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.
There’s also another category — people like you! I usually stop and read your posts in the same way my dad would a columnist in the paper years ago.
I think the author of the post was looking for something in the wrong place. Which is all good!
This might be me; I am older and have less time. The bar to novelty in my life was a lot lower in my late teens than it is now. But I can't shake the feeling that "something" has changed in the world around me. Every social medium, from the follower-only Mastodons to the heavily algorithmicized Twitter FYP is angry at something or dunking on someone.
(N.B. Sometimes I wonder if this is the nugget of truth behind the wisdom of having kids. That at some point humans become inflexible and recalcitrant but the act of having kids ties your own mood and outlook to the future of humanity as a whole rather than your own crotchety self.)
People who want to discuss things in good faith (which presumably includes you and I) and achieve consensus get bogged down in long and complicated discussions while those who have selfish motivations just do whatever they want largely without any cost. The overlap between people who are 'well-meaning' and 'successful' shrinks, leaving the well-meaning people angry and bitter - not generally at each other, but still sometimes unfortunately.
I've been here over a year and seem to be fairly well recognized at this point, but I don't think I could even confidently name another user in the same city as me.
Has HN really helped people connect in this sort of way?
To me, HN has almost always felt anonymous, in the sense that I don't recognize (hardly) any of the users that post (aside from maybe dang). A lot of times, I don't even look at the username.
I think this is a combination of a lack of an avatar that nearly all other social media platforms have (except maybe Reddit, which also feels anonymous for the same reason, but I don't use it much/am not a member), as well as the low contrast username.
HN seems to intentionally deemphasize the author, and draw the focus on the content of the article and comments. Which results in a lack of connection (again, likely by design).
But I've been around for almost 15 years, and can't think of a single person I've connected with outside of HN, and could maybe name less than a handful of users by their username.
Again, not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. Just would be surprised if many people have made friends on HN (unless you're going out of your way/trying to build a network, which I guess some people likely do).
But, yes, the way the username is displayed matters as well, I rarely look at it.
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.
Instagram, X, & old school forums etc lend themselves to it a bit more, but it's probably the chat / watering hole ones like discord and IRC that lend themselves the most to making internet friends. All the other ones you need to reach out specifically and it can be difficult.
https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2025-02-08
Right now I am trying to deprogram a rather isolated friend who seems to be sucked into this, it is so frickin' hard to get through to a person who has been seduced, has a crush on somebody, and who has accepted a sob story.
If it is not that, there are all the people who are maybe promoting their onlyfans profile or maybe they're just trying to click on a virus, but either way it is awful. I've been cataloging features that are "expressions of hostility" on BlueSky profiles and one of the most common is "No DM" and it is so common and the people who use it are relatively normal otherwise that we don't treat it as a red flag.
If I was starting out a new platform I'd have a ground rule of never supporting DMs because they are a hotbed of fraud and trouble.
It does feel harder to build that kind of connection today. Maybe it’s the anonymity, maybe it’s the sheer volume of noise, or just the way platforms are designed now. The sense of community that used to form around niche forums seems a lot rarer.
Maybe it was also my age. I was a teenager back then and more open to forming those connections.
Most of the discourse that we see is where groups of people are intersecting that wouldn't really meet in the real world because of the echo chambers we keep.
The Americans are often saying that they only see that crank uncle, or their liberal nephew or niece, at thanksgiving, and, honestly, it's the same for the rest of us around the world - we're normally only exposed to the very different viewpoints at family gatherings.
IRL we try to avoid conflict, and try not to associate with people that hold views that are vastly different to our own, so much so it's considered "unprofessional" to have the discussions at work that would show how different everyone's (political) viewpoints are in the workplace.
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 have some pretty strongly held, but also probably divisive opinions, that I’m afraid would push people away from me if I voiced them to my irl people.
So the thought / emotion is feeling limited irl, and feeling less limited in an anonymous Internet forum. And even occasionally validated in an Internet forum when you find someone that agrees with you. (Or sometimes, when I’m proven wrong, I get something to think about for a little bit.)
Interesting thought exercise, thanks.
Even more if it's a discussion forum, instead of wall of temporal comments.
HN doesn't qualify for either, but there probably exist active places that qualify.
