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.

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.

I think we are all pretty aware of how the up and down arrows are supposed to be used versus how they get used.

For content that doesn’t trigger an emotional response: the arrows are used appropriately, highlighting comments and silencing less useful discussion. HN is incredibly useful for discussion on non-controversial, almost mundane, topics.

However it all comes undone for any topic that carries emotional baggage. Where up and down arrows are clearly used as “like” and “dislike” buttons regardless of the facts or merit presented in each comment. Instead commenting becomes an exercise in PR. The first clue is the comment count. HN has some very predictable patterns in comment counts.

Platform operators may not be willing to change this as “hive mind” and “liked” content helps visitation, even if it doesn’t help discourse. The consequence of inaction however is that topic experts are pushed out by mobbing, because invariably not everything is sunshine and roses.

I unironically just closed this tab before submitting out of habit and reopened it to submit this

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

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.

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.

That said, there's another problem with comment culture that seems worth mentioning. I seem to have gotten good at expressing thoughts that fit in a comment. That gives me a false sense of competence; but when I need to write something longer, like a blog post several pages long, the structure just completely falls apart. And writing a book I can't even imagine. It seems writing at different lengths is essentially different skills, which need to be practiced separately. And if that's the case, then as Annie Dillard says, why not just write something long to begin with? I'm actually thinking of that now.

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

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.

> 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.

It shouldn't be taken as a replacement for having a social life, but can be a very good complement if your social life isn't as intellectually stimulating as you would like.

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.

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 miss phpBB as the dominant mode of internet socialization. Communities with norms, in-jokes, reputation. Take me back!

In the 90s and into the mid-aughts, we would give out our names, phone numbers, and addresses no problem. It's a world where cryptocurrency could sprout because it was built around chat rooms and forums with like-minded individuals, or individuals working/playing in particular niches. Today, most people seem to assume giving your address is something only an idiot would do, or that times have changed drastically so it was fine then but stupid now.

I think we live in a world now where people are conditioned to no longer speak to each other. This is a world where Jesus would be very strange indeed, even if we do find ourselves under a nominally Christian nationalist government. Imagine letting a stranger into your house, or even talking to a stranger in a parking lot. There will, for sure, be no kind of foot-washing.

I agree this is largely conditioning coming from the gamification of socializing brought on by social media and other websites to drive engagement. I don't think the average Internet user would be like this without conditioning by big technology companies. I think it can be beaten by recognizing it as a harmful addiction, and an addiction that can be pretty tough to beat. Government and tech companies aren't going to fix it; it's something you have to want to fix for yourself.

There's something different about social media culture and polarization, and it's not as much the polarization as something else.

I think it's the volume. Maybe I'm an elitist but there's something niche about agreeing to disagree. And building communities in other ways even when disagreeing.

What were interesting ways to share interests, hobbies, projects and free knowledge degraded post-social media into a cesspool of engagement, with the exception being the AI generated jesus or cat pictures.

Pretty much everything else went to shit and is created to make you mad, because that's when you talk or click the most.

A couple years ago when I was targeted by APT28 the first time, I decided that the only healthy internet time is around twice a day for a couple minutes and that should be it. So I introduced the toilet rule: I only use social media on the toilet, and I don't even have the passwords on another device.

This way I guarantee the same level of content quality that social media expects me to have, without the emotional aftermath when the bots try to reinforce you in their absolutist beliefs of why killing someone is actually okay.

It's great, I can fully recommend it. I've never been more productive.

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.

As for the worst thing, I think it's that you can have "kittens playing" and "terrorist attack" posts right next to each other. That can't be a good way to view what's going on.

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.

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.

One idea I have is to mimic Lincoln–Douglas debates where two people debate each other in a fixed format and with structured time for rebuttal. The hope being by slowing down rebuttal the response becomes more mindful.

In general though I think its the speed and low quality of response leading to dissatisfaction of comment platforms.

But for every positive case there are just as many negative ones. I have an intrinsic need to answer questions and will often spend an inordinate amount of time doing so, when in fact I could have used that time far more productively.

> All of that social activity with zero ROI.

Pick one

But seeing it as a bad ROI in terms of social interactions that don't create any social bond, that's quite true. You spend all this time "socializing", and yet gain no social connection from it.

Discord, unlike IRC, is killing forums. And is on the Deep Web, meaning that all the lore, all the knowledge is lost to anyone searching for it, including Internet Archive crawlers.

And in addition to that it's a platform, so people using it are collaborating with totalitarian extremists that are turning our countries into (uncool) cyberpunk dystopias.

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.

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.

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.

But it's shallow and self-aggrandizing, because I comment, hit post, and... never look at it again because what if I'm actually held to account on what I just said?

But also, nobody's ever read a comment and thought "whoa I need to get to know this person better!" and reached out - but that's normal because I never read a comment and have that thought.

Publishing my opinion is great, that's why so many people have blogs and twitter and such as well, it's their own soapbox. But conversing over comments, not so much.

HN's issue is that you don't get notifications if someone replied to you. Someone may reply to you, you may reply to them again, but who knows if they read it and reply again? Reddit's issue is that I ignore notifications.

Forums were great 15-20 years ago, I'd go there several times a day, go through ALL the unread posts, read everything, reply, and there would be actual conversations going. But also usually not one to one, so you'd rarely stand alone in any discussions.

But for me, that time has passed. I haven't been to these forums in ages (and I run them, lol), I just don't read long posts, especially from people I know who write long posts, the personal conversations have mostly died out and moved to Discord or private chats - because over time, people shared too much, were too trusting, and got hurt because of it.

TL;DR, I'm still on the internet but it's a husk of the mid 2000s - or at least my experience thereof is, the generation following will probably say the same in 20 years time. It matters more what time in your life you are than the online communities themselves I think.

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.

The point of commenting is not being social or a socialite. The best comments are questions - asking others, questioning yourself.

Looking back at some of my comments, some were clearly toxic and I know why: it was time when things weren't going my way at work (cause most of my comment activity is in tech-related forums). It reminds me when I was bullied at school, which made me at times not the nicest brother. Took me too long to notice I had this tendency.

But their reasoning then becomes unsound: "All of that social activity with zero ROI." They throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It seems that the author belong to the same regeneration as mine, so they might be in that period of their life - the "forties blues" or "middle age crisis" (1). This doesn't "invalidate" this post, except for the false dichotomy between Internet acquaintances and IRL friends. It is a warning to be heard, at a time when we see more and more smartphone zombies in the streets.

(1) it becomes really ironic when you been looking at teens and their identity crisis with a patronizing eye in your thirties-forties and then you experience it a second time yourself.

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.

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.