I kissed comment culture goodbye

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.

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.