Jarred was probably young when the internet was first taking shape, and every generation shares the feeling that things were better in their youth (aka the Golden Age Fallacy).
The internet was a lot smaller and inhabited by curious nerds - to find similar fun and weirdness, just find a community today that shares those properties. Packet radio, infosec, crypto, gaming, music production, etc. - there's plenty of weird and fun to be found if you look for it.
...and sometimes, things really were better, too. Regressions happen, and the Eternal September is real.
This does not mean that there aren't wonderful things available in today's web environment, too. There is no one to blame other than the natural evolution of a system. But something was lost, and it is ok to miss it.
>Regressions happen, and the Eternal September is real.
Is that a regression, though? I mean the state pre-ES was basically that the unwashed masses weren't able to use a special service for their more-refined betters.
To me, it's essentially the difference between a country club and a public park. Certainly, the country club is better maintained and more pleasant for its members than a public park. But there's, at minimum, a strong case to be made that a park that all may use is a greater social good than a country club limited to a few.
They rapidly became a place where people from all walks of life could, and did, come for lively discussion. And their rapid increase in popularity caused them to collapse from their own success.
Early access to the internet was, by definition, limited to people who were on academic or military networks. But by the time BBS culture came about, it was the thrill of finding like-minded folks from wherever they might be- it was not a culture based on exclusion per se, like what you would find at a country club.
I chose country club specifically because I think there has always been a strong fiction of meritocracy in IT and I was very specifically highlighting the exclusatory nature of the culture.
"All walks of life" is a polite fiction. The September in "Eternal September", after all, refers to university intake. "Wherever they might be" is a bit of a cop-out, because they weren't really "wherever", they were in other universities.
It wasn't a coffee shop, it was a strongly walled garden which only very specific groups of people could reasonably access.
Modems have been around for a very long time. By the time the mid-80's rolled around, a 300-baud cuff modem was well within the range of a young kid who had some paper-route money, because that's what I did. And my family was not wealthy at all.
[edit]- I found an article from 1987 talking about how amazingly fast (and cheap) the new 2400 baud modems were. I had to chuckle, as I still remember going from 300 (slow enough that your reading speed was baud-limited) to 1200 (wow! I can barely keep up!) 2400 and above was a speed that seemed almost decadent.
Oh, yeah, if local calls weren't free, BBS's would have never taken off the way they did. It was a thrill being part of a network where each BBS would make a nightly call to the furthest still-local BBS, which would then repeat the process... You could reach all the way across the country and back in a few days, for free! It felt like you were getting away with something. Exciting times.
Not all parents were OK with blocking the phone line with a modem when they have just watched a movie were a curious teenager almost started WW III by accidentally hacking into the Pentagon (speaking from experience).
I thought it was so cool to have an acoustic-coupler modem like Broderick's character in War Games. Never did find the number to connect to the WOPR, though.
In the mid-80s, only maybe 10% of U.S. households had a computer, much less a modem. You also paid by-the-minute long-distance charges for calling anyone (or any computer) outside your town.
That's why local BBSes that were part of a relay network were so popular. Communicating with folks far outside one's home range 'for free' was exciting!
I think what changed is less access to consumption, but access to making your own. When you wanted to host your own community, you need a domain and a server and some technical skills. That was a much higher bar than you need to create a Facebook community. That's ultimately what made the internet boring. Every special interest group used to have their own hand created websites that were a labor of passion. Now it's just another Facebook group or sub Reddit.
That's part of it, no doubt. I got started in the BBS era, pre-WWW, and the folks that set up their own bulletin boards were all interesting in their own right. Each board, even if it used the same base software as another, had its own distinct personality and flavor.
Access to a modem, a piece of hardware that cost hundreds of dollars, and obviously also required a machine that cost thousands. Unless you attended a university, which was also more exclusive in the early 80s than now.
Things changed very rapidly back then. By the time I was old enough to be part of BBS culture (mid-80's), a Commodore was a couple hundred dollars, and a modem not even $100. Penetration by % of population was low compared to today's ubiquity, but competent machines were readily affordable to the majority of Americans.
>But there's, at minimum, a strong case to be made that a park that all may use is a greater social good than a country club limited to a few.
