Hacker News Reader

Comment by Digory | Hacker News Reader

"Stable-ish social order" is a byword for homogeneity, isn't it?

We were all nerds, mostly descended from Europeans, associated with post-war higher education, learning through math or reading, and critical thinking. We had (inside the US) geographic diversity, but otherwise had very similar social norms. The wide range of social norms from UC Berkley to WUSTL to MIT.

Everybody you met on a BBS was likely to be interesting to you, because they were another person with interests significantly like yours.

The worst parts of the "open" internet today are full of people who see your interests as antithetical to their own interests.

View on HN

> "Stable-ish social order" is a byword for homogeneity, isn't it?

I mean you talked to the same people over time, rather than, like most social media today, new people every time. You recognized people, and those people had social relationships with other members. There was a reasonable mixture of backgrounds and genders, but people didn't seem to make as big of a deal about it.

I do think the reason it appears very important today is because it can help form some semblance of cohesion and structure in social media that really doesn't cater to that sort of thing.

That’s fair; a community of repeat players has a different feel than people trying to win one round.

Your OP said the stability involved “some sort of community with social hierarchy and structure, agreed-upon values,” though, which I think came partly from the early Internet being a narrow-ish slice of class and culture.

Stable is a very different word from homogeneous. It implies a regular cast of characters, not an identical one.

Late-90s to late-2010s forums were hardly all homogeneous. Age-wise was the most homogenous dimension - the number of folks 40+ was low - but many of these communities were full of people who'd grown up with the internet pre-college or even pre-high-school.

With a stable cast of characters you actually get to know people even if they're different, you don't simply assume that their interests oppose yours, like you seem to be doing.

A similar transition happened with the advent of smartphones. Before smartphones, anybody on the internet was someone who owned and could operate a computer.

Well, at least in my experience, no.

I feel like I grew up on forums and I'm still followed around by the psychological archetypes and ghosts of the long-term friends and acquaintances and their personalities many years later.

I've been in communities with theologians, philosophers, republicans, democrats, economists, poor, rich, nutjobs, communists, programmers, non-programmers, truck drivers, radicals and straight down the middle types. People from Europe, Asia, South Africa, South America, NZ, Australia, North America. Singletons, children, members with families, and even a couple of oldies.

Modern social media feels so absolutely non-diverse and universally dumb, consumerist, artificial and corporate focused in comparison I don't generally want a part of it.

These days I'm largely stuck on a private discord server without about 20-30 other people that I've known anonymously for the last 5-10 years because there are no more open or interesting communities available on the general web that don't get the doors knocked down by spammers, hackers or hostile actors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com