30 minutes with a stranger

An interesting "control case" is random-chat websites like Omegle. I spent many many hours on that site before it shut down. Omegle pairs you up with a single random stranger, so there's no audience. I typically used it in text-only mode, so there's no face-to-face communication either.

I'd say my experience was closer to the "30 minutes with a stranger" study than it was to modern social media. It was fairly common for a conversation to degrade into insult-trading. But it was more common to have a deep, heartfelt conversation. (Oftentimes I felt like I should follow up with the person I talked to, but I rarely did so in practice, even when we traded contact information.)

Another interesting "control case" is Usenet. You mention the concept of point-scoring. The point-scoring metaphor is rather literal on a website like HN which has upvotes/likes/etc. Usenet didn't have that stuff, but I'm told it had flamewars nonetheless.

Surely some HN users reading this comment are old enough to remember Usenet. Was it better or worse than modern social media in terms of civility? I'm especially curious about Usenet after Eternal September, once small-group norm enforcement broke down, and the underlying characteristics of the platform shone through. If we score early Usenet as 10/10 for civility, and modern X or reddit as 0/10, what score would latter-day, post-AOL Usenet receive?

Another thought: It occurred to me that "point-scoring" could actually be less of an issue with pure-anonymity platforms like 4chan, since you have less of a persona to defend. I've barely used 4chan though, so I can't say much here.

Point scoring isn’t referring to literal points. A better term might be “dunking on someone”.

The same thing happens in social circles in a school. Kids are more likely to make fun of and ridicule other kids when they have an audience to show off to.

I don’t think the anonymous nature helps either. Because the person doing the ridiculing is looking for validation that they are indeed correct and the subject is an idiot, therefore the critic gets to feel good about being smarter than their victim.

So the only dynamic required is just someone telling you how smart you are when you cut someone down. Whether that’s upvotes, or just someone commenting in agreement, it doesn’t matter.

My view is that USENET ran the gamut, depending on what group you were reading. Some would feel more like your typical HN thread or a well-behaved, niche Reddit topic, and others could be just as messy as you could find today. Just in text form rather than images and whatnot.

There is an overall style shift over the long term, e.g. USENET was a little more like email lists and less like chat. More like writing letters to one another rather than having an interactive conversation.

But, those social network problems already existed. There were various kinds of trolls, just like today. Some were just permanently in it for a laugh, others seeming more focused on dealing out grief, and some who (rumor had it) would escalate their newsgroup beefs into real life harassment and stalking. I think there was a period where using real identities, e.g. university email IDs and real names, was typical but then eventually it was mostly pseudonyms whether by explicit blind mailers or just the wave of random usernames at random commercial ISPs.

I don't know what drove what, but I'd say many groups died by attrition. People with niche interests and finite patience started finding other venues like web rings and web forums. Eventually it was mostly trolls, floods of binary attachments, and newsgroup necromancers.

Omegle still exists.