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.
The returns aren't constant. There are periods where I no longer see the value and that's when I stop until I see the value again. But if you never find ROI, how does one find the motivation?
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.
> 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.
The mind loves to invent time regret in hindsight: "I should have cleaned the house instead of watching TV", "I should have spent more time with my kids instead of spending so much time at my job", things like that. Is that what you mean?
I'm on the train right now, I probably spent five minutes phrasing this comment (and if it feels like five it was likely ten) meanwhile I had a book I was going to try and finish and instead I squandered the ride on Internet junk food.
So to answer your question: yes, but no.
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.
You're either writing to tell the author something, or to share your take with other people. So that's a connection, of sorts. Now, the question is if it's a meaningful connection. Sometimes, it is. A lot of the time, it isn't, because everyone is just there to say their piece and move on to the next thing.
I unironically just closed this tab before submitting out of habit and reopened it to submit this
Fortunately, that seems to also have trained me to not write those comments in the first place. I also think much more about what I am trying to actually effect with a comment, not just about what feels good in the particular moment.
One thing that didn't change though is that probably most of my comments are edited at least once, often a few times, right after sending them. And even if it's just swapping out a word, or adding a missing comma. This one here is no exception at all, I just added this paragraph after doing some minor edits.
It may be a super low sample size but it's far from impossible. Especially Reddit has DMs/chat and it's way easier since you can contact someone without someone else impersonating the other party. Sometimes you gotta believe you are talking to just another human being. Love that the article in the OP mentions trolling. We all probably had moments where we did not act in the best way we could have.
To all those that act noble in the shroud of anonymity!
Update: The article also says it takes several hundreds of hours. That may be so, but I find the same time needs to be spent IRL to get to know someone. Usually a continuous effort can be just as much as linking a friend a good story and saying hi. People will engage conversation spontaneously when both parties want.
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.
What hasn't worked out is the no-holds-barred mega-spaces.
It seemed to have worked quite well.
I miss phpBB as the dominant mode of internet socialization. Communities with norms, in-jokes, reputation. Take me back!
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.
There are some places where commenting is meaningful because you're a part of some closely-knit, stable community, and you can actually make a dent - actually influence people who matter to you. I know that we geeks are supposed to hate Facebook, but local neighborhood / hobby groups on FB are actually a good example of that.
There are places where it can be meaningful because you're helping others, even if they're complete strangers. This is Stack Exchange, small hobby subreddits, etc - although these communities sometimes devolve into hazing and gatekeeping, at which point, it's just putting others down to feel better about oneself.
But then, there are communities where you comment... just to comment. To scream into the void about politics or whatever. And it's easy to get totally hooked on that, but it accomplishes nothing in the long haul.
HN is an interesting mix of all this. A local group to some, a nerd interest forum for others, and a gatekeeping / venting venue for a minority.
I like that you try to learn from bad arguments, but don't forget, that many misunderstood on purpose, to "win" an argument. Or at least to score cheap karma points or virtual karma points from the audience.
I used to have to talk more on Internet privacy.
Now I feel like enough people are talking about that one, that I usually don't have to.
In more recent years, it's been pointing out the latest wave of thievery in techbro venues -- sneaky lock-in, surveillance capitalism, growth investment scams, regulatory avoidance "it's an app, judge" scams, blockchain "it's not finance or currency or utterly obvious criminal scheme, judge" scams, and now "it's AI, judge" copyright violation scams.
There's not enough people -- who aren't on the exploitation bandwagon or coattails-riding -- who have the will to notice a problem, and speak up.
Though more speak up on that particular problem, after the window of opportunity closes, and the damage is done, and finally recognized. But then there's a new scam, and gotta get onboard the money train while you can.
That ticks me off, and I can type fast.
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
Like, I didn't know about that form of the loss meme, but now that I know it's loss if you add strikethrough, I'm pretty sure I'd recognize it even without the strikethrough.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I dislike that that's my reasoning.
I would look for local( like in your state/city instead of global) or small userbases (so it's unlikely most are bots).
Read it; it's only 4 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 who disagreed with that perspective — a prolific developer who sought friends on the internet — later killed themselves because of the internet.
Raztuf•1h ago