Can't both sides be correct? There is certainly a host of good feelings one gets when they're a part of something that is exclusive. (Not saying it's morally right, just making an observation.) Whether those feelings are altruistic or not is besides the point. From that person's point of view, they no longer have those good feelings when their club is no longer exclusive.
From the view of the larger public, the ends justify the means as the happiness of all is larger than the loss of happiness of the few. But for those few, it's still worse.
I suppose it depends on where you are, but where I'm from many populist folks don't really believe in the Tragedy of the Commons. God gave them the resources to use, we can't possibly use them all up, humans aren't powerful enough to change the earth, yadda yadda.
Global Climate Change is just one big Tragedy of the Commons.
But 'Eternal September' describes what happens to a particular platform, as something moves from niche to mainstream. There are new niche things that take their place, but people are often at a point in their lives where they aren't seeking out the new niche stuff anymore.
>There are new niche things that take their place, but people are often at a point in their lives where they aren't seeking out the new niche stuff anymore.
Speaking just for myself, here, but this has not been my experience. In my opinion, that interest in the early internet was a niche was essentially orthogonal to what it offered. It just so happened that the mindset of folks who would be attracted to the early offerings was a small portion of the overall population. But it wasn't the fact that the group was comparatively small that was what was interesting.
Right, but my point was that during that early internet period, you just happened to be in the niche group that was on it. There are new niche things out there now, but you aren't in the right group to be in that niche anymore.
Re-reading what I wrote, I see that I neglected to mention the other salient aspect- I don't find it difficult to find niche interests nowaday at all. Thanks to the internet, finding like-minded individuals for just about anything has never been easier.
But it's a different feeling than it was before, because of how things work. And some of that works against the process of forming smaller, tight-knit communities than how it used to be. And it's ok to lament loss.
> Regressions happen, and the Eternal September is real.
Now that UUCP time has come and gone, I wonder if Usenet might have returned to its once former glory. It would be a really good place for technical conversation.
It's a decent ready-to-go forum. I only used it for the clojure groups, but then the clj community discovered slack. All that useful topically categorized awesomeness now must be mined from worthless slack logs.
Usenet still exists independent of Google Groups. Google provides an interface for users to post on Usenet groups, at least until they decide to stop supporting it, but you don't need Google at all to get on Usenet: http://www.eternal-september.org/
A lot of online communities today are unbearable tho as everything's become so politicised. It started really wildly happening around 2013-2014 where no community was to remain a zone without some minority of users politicising it for attention. It was probably something that also happened before that but it somehow became really prevalent, at least. And often that took the fun out of it. I kind of think fondly of those times. Now of course this is just anecdotal, but that's what I've experienced in most communities I used to frequent and perhaps lots of other people here did too.
In fact, it's something I really appreciate here on HN, the tone of discussions is rather pleasant and on topic and it's very rare to see people intentionally driving it into the ground, although in contrast to something like a Facebook group it's a lot less personal.
I distinctly remember a discussion about Something Awful's slogan ("the internet makes you stupid") and how it was actually a keen observation about the internet. Pre-internet you would have people with really bad ideas. These people were so obvious to any normal person that bad thinkers generally shut up because sharing their bad ideas meant being socially ostracized or at least getting shunned.
But then you add the internet, and all these radically bad thinkers find each other and their ideas almost seem normal amongst their type. They not only normalize bad thinking, but they also push for even more radically bad thinking in an effort to out-do each other. End result, you end up with a vociferous contingent of town idiots who don't realize they are town idiots because they only listen to fellow town idiots. Add advertising companies who function on a metrics-first approach, and those town idiots dictate how companies act.
What's very interesting and frightening to me is the mental health version of this dynamic.
Someone with anorexia or another illness that destabilizes your perspective may find support in an online community. But they can also seek out and find communities that catalyze the destabilization.
There is also more annoying version of this. Previously people with stupid ideas didn't get much practice in rhetorics. In live conversations you get demoralized very quickly when people don't respond in any way.
Today people with stupid ideas are the ones who get most practice in rhetorics. And practice makes you good.
