a couple. I still comment on things, but it leads to more shallow relationships if any, but perhaps that's because I'm not really looking for friends anymore.
But I think that the bigger reason I'm reconsidering commenting online is: I can never be sure if the other person is real anymore. And even if they are, it often doesn't feel like they're debating in good faith. A lot of recent Reddit comment threads have really felt like I'm arguing with an AI or Russian troll farm. Social media now feels like a propaganda cesspool rather than something where people come together to share disparate views.
Agree - for me this leads to the conclusion that some services should not be run for-profit, or at least they should be run for public benefit. Similar to how governments in some countries own part of the railway.
Most of the discourse that we see is where groups of people are intersecting that wouldn't really meet in the real world because of the echo chambers we keep.
The Americans are often saying that they only see that crank uncle, or their liberal nephew or niece, at thanksgiving, and, honestly, it's the same for the rest of us around the world - we're normally only exposed to the very different viewpoints at family gatherings.
IRL we try to avoid conflict, and try not to associate with people that hold views that are vastly different to our own, so much so it's considered "unprofessional" to have the discussions at work that would show how different everyone's (political) viewpoints are in the workplace.
IRL I think people are often more empathetic and sympathetic, and I think that this environment leads to less polarized opinions even when our exposure to viewpoints is relatively limited. That said, lately, IRL socialization has become quite limited, especially after the COVID-19 lockdowns. Online interactions are just not really the same... especially not limited to text, over heavily manipulated platforms like Twitter/Facebook/etc.
Seems a bit contradictory I'm sure, but if the problems of socializing on the Internet were simple and easy to understand, we wouldn't have to talk about it so much :)
I mean, I hear what you're saying, but the only real difference between IRL and online discussions is that online people can get heated at each other without any fear of physical violence.
That limiting factor for IRL prevents people from being more frank about their position on whatever.
Speaking as someone that has been public on various political positions in the past, I've seen the polarised views forever.
I mean, history is littered with stories about polarised sections of societies inflicting actual violence with one another - American examples might be the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the Vietnam war, Drug use (and it's policing alleged as being a way to break up communities that oppose the ruling community)
Oh, I should also point out, people like Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher, Trump, etc, don't come into power in a vacuum, they have vast communities of supporters that believe that they are right, and the communities that they oppose are wrong (same goes for the communities that they oppose, vast groups of people that believe they are right and the community that they oppose is wrong)
I hear what you're saying, but I think you are looking at this wrong. I'm not suggesting that IRL social interactions are perfect and Internet ones are hopelessly broken. We have plenty of history to show how IRL social interactions can break down, in small groups or big. What I'm saying is that IRL interactions are better on average than Internet interactions, largely due to the modality and venue that most Internet interactions occur.
Edit: also, it is worth noting that there are definitely robust studies that can back up some of these ideas, which may be a good data point to add into this discussion. That said, I am honestly too lazy to go cite sources right now, to be completely honest with you. (And I know HN is rightly a bit skeptical of psychology studies, since you can pretty much find something to validate anything you want, but there are some actually good and interesting ones.)
I've definitely had online discussions that were orders of magnitude more productive than the best IRL conversations on similar subjects, because people felt more free to contribute.
It's so much more productive online that I look for communities that discuss those subjects (eg. Twitter when it was good, or Reddit).
I avoid that IRL because it's so poor.
Anyway, it seems like we're at an impasse, but I may as well link some references that back up what I'm trying to say.
There was this fascinating experiment posted recently to HN, "30 minutes with a stranger": https://pudding.cool/2025/06/hello-stranger/ - conversation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45124003
Publications regarding how people are exposed to opposing viewpoints online and how that influences polarization:
"How digital media drive affective polarization through partisan sorting" https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2207159119
"How Many People Live in Political Bubbles on Social Media?" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244019832705
"Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06297-w
Lots and lots of single sentence replies makes me want to close the entire browser.
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.
Though I think that two things that I hate is that information there isn't as structured in the sense that someone might come reading this comment after specifically searching for this topic of comment culture.
