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The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

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622 points ColinWright | 6 comments | 25 Jan 22 22:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.859s | source | bottom
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aeturnum ◴[26 Jan 22 01:33 UTC] No.30080539[source]▶
I have never understood people who mourn the death of the "old" internet because I do not feel I have lost it. Particular communities come and go, as they always have, but I have found that the I can find the same sorts of gathering places for the same kinds of people I always have - in about the same numbers too.

The thing that has changed is that a huge swath of new people have come online and, though some of what brought them online is wider access to connectivity, a lot of what brought them online are new kinds of communities. They showed up for social media and most of them just aren't that interested in the things that made up the "old" internet.

I put "old" in quotes because people have kept and maintained the parts they love. You can still play MUDs, you can still visit BBSes, people still run Hotline servers[1]! Many of these communities have changed because the world has changed: lots of people who played MUDs in 1990 have moved on to other online games, but lots have not! Critically - tools have continued to be developed. You can use IRCCloud (and be told it makes you a bad IRC'er), you can play MUDs on your phone, etc. These communities have changed with the times and improved for it.

My sense is that the absolute number of people who are involved in these communities has dropped, but not actually by that much? Maybe half as many people play MUDs now as they did at the peak - but it's a steady half. I think of it like the communities around vinyl or around film photography: less central than they once were, but healthy and vital.

I am really glad that people who were not online at all during their peak are discovering these older forms. We have kept them for good reasons. But don't call it a comeback, they have been here for years.

[1] https://hotline.fandom.com/wiki/Clients

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yakireev ◴[26 Jan 22 04:03 UTC] No.30081546[source]▶
> I have found that the I can find the same sorts of gathering places for the same kinds of people I always have - in about the same numbers too.

My personal experience does not match that. There was a time (2010-2012 or so where I used to live) when communities were migrating from older "forums" to new and shiny "social networks" - and inevitably ceasing to be communities.

One of these communities was niche enough (and I was involved enough) for me to personally knew all the regulars - they are mostly still online and still care about that thing which brought us together, but there's no meeting place for us online anymore. Facebook groups and Twitter wars do not facilitate meaningful discussion, and the old forum... "Who uses forums nowadays anyway? We have FB and Instagram and stuff", I hear from them, but I believe they're deeply mistaken and it's the other way around. FB has them, and it kinda took them away from me.

old_man_yells_at_cloud.jpg

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executesorder66 ◴[26 Jan 22 11:12 UTC] No.30084118[source]▶
Is there any reason a subreddit wouldn't work for that community? Or is that not "forumy" enough?

I'm genuinely curious.

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1. unsungNovelty ◴[26 Jan 22 12:24 UTC] No.30084658[source]▶
Apart from privacy concerns like Twitter and Reddit sharing your data with FB (Maybe they share with Google too, not entirely sure), you create a healthier community in a forum than Reddit, Twitter etc.

This would be different if you are in a subreddit for a niche topic, sure. But there are higher chances of creating healthy online interactions in Forums than a subreddit. You meet with regulars more often. Knowledge transfer is better cos you know the skill levels of different people based on your interactions and experiences. This is opposite cos in a subreddit depending on the topic. There is a high amount of irregular folks. This means you have no idea how to rate the interactions than to take them on face value. These are all small but important things that are important when it comes to a community.

Think of forums like your neighborhood. You participate and nurture it. You know most of them and the rate of new people are less than you can catch up with the pace among other things.

PS: These are some of my thoughts, people have different ideas and opinions on forums.

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2. imglorp ◴[26 Jan 22 13:36 UTC] No.30085178[source]▶
Reddit is as always a mixed experience.

I think any successful forum depends heavily on its mods (notably like this one) to maintain community and civility, to remove spam, abuse, brigading, and astroturfing. This works despite the corporation trying to monetize with both hands. Reddit still has some subs with good mod teams where kind, productive communities are carrying on. This could happen on any decent forum software.

And yeah the rest is commercialized filth.

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3. neutronicus ◴[26 Jan 22 14:50 UTC] No.30086090[source]▶
Yeah, and I'll jump in with a contrary opinion.

I think people are much nicer on Reddit than they were on forums, and nicer on Discord than either.

My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll past long-running inline reply wars that would suck people in. The fact that this kind of thing gets quarantined to a downvoted sub-tree (on Reddit) or just scrolls into the past, accessible only by search (on Discord) helps keep these new community platforms a lot less toxic.

And yeah, the newer platforms (especially Discord) are maybe a little less valuable as pure stores of knowledge, but I think the structural resistance to domination by assholes is very valuable.

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4. awild ◴[26 Jan 22 14:57 UTC] No.30086205[source]▶
I agree a lot with this. I'm in a lot of niche groups of my hobbies and of those most are really quite trash (usually pedantic ideological battles) even if they claim to be otherwise. There's however one that has such a strong moderation team that it's become a kind of meme, BUT the discussions if they do happen are always strong and factual by a weird mix of industry professionals and hobbyists alike, with a good focus on citation and cross referencing.
5. epicide ◴[26 Jan 22 15:25 UTC] No.30086591[source]▶
I think parts of your comment and your parent's comment are correct.

IMO a lot of it isn't about technology, but the size of the community, the people within it, and the norms of that community.

For me, the biggest heuristic on whether a subreddit/forum/Discord has the potential to feel like a community is the size. For various reasons, subreddits tend to be larger than a forum. The larger the subreddit, the more it feels like yelling into the void of Twitter. It's hard to "know the regulars" when there are thousands of people talking in the same place at the same time.

Smaller subreddits have no guarantee to feel like a community, but they have the potential. If there are regulars that show up and moderators that fairly moderate[0], subreddits basically "fall back" into being a forum.

Of course, there is the elephant in the room of Advance Publications, Inc. [1] wanting to make economic profit and, therefore, push for Reddit to grow and overcome the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Most forums never really had/have the same dreams of world domination.

Overall, as someone who has been a moderator on a larger forum (about 10-15 years ago) and seen tight-knit subreddits and Discords, my advice is:

Regardless of the wallpaper, pay attention to the people and the customs of your community and strive to improve those. There's no guarantee it will flourish, but it cannot if enough people don't act similarly.

[0] e.g. delete spam, lock flame wars, and generally contribute to the well-being of the community. [1] The effective owners of Reddit.

6. unsungNovelty ◴[27 Jan 22 06:32 UTC] No.30096958[source]▶
> I think people are much nicer on Reddit than they were on forums, and nicer on Discord than either.

The medium is different could be one of the reasons.

> My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll past long-running inline reply wars that would suck people in.

But that can be reddit as well. :)

---

But you should also define what "nice" is to make sure we are on the same page. Arch linux forum is notorious for being known as hostile and rude. But they are just direct. They are damn helpful and cares a lot on helping. They expect you to do your due diligence before asking help is all. This is 100% direct towards help vampires which are bad for any community. But help vampires are going to rant on twitter and other places how horrible Arch folks are. Which is not true.