As a result you find very specific kinds of stupid. If you know Nassim Talebs IYI (intellectual yet idiot) there exist supermutants of that phenomenon. For example I just argued with self proclaimed Marxist who managed to have opinions of fascists straight from 40's. He had absolutely delusional view of multitude of things like not believing in industrial revolution, or that machines could outproduce people when making bulk materials. Yet he could muster huge array of minutiae from history, usually correct and supporting whatever weird point he was making. This dude actually was rhetorically decent and very passionate about.. I don't really know what.
Such individuals are far from stupid despite their stupid ideas and they seem to be able to shut down intelligent discussion on niche boards. Specifically because nothing seems to stick: they are not trolls, not really malevolent, not really belonging to any definite camp. Just really twisted, bored and eager to engage others.
>For example I just argued with self proclaimed Marxist who managed to have opinions of fascists straight from 40's.
Is this really a bad thing? Do fascists become less objectionable with time? I'd say they still hold the same abhorrent ideas as they did in the 40s.
>not believing in industrial revolution
As a Marxist myself, that's an odd thing for a Marxist to be saying, but Marx himself does not use that term, so there could be some confusion there - we should be careful with terminology, since they can and do convey particular histories and prejudices and ideologies.
>or that machines could outproduce people when making bulk materials
That's absurd, since Marx makes exactly the opposite point in the first 3 paragraphs of Capital.
Now before you categorise me as twisted, bored and eager to engage others, I'd like to do it first - I really am bored, and at least eager to engage others. When I see a post on a topic I'm relatively familiar with (in this case Marx) I feel the need to comment on it. Now I pledged that I would do that less, but I felt a kind of draw to reply to your comment. Why, I'm not even sure. Perhaps to correct the record on a topic I feel passionately about. But I hope you don't see me as shutting down intelligent discussion, anyway.
Since getting into philosophy I've started to become skeptical of calling people stupid if I don't have any grounds to disagree with them, even if Taleb would group such people, ideas we often think are bad or false at first sight can actually be very reasonable once we peer under the ideology.
but conversely you might have the contrarian town geniuses also interacting where they would not previously. so I guess it depends on the relative size of the 2 groups and their respective probability of being ostracised in their home environment
This SMBC from 2013 illustrates the issue as well as anything. And all joking aside, I think it is 100% accurate, and a real problem that we don't yet have a solution for.
Yeah, and that's best case because it assumes that these are normal populations with normal a-hole distributions, but all acting in good faith--even the a-holes, as much as they can. By that I mean that these are people with genuinely held ideas, some of whom aren't the nicest IRL, and so are just expressing their beliefs "as best they know how".
Instead, we know that there's been great effort to purposely troll and manufacture dissent for political and other purposes. It's really just coming into view as a sustained, organized, and scaled effort but, looking at the tactics on display, it's easy to believe that it's likely been going on much longer.
So, this trashing of the Internet has been deliberate and effective. Hence, the wastelands that YouTube comments, Twitter, FB, et. al. have become.
So what we've now got is weird, but certainly not fun.
There's an information asymmetry that some multiplayer games have exploited to solve this sort of problem (namely, pit all the cheaters and troublemakers against each other), but I think it's that lack of global information that lets it work.
In other forums I think it's easier to detect that you've been shadow banned, and that the reason only certain people are responding to you is that they're the only ones who can see your rants.
There are people being loud in the center who are still incorrectly labelled as "far right" or some other meaningless label and targeted for deplatforming.
Unfortunately, politicization is inevitable when double standards exist in moderation. If you're going to have rules, they need to be applied evenly. We've seen that several of the internet giants are incredibly inconsistent in their approaches to banning content or users from the two sides of the political spectrum. Nowhere seems to be safe, including HN.
A few years ago, I never would have thought I'd be sympathising with Reagan and his "I didn't leave..." quote, particularly considering that I lean left on most political decisions. But man has it been a shock to see how quickly the progressive side of the left shifted what was considered left and right here in the US. And I am dismayed by how all political opinions across the board are now considered shibboleths for a purity test rather than subjects worth discussing.
When I was growing up, my father was a diplomat for the US Foreign Service. He was a small-d democrat. His best friend was a small-r republican. They both greatly valued each other's thoughts and opinions, and each allowed the other to sway their positions across convivial dinner-table discussion. I know such approaches are possible because I saw it on a regular basis, and I would like it if we could get back to said approach.