But the same couldn't be said for things like online forums and as such I can't shake the feeling that if we all collectively stopped commenting on things, it can really move a lot of discourse away that might influence new generation.
I myself have been inspired many times to try something new or think of some idea because of some idea just to try if that make sense. Or seeing someone post some idea that I like and then reading the comments to find nuanced opinion about and maybe I can chime in sometimes helping it.
I feel like commenting system to definitely be one of treasures like wikipedia although I think that the noise:signal ratio is definitely higher in commenting systems (ie. they have more noise than signal)
https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2025-02-08
Right now I am trying to deprogram a rather isolated friend who seems to be sucked into this, it is so frickin' hard to get through to a person who has been seduced, has a crush on somebody, and who has accepted a sob story.
If it is not that, there are all the people who are maybe promoting their onlyfans profile or maybe they're just trying to click on a virus, but either way it is awful. I've been cataloging features that are "expressions of hostility" on BlueSky profiles and one of the most common is "No DM" and it is so common and the people who use it are relatively normal otherwise that we don't treat it as a red flag.
If I was starting out a new platform I'd have a ground rule of never supporting DMs because they are a hotbed of fraud and trouble.
For people to develop friendships with each other, they need to be able to have 1:1 or 1:small time with a ton of back and forth, and public comment sections don't lend themselves to 100 deep message threads. Chat rooms do, chat threads do, and DMs do. In real life it happens naturally as people split off into side conversations.
For whatever reason, public Discords just don't seem to work the same way as IRC did, though. I've had great luck seeding Discord servers with friends from elsewhere (real life, forums, shared activities, etc.) and making friends as the group grows, but I've never really jumped into a random Discord and made a friend the way I did on IRC. I can't really figure out what the difference is, but it's one of the little things I miss that I haven't been able to put a finger on.
Overall though, I've made plenty of friends online, even in the last few years and even as I get older and the Internet changes. The original article really didn't resonate with me at all, which actually made it even more thought provoking for me - I can't imagine making 16 years worth of posts without a single direct connection.
I remember "back in the days"™ many forum software allowed a feature called "signature", it allows you to attach custom pictures and links after each and every post you posted. Many people use this feature to advertise their sites/blogs for others to visit.
Then the feature got weakened by both the social media platforms and forum software, to the point that it's gone and forgotten.
But based on my experience, it was the best place in the old time to do advertisement and SEO. I learned and bookmarked many interesting blogs from those signatures.
Now days, I'll just google it if I need anything, and never look back after I'm done. That's one reason today's Internet is dead to me.
I also 100% agree that super-wide-scale social media feels like it's dying, though - Instagram, Twitter, and any Reddit with more than a few thousand users are definitely worse by the day, but I never really got a huge amount of value from those spaces anyway. My Twitter account (which in fairness, I think had 1FA with a password from 2008 or so) somehow got taken over by what appear to be drug dealers from Japan and I didn't particularly mourn the loss.
Oddly the only online space I really _miss_ is, of all things, the early days of Xbox Live voice chat. Matchmaking seemed to really heavily favor ping and in turn I'd frequently encounter my neighbors in lobbies. Everyone used a microphone. It was still toxic in terms of various -isms, slurs, and so on, but the trash talking was generally more of an aside and you'd frequently get some genuine small talk and connections while you queued for matches. I've tried it a few times since and while I'm sure part of it is just me getting older, the signal isn't even really there (I think a lot of people are in private party chats in Discord, if they're talking at all) and if it is, the noise ratio is way higher than it used to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Communicative_Ac...
which seems to postulate that some kind of deliberative process by which "people come together to share disparate views" could solve many of the problems that he points out in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book)
if we could just find the right process but in 2025 it seems dangerously naive today. That is, when people come together to share disparate views online they seem to relish attacking each other and reinforcing tribal identities. I have a lot of problems with this recent Nate Silver editorial
https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-is-blueskyism
particularly (i) it didn't start on BlueSky but really started on Twitter and Tumblr, and (ii) centrists like Matt Yglesias who pick fights with that kind of leftist or anyone who complains about being bullied by trans people is either doing it to get a rise or drive traffic to their blog. Even if he names it wrong, the phenomenon he's describing is a very real thing and it's particularly harmful to the causes and the individuals that those who participate in it claim to be advocating for.