> He was a small-d democrat. His best friend was a small-r republican.
Uh, that's not what those mean, unless your father was a monarchist and his friend a believer in dictatorships?
"Small-p Partyname" is used to differentiate the actual word that the party's name is from the proper noun. A small-c conservative is someone who holds conservative beliefs, regardless of whether they support a Conservative party.
In my experience, the other guy has it right: "Small-d democrat" means someone who supports democracy (... enough compared to some base line in whatever context that it's worth discussing), not someone who weakly endorses the Democratic party. A small-d democrat may be an avid big-D Democrat, or a weak one, or not one at all. I'm sure a big portion of the Republican party are small-d democrats when the alternative is monarchism.
That was of a different era where politics anb religion wasn't discussed in mixed company. Now you need to yell which side you are on as virtual signage.
> There are people being loud in the center who are still incorrectly labelled as "far right" or some other meaningless label and targeted for deplatforming.
And so on. But are these meaningful examples? I would argue both yes and no. No, because it's difficult to argue that the people calling them out are not a minority of activists who are just pushing their own political agenda.
Yes, because even if it's a minority viewpoint, it's effective - people apathetic to the given issue are likely to take the word of the activists as gospel, which leads to deplatforming.
A very visible example of the effectiveness of this tactic is Charles Murray and The Bell Curve. Regardless of the validity of more sophisticated criticism of his work, he has been effectively denounced as a racist and deplatformed.
This also leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where speakers presenting their ideas find themselves shunned by group X, and supported by group anti-X. As X step up silencing/deplatforming efforts, either the speaker fades into obscurity, or receives enough support from anti-X to continue their work, but now they can reliably be demonized via guilt by association(Jordan Peterson and the NBC news piece is an example).
They are not far-right or alt-right but they continually show sympathies with such ideas, and defend the same status quo that the right-wing wants to support. They are continually invited and supported by right-wing speakers. It's not as though these people are exactly centrists, and even if they were, there's a reason for a left-wing individual to critique them too.
>Charles Murray
Is a member of a right-wing think tank and the serious criticism of his work often alleges him of using scientific racism. Is it a far stretch to say that a proponent of scientific racism is himself a racist? Is it wrong to denounce people on such matters? Perhaps the critique can stretch beyond the mere empirical validity of the results and into the philosophy of what the authors are arguing. These methodological issues are in the purview of critical theory too.
>his also leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where speakers presenting their ideas find themselves shunned by group X, and supported by group anti-X.
I'm skeptical of the idea that the only reason why such people are supported by anti-X is because they have been shunned by X.
It's a popular, or at least persistent, european meme to dramatically underestimate the political diversity of the American public. He believes that all Americans are on the right.
As an American living in Europe, it's actually a fairly accurate one. The American greater public is generally much narrower than in Europe, in particular due to Europe's history with Communism and the various degrees of strength of the labor class compared to America.
There are a lot of "left" policies that are unthinkable and unspeakable at a national discourse level.
That's not accurate. And there are Americans who are very far to the left. Anybody making blanket statements starting with "all Americans" or "no Americans" is guilty of generalization.
The window of allowable discourse in the US doesn't reach as far left as the center of Canada.
Most Canadians steadfastly believe in health care for all, and they'll defend that. They might quibble a tiny bit about the edge like "Should there be any private health care at all?".
In Europe, in many cases, the farthest right parties aren't even as far right as the Democrats in the US. Standard government policies are complete heresy to discourse in the US.
Try talking about Unions in the US. Even in California, that bastion of the Left on the Leftest of coasts. At which point, you're likely going "Yeah, but who worries about Unions in this day and age?", which is exactly what I mean. The rest of the developed world does. A lot.
It's not a generalization, the window of allowable discourse does not encompass much of the spectrum in the US.
The Obamacare reforms brought us about 3/4 of the way to a German-style multiple-payer universal health care system, and those were widely supported as well (enough to be passed into law!). A majority of Americans consistently support at least some type of health care reform that approaches universal coverage: https://www.kff.org/health-reform/poll-finding/kff-health-tr...
> In Europe, in many cases, the farthest right parties aren't even as far right as the Democrats in the US. Standard government policies are complete heresy to discourse in the US.
The last presidential campaign included a debate between the Democratic candidates where both candidates effusively praised the policies of Denmark, which one candidate identified as “socialist”. The Prime Minister of Denmark replied, “Denmark is a market economy”. https://www.thelocal.dk/20151101/danish-pm-in-us-denmark-is-...
> It's not a generalization, the window of allowable discourse does not encompass much of the spectrum in the US.
Bullshit. Half of the country is falling over itself trying to turn the US into a replica of Europe or Canada.
If anything, it’s the opposite—only in the United States is a full, wide spectrum of allowable discourse present. Not only can you find lots of Americans who support virtually any policy commonplace in Europe, but you can find many more who hold views unthinkable or at least unsayable in Europe.
It is accurate. Reread what I've said. "It's a fairly accurate portrayal of the national discourse and the court of public opinion," to paraphrase
When was the last time you found yourself questioning capitalism in the USA? That tends to be the center in Europe, and is unthinkable by the general public and national discourse in media in the USA.
Obviously, I am not defending generalizations and recognize extremist political factions exist in the USA. I am not going to get into a semantic battle about what someone else said when the general idea is there and was just expressed poorly, and the poor semantics are used to somehow disprove the actual idea.
> When was the last time you found yourself questioning capitalism in the USA? That tends to be the center in Europe, and is unthinkable by the general public and national discourse in media in the USA.
You might have missed this since you've been living in Europe, but questioning capitalism is extremely popular in the United States ever since 2016. In fact, many European countries are far more secure in the turn-of-the-21st-century neoliberal consensus than the United States is.
Here are some ways in which the United States is either within European norms or, at times, even further to the left:
* US judicial precedent establishes a constitutional right to abortion on demand early in pregnancies, and some states, including most recently New York, extend this right to any point before childbirth. Most European countries only allow abortion in the first or sometimes the second trimester.
* The United States also recognizes a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, which is not at all recognized in Italy, Greece, Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Switzerland, and Northern Ireland.
* US corporate taxes and regulations are within the European norm. The Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom Index (https://www.heritage.org/index/) (which defines "economic freedom" as embracing the right-wing economic policies the Heritage Foundation tends to advocate for) rank Switzerland, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Iceland above the United States while ranking the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, and Luxembourg within one point of the US rating.
* In terms of civil liberties, the US is virtually unique in recognizing an absolute right against self-incrimination and an exclusionary rule of evidence, where evidence collected in contravention of anyone's civil rights is admissible in court.
* One of the biggest controversies in recent American politics is whether to overturn the constitutional standard of jus soli birthright citizenship--the notion that any human being born on American soil is unconditionally an American citizen. No European country has this policy at all, let alone enshrined in a written constitution.
* The US does not have mandatory military service. However, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Norway, and Switzerland all do.
* Unlike many European countries, the US has a virtually complete lack of media censorship by the government.
* Austria, France, Belgium, Germany, and Bulgaria have all outlawed face coverings, while Switzerland has banned the construction of minarets. France prohibits the wearing or display of "conspicuous religious symbols" in schools, a law targeted at hijab-wearing Muslims. The United States has no equivalent laws, and any such laws would almost certainly be ruled unconstitutional.
As someone who has been interacting online since FidoNet was a thing, I have to say ... this is a problem as old as humans. There were plenty of politicized discussions back then, plenty of contentious people, plenty of trolls. In some ways the vibe was different, but really, it wasn't better. Or worse, to be honest.
>It started really wildly happening around 2013-2014 where no community was to remain a zone without some minority of users politicising it for attention.
It was actually in September 2013 when it started ... or was it September 1993 ...? Uh, oh, how time flies, never mind.
I remember it always being political. Back in 2002 most of the posts in the Command and Conquer Generals forums where various views on if Bush should invade Iraq or not. That community died the day EA banned political discussions.
The day EA killed Westwood Chat and it's active community and replaced it with their hideous in-game matchmaking was I think the day the internet stopped being fun and weird for me.