I've noticed that the demise of twitter has impacted my ability to connect with like minded people - I gave up on mastodon because the ability to stumble upon other people with similar tastes wasn't nearly what I wanted it to be.
Here (HN) I have mostly found wonks and trolls replying directly to me, but I do see a lot of interesting discourse (which is what I'm looking for... right) which will likely lead to connections (eventually)
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 personally believe that part of this is due to the upvote/downvote culture of Reddit. We're all incentivized to say something that will attract upvotes. There's a positive side to this -- thanks to this I regularly read really funny, entertaining comments. Genuine genius in the comments section.
On the other hand, its just to entertain. There's nothing really human or of substance there. Or, what's especially dangerous, to say something that bucks the trend, the status quo, admit an unpopular vulnerability outloud and suddenly you're hit with waves upon waves of downvotes. Not only that but I genuinely believe that the downvotes empowers angry debaters to come in and pick apart whatever it is that you said, just to enjoy the upvotes. I perceive it as a kind of bullying.
At any rate, I don't think these spaces are designed for intimacy. They're designed for memes and funny jokes, not genuine conversations.
Every once in a while I have some experience or some a point of view that I don't see reflected anywhere else. One of the benefits of the pseudo-anonymization of sites like Hacker News is that I feel a bit more comfortable stating things that don't really have a place to say anywhere else.
The only thing I regret is when I get into pointless arguments, usually when I feel that my comment was misunderstood or misinterpreted. But even those arguments sometimes force me to consider how to express myself more clearly or to challenge how deeply I hold the belief (or how well I know the subject) that lead me to the comment in the first place.
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.
I like that you try to learn from bad arguments, but don't forget, that many misunderstand on purpose, to "win" an argument. Or at least to score cheap karma points or virtual karma points from the audience. So there one can only learn to make arguments in a way that they are harder to be intentionally missunderstood, but those ain't truthfinding skills, they are debate technics.
A second goal of this comment is to add a point: That I also comment because sometimes saying something makes me feel like I am more than nothing and nobody. I want to feel more than nothing and nobody.
I used to have to talk more on Internet privacy.
Now I feel like enough people are talking about that one, that I usually don't have to.
In more recent years, it's been pointing out the latest wave of thievery in the techbro field -- sneaky lock-in and abuse, surveillance capitalism, growth investment scams, regulatory avoidance "it's an app, judge" scams, blockchain "it's not finance or currency or utterly obvious criminal scheme, judge" scams, and now "it's AI, judge" mass copyright violation.
There's not enough people -- who aren't on the exploitation bandwagon or coattails-riding -- who have the will to notice a problem, and speak up.
Though more speak up on that particular problem, after the window of opportunity closes, and the damage is done, and finally widely recognized. But then there's a new scam, and gotta get onboard the money train while you can.
That ticks me off, and I can type fast.
I unironically just closed this tab before submitting out of habit and reopened it to submit this
Fortunately, that seems to also have trained me to not write those comments in the first place. I also think much more about what I am trying to actually effect with a comment, not just about what feels good in the particular moment.
One thing that didn't change though is that probably most of my comments are edited at least once, often a few times, right after sending them. And even if it's just swapping out a word, or adding a missing comma. This one here is no exception at all, I just added this paragraph after doing some minor edits.
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 was browsing some thread and someone referenced a meme typed out as :.|:;
The comment had a few replies who recognized the meme. I had no idea what it meant so I asked Claude
Well the AI knew what it was! It was the “loss” meme but the explanation it gave made no sense.
Turns out the meme needs a strike through tag. This turns :.|:; into a four-panel diagram of a web comic.
That’s when I realize that whatever trained Claude stripped out the formatting, and thus the entire meaning of the meme. And the comment I originally saw was a repost bot that also failed to retain the formatting when it reposted it.
And the replies that understood the reference were all reposted by bots.
So who even knows if we CAN make relationships on the internet anymore?
I can’t trust that any comment is actual human expression any more. Or is it just bullshit stripped of any context or meaning
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.
Of particular note: comment culture is how I managed to engage with local politics here in Chicagoland, through which I met a ton of my neighbors and got actively involved with campaigns and the local government itself. Those are all in-person relationships that were (and remain) heavily mediated by comments.
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.)
People who want to discuss things in good faith (which presumably includes you and I) and achieve consensus get bogged down in long and complicated discussions while those who have selfish motivations just do whatever they want largely without any cost. The overlap between people who are 'well-meaning' and 'successful' shrinks, leaving the well-meaning people angry and bitter - not generally at each other, but still sometimes unfortunately.
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).
But, yes, the way the username is displayed matters as well, I rarely look at it.
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.
You're #1 in karma on HN, so you are a kind of oddball: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Also, Chicago is 3rd most populous city in the United States, which likely helps, because your odds of "meeting" someone online who happens to live in your city is higher than people who live in less populous areas.
Conclusion: everyone should move to Chicago. Chicago is amazing!
I've actually considered it. However, Chicago appears to be quite expensive, at least where I was looking.
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!
Comment culture died starting in 2016, as the internet as a whole became more polarized and making maliciously edgy is both commonplace and rewarded. Hacker News is an outlier in that aspect as it avoided that fate.
What hasn't worked out is the no-holds-barred mega-spaces.
It seemed to have worked quite well.
I could wander around town and strike up conversations with strangers and years would pass before I found somebody with the specific set of interests. But there in the depths I can find somebody else who is actually looking to talk about the same niche thing.
I don't know if friends is the right word, I only rarely meet them again later. But for a brief time we were a some kind of partner.
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 on the train right now, I probably spent five minutes phrasing this comment (and if it feels like five it was likely ten) meanwhile I had a book I was going to try and finish and instead I squandered the ride on Internet junk food.
So to answer your question: yes, but no.
-- William S. Burroughs, "The Western Lands"
We really don't need to assign ROI to every single thing we do.
And I don't think comment culture takes away from any of the activites that lead to more meaningful relationships. Like, how do you imagine this works - "I'm not going to comment on this tech blog post while I'm having my cofee this morning so that later this week I can meet with people at a local book club"? One has nothing to do with the other.
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?
I miss phpBB as the dominant mode of internet socialization. Communities with norms, in-jokes, reputation. Take me back!
It wasn't always like this, and the I feel the whole "engagement" blame is misplaced.
You don't post comments for engagement, you post it for recognition. And people post selfies on social media not to farm engagement, but to attract attention.
The engagement part come after it. Someone welcomed the content you posted, it's positive feedback from there. The social media platforms wants to farm engagement for profit, you, or rather most people at least, don't.
The connection part on the other hand, is your own effort, it don't happen automatically. Platforms are just a place, a pub, for people to gather, you need to do the work to find friends.
Read it; it's only a few paragraphs. If I could, I would distill that warning into the guidelines of any serious forum.
Not just because it fits my lived experience. But because one of the people in thread who disagreed — a prolific developer who sought friends on the internet — later killed themselves because of the internet.
stop thinking about the nature of comments, the content, the responses you get. start thinking about the thoughts/emotions that come up when trying to make connections irl.
I have some pretty strongly held, but also probably divisive opinions, that I’m afraid would push people away from me if I voiced them to my irl people.
So the thought / emotion is feeling limited irl, and feeling less limited in an anonymous Internet forum. And even occasionally validated in an Internet forum when you find someone that agrees with you. (Or sometimes, when I’m proven wrong, I get something to think about for a little bit.)
Interesting thought exercise, thanks.
> It has made me a (mostly) better person.
> All of that social activity with zero ROI.
Sorry you didn't make friends from it, but "zero ROI" seems pretty at odds with the rest of your results.
Maybe 20% of the time I don’t actually submit the comment because I read it and decide I have nothing substantial to say.