Or I maybe just lost my internet innocence, seeing Big Game come in and decide on a whim to toss in the bin the place where I spent most of my after school time. Also where I learned how to un-ban myself by editing the right registry key. :D
> In fact, it's something I really appreciate here on HN, the tone of discussions is rather pleasant and on topic
I've been a member here since 2008, 10 odd years! It has been quite consistent, and an almost daily visit for me since joining. I don't know how they do it but I am glad that they do.
>A lot of online communities today are unbearable tho as everything's become so politicised. It started really wildly happening around 2013-2014 where no community was to remain a zone without some minority of users politicising it for attention
Can you help me understand your argument by giving examples of what this means? What is "politicising" and what communities have you seened ruined by "some minority of users politicising it for attention?"
A recent example from reddit: An influential person in a small community came out as trans and preferred to live as a women now. The OP who wanted to bring this to the attention of the community and wrote:
> Given the misogynistic reputation that the community has, I think it would be good for people to go out of our way to send a message or say something about how her coming out is a positive thing.
Que the comments being about this inflammatory statement and not about what the post was meant to be about, and for good reason. People that criticised OP were met with angry replies and stuff like this:
> Lotsa male white fragility all over this thread.
2 hours later another user made a solid post highlighting nothing but her, her achievements and detailing just how influential she has been and still is for the community, the comments were nothing but praise, positivity and celebration.
IMO a pretty good example of something being politicised for no reason and directly being a detriment to the community.
On the Internet you get a Covington Catholic school incident every other day. There's lots of extreme accusations (racism, homophobia, sexism etc) thrown around with little backing evidence. I think Jonathan Haidt explains it best, where the barrier to communication has moved from "reasonable person" standards (if someone says something that could be construed as extreme/hateful you give them the benefit of the doubt but get them to clarify) to "most sensitive person in the room" standards (anything that could be offensive, even if its not intended at all, is construed as the person being some horrible monster). It leads to extreme self censorship because people are scared to talk in case they something that could be taken out of context, treated uncharitably and used to whip up a twitter mob. Coming from a moderate position it seems to me that this has had a chilling effect on debate and lead to the public square being dominated primarily by the extremes of both sides.
Just exploring the subject here, please don't feel attacked: what would "not be tolerated" mean, and what sort of opinions could be considered "dissenting?"
>without some minority of users politicising it for attention
What does "politicising" mean, and how do you know their motives? If you mean what I think you mean, i.e. women for example standing up for their right to be included in historically male-led organizations (say, a SDR club), I must admit skepticism - perhaps what you are witnessing isn't "doing something for attention," but instead "demanding to be treated as an equal?"
> What does "politicising" mean, and how do you know their motives?
Example right here. For better or worse, some people will try to make everything about their pet issues. It doesn't really matter if their motives are good when every single discussion gets dragged into the 2010's version of Godwin's Law.
The OP gave no example, so I had to make a guess. In my experience, people that complain about "groups getting politicized" generally mean "a minority joined and was upset when we weren't inclusive."
Perhaps I should have simply left it at the question, but the internet is a frustrating place to have dialogues like that - clarifying every tiny point before running out of space for a counter argument.
He meant you were the example. I am not saying it was your intention, but the way you mentioned a particular issue and then added your opinion on the issue in your comment is one way people inject their beliefs into otherwise unrelated conversation. I know you needed an example to make your point, but the grandparent was trying to make a point of your comment.
This is the most obvious Golden Age Fallacy I saw in Jarred's text:
> MySpace showed the world that if you make powerful and complicated tools (like coding) accessible to anyone, people are smart enough to figure out how to use them.
My own experience with MySpace was that every page I landed on looked like a dumpster fire. I can't recall a single person who exhibited competence in using the tools MySpace gave you. Everything was always poor contrast with a cockeyed layout.
That's their whole point - each page was individualistic, people were trying crazy things and showcasing their own personal style. The one thing that it wasn't was bland.
> My own experience with MySpace was that every page I landed on looked like a dumpster fire.
Reading this, I finally get what people mean when they say "But Snapchat is supposed to have an unintuitive UI".
I was big into editing Myspace HTML back in the day. There were simply so many possibilities. The design was an extension of your style, howrver crude and unfinished it might have been.