But the commenting is at least as formative and useful as the articles.
I am not talking about reddit subs, maybe something more niche, even for hobbies outside computing.
The only place where I felt in company of real humans is a couple of niche IRC channels, where someone without fail always asks me how my day is going whenever I join, I am looking for places like that.
Given AI, bots, and desire to make Internet properties collect identification data of all users to make sure they're adults (even though their ISPs already do), I feel like your new, exciting and culture-driver Internet spaces of the future are going to be more like private clubs if trends continue.
They won't be accessible until you physically check in with the admin at a public place, or attending a "Meet-N-Greet" type function. This will make them local-first, and such clubs/forums will have to master the art of developing and networking with other local chapters.
Things operated like this before the Internet, and that's where the real people are probably going to end up back to, because the Internet is becoming as boring and tamed as the capital-intensive corporate-driven phone and TV networks of yesteryear.
Should surveillance increase, I can even see the typical social function of the Internet being nothing more than an events calendar and payment processor, and no other real chat or interaction happening within it.
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).
I often watch YouTube live streamed sports watchalongs and have become familiar with the regular super chat contributors that are read out. Similarly on Twitch there are many regular streamers with small communities and regular chatters.
It actually doesn't anymore. LLMs can transform you into Diogenes in a mech suit.
You can minimize your expended energy, maintain emotional cool-ness (vital to being perceived as 'winning' to the audience), and ultimately turn every discussion into a war of attrition. If your opponent is getting emotional heated and burnt out, they eventually drop out.
If you get off on winning online arguments, it turns comment culture into an asymmetric warfare. We're going to I expect this to destroy forums. Ideologies and untreated anti-social personality disorders cannot, at scale, co-exist with the commons.
No comments yet
Anyway like the author I often wonder, why tf am I commenting? I don't recognize any of you, even though I've had very pleasant interactions and have learned some interesting things here and there from you (like yesterday I learned about claude sub-agents), but it isn't what draws me. It's some kind of compulsion. Dopamine hits from replies? I do love talking to people IRL as well, so maybe it's just that? My friends tried to get me back into world of warcraft and an hour after logging in all I'd done was sat in a capital city arguing with people in Trade chat. Bizarre compulsion.
I don't understand ROI thinking but what frequently breaks my addiction is remembering that my comments are adding value to some rich bastard's wallet at probably no return to me, maybe harm. At least on reddit and twitter. HN isn't so bad, I mostly have good interactions here, but I'm an addict so what is useful to some is to me, falling off the wagon. Which is what I'm doing right now :P
I struggle with comments, where I try to be succinct and to the point. I’ve been soft-banned on HN – to the mods credit they worked with me to restore my account, and had good intentions.
Commenters and moderators tend to favor vague, long-winded language and double-entendre over direct & succinct comments.
Hence my frequent downvotes and soft-bans.
But now as my comments are likely being fed into AI for training for profit by specific individuals, it doesn't feel the same. I'm getting a stronger urge to keep my expertise to myself.
Also, the benefits of good writing aren't as great anymore. I still kind of benefit in terms of practicing my tough typing... It's valuable to be able to type AI prompts quickly.
But I think I've aged and the internet has changed too. Today, I have the friends I need in real life, and I don't make friends online. Not sure if it's me or the world has changed, or both. Probably mostly me.
Everyone comes to online social space looking for some kind of connection, friendship or otherwise.
Even more if it's a discussion forum, instead of wall of temporal comments.
HN doesn't qualify for either, but there probably exist active places that qualify.
I can't tell if Hacker News is less affected by this, or if it lends itself to parasocial relationships, but I've started to recognize a few other users who seem to frequently read and comment on the same topics that I do.
I don't think these will blossom into friendships, but many friendships of mine have started with frequenting the same location or event until you see who else is usually there, and then introducing yourself.
If this kind of comment-acquaintance is common on HN though, it probably comes back (as always) to the self-selecting user base, the text-only interface, and of course, the moderation. Because I certainly haven't experienced it on Reddit, Twitter, or Meta platforms.