I think, weirdly, I have a harder time finding communities around that sort of thing now. I mostly read HN. Where would I go to find something like HN for, say, sustainable living? woodworking? cycling infrastructure? A lot of it is, if nothing else, subsumed in to a Facebook group, or a slack group, etc.
The best I've found is small subreddits. Which is not ideal, because discovery is a giant PITA. Much like the split between /r/trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts (the /trees subreddit was first founded by people who were talking about weed, and people who wanted to talk about actual trees were a little nonplussed at the whole thing, thus creating /marijuanaenthusiasts and using it for tree-talk) most of the better communities are using a name that is not immediately obvious, so that they aren't oversaturated from the get-go.
The bigger problem with reddit, in my experience, is that 95% of the comments on any given post are pure garbage filler. Joke chains as far as the eye can see.
HN is also quite bad to have long-term discussions about a topic, and suffers from the same constant rehashing of topics happening on reddit. It sort of works for news and random individual articles, where there aren't necessarily longer logical threads, but that's not what many communities need.
E.g. a typical comparison between forums and reddit: A hobby forum often has a "I just bought X" megathread or two, where people post new things they've bought and want to share their excitement about, but that don't warrant a full thread. On hobby subreddits, a large amount of the threads can be "I just bought the thing everyone always recommends and everyone has seen 20 times this week, can't wait to use it!". Similarly, what would have been a single post on an old thread in a forum needs to be it's own thread on reddit, loosing context and making search harder (even if people try to link other relevant threads). Which in turn leads to more repeat questions etc.
Hacker news is 30x worse because you don't even see replies to your comments so the fire and forget mentality is very strong. Also very discouraging to reply to older comments because once it gets over a day old its likely even the person you reply to wont see it.
Moderation is definitely key to dealing with that issue.
For me, as with HN, I don't like the inherent stress of commenting on submissions before they fall off the front page. The earlier one comments, the higher the chances of getting eyeballs/responses. After that short ~24 hour window, people may still read the comments, but submitting new comments seems futile.
As opposed to older "style" forums, even today, threads often stay open, allowing people to post months or years later to revive "dead" threads.
The two-hour edit window and rapid falloff on HN are two of my least-favorite aspects of discussion on this site. It is almost a daily occurence I'll come across something interesting here, get ready to type a contribution to the conversation, then realize that it's too late, and it won't be read. It is a little demoralizing.
I'm sure this approach also eases the moderation burden, and I'm pretty impressed overall with how dang handles things. So maybe it is a simple workload necessity. It does strike me that HN could be quite a bit more if these two restrictions were loosed.
Most SO sites have too many moderators squelching any attempts at constructive, and deleting the unique as duplicate. Like Wikipedia it's become incredibly hostile to newcomers.
> just find a community today that shares those properties
How? I can't even search for shit anymore without being drowned in results that have nothing to do with what I searched for, but are kinda-sorta similar and get visited a lot more often.
- no regulations (yet)
- lots of unknowns
- very few hidden motives
That said, the duration of this state is probably quantifiable. Everything has these traits at first, until human stay for a while, then organization naturally takes place, taking the virginial beauty off at the same time.
I've read that some antique cultures believed in burning things to the ground. I wonder if that's not a useful thing.
I think this is closer to what I think has happened. The internet is used by such a large percentage of the population that "weird" sites now are going to be smaller in relation to sites that appeal to "the masses." The ratio of "weirdos to non-weirdos" on the internet today is significantly smaller than the mid 90s. "The masses" were very underrepresented online back then. :)
There's been a real qualitative change too. It was October 27th, 1994, and it was Wired's fault. The same year those bottom feeding lawyers decided to bombard Usenet with their green card spam. The first banner advertiser was AT&T:
The Internet was better because it was not yet another way to spoonfeed culture to a complacent populace. The Internet was for interested people, now it's for everyone. It is not better now. I mean sure the video is HD but the content is usually garbage.
Maybe the internet was just new. And then it got old. Then your mom started using it. The first album is always the best. By the fifth album the band just sucks.
The internet was a lot smaller and inhabited by curious nerds - to find similar fun and weirdness, just find a community today that shares those properties. Packet radio, infosec, crypto, gaming, music production, etc. - there's plenty of weird and fun to be found if you look for it.