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Absolutely.

My workplace is in the throes of a "back to the office" vs "pro-telework" battle, and it seems to me that those of us who grew up during those wonderful instant messaging / email years are the core of the pro-telework camp.

We know the power of asynchronous communication. We know it can transmit deep thought. We know it can create and sustain friendships, and it can be fun! We also know that the technology is all messed up now and needs a lot of work if we're going to regain what corporations destroyed in the last decade.

With rose-tinted glasses, we can and probably should go back to this. I fondly remember YIM from high school and eventually getting Pidgin/Adium to wrangle ICQ, MSN, AIM, and the mass of options Jabber-based options via libpurple. I'd chat with folks about what they were doing on the weekend and where to meet up--to get away from the computer. XMPP is still around and being worked on with decentralization and with OMEMO we can have the encrypted chats we didn't at the time. I've even seen some clients picking up "stickers" that some folks love. I also agree with the public persona of social media eroding the intimacy of conversation as well--just like in real life 1-on-1 conversation is always more intimate than going with a group (or hanging in the MUC). When you'd head to a MUC, it wasn't uncommon to add someone you thought was interesting to your roster and check in with a DM every once in a while.

Yup. Actual conversations were replaced by liking or commenting something short. Those micro interactions are almost useless.

I upvoted this... And then literally smacked my head.

In a forum like this, though, it's appropriate. Does anyone really want to wade through a bunch of replies to a comment that just say "I agree" without adding anything?

That said, I'm guilty of the occasional "I agree" reply like that, and it typically gets downvoted -- as it should.

Honestly, this was/is rarely a problem in forums that have no upvote/downvote feature. The important part is that they don’t have the UI of a chat and have affordances that make them convenient for asynchronous use.

I disagree, those micro interactions complement async conversations - an easy way to acknowledge something, equivalent of saying 'lol' or 'ok'.

Right. My point is though that many people will just like someones wedding photos or whatever life event instead of having a conversation with them and discovering that information.

Acknowledging something is fine if you then talk to that person but most people replaced the conversation with the like.

I think the bigger issue is that instead of having conversations with those around me I can choose to interact with people like you who may be a thousand miles away instead.

Whenever I comment on Hacker News, I'm always thrilled to get reply comments. It shows that someone read my comment, thought about it, and had something more to contribute to the conversation.

While it's nice to see "number go up" from the upvotes on my comments, that simply doesn't have the same value to me as having the conversation move forward.

Sadly, Hacker News isn't the best place to have conversations. Threads can start fast on 1st page articles, run up a bunch of comments, and then the discussion dries up within hours. Ugh.

Arguably worse than nothing in some situations. It's easy to speculate that upvotes/downvotes may contribute to bubbles, blind spots, and polarization when there is a tribal divide or some other kind of groupthink pathology.

edit- specifically, I'm thinking of politically-minded forums where the top comments are just comments that reinforce the accepted mentality without really challenging anybody's ideas

This is a good point and a similar experience for me (I was in high school 1996-2000). I'll add that, in my experience, those private, deep conversations through AIM and email enhanced my in-person relationships. While phones and social media have interfered with them.

This is my experience too, but I think it possibly corresponds to the transition to mid 20s and adulthood, where a lot this contact drops off anyway (not that it should).

I'd be interested to know what it was like for older adults, but my guess is that a lot of them weren't using AIM that way in the first place.

I'm an older adult, and my experience of that period of time echoes this. The dropoff wasn't related to age, it was an effect of that moment in time.

> It does seems that between 2010-14 or so, people disappeared en masse from AIM. People stopped writing back to personal e-mail. Everyone migrated to social media, even though social media wasn’t a replacement.

In my experience, it was texting (and similar 1-on-1 phone apps) that displaced IM, not social media.

IME it was before 2010. I was in college 2000-2004, and people used AIM then to keep in touch. But by the time I was in law school from 2004-2007, AIM was sparsely used by my peers. I wasn't texting at the time either, nor was I on FB. I guess we just emailed.

Interesting. College for me was 2004-2008, and AIM was still the primary means of chatting where I was. I remember people giving their AOL screen names as contact information on semi-official documents. What did start to change was expressing ourselves on our Facebook pages instead of using our AIM "away" messages.

I kept my AIM client logged in and running on my laptop throughout 2009 after moving away for my first job, but that's when I remember things shifting quickly to SMS text messaging. I resisted hard, kept using a dumb phone without a keyboard, and probably missed out on a lot of social connections in the first few years after college because of it.

This reminds me of another recent thread in which I talked about Facebook turning to crap soon after I graduated college. Someone replied that they started college in 2010 and thought Facebook was fun until about 2015.

I wouldn't say it displaced but rather emphasized the instantaneous part of IM (Instant Messaging). The portability and convenience with the innovation in social media combined pros of the AIM, personal e-mail, etc.

This seems like just another iteration of old people decrying technology they don't like:

Communication these days is so impersonal. Why can't they have a chat instead of public posts

Why can't they call and actually talk to each other instead of chat

Why can't they write each other e-mails instead of these superficial chats

Why can't they send letters instead of these impersonal e-mails

Why can't they meet up in person like we used to

Communication changes and life goes on. Don't really see much difference with phones. It's just the same "kids these days" and the same obliviousness as always that they've become the "old man yelling at cloud".

Objectively speaking - I think we've never had as many companies vying for our attention as we do today.

Worse - we've never had the ability to give those companies real time feedback on whether their strategies are working like we do today.

So while I somewhat agree with:

> Communication changes and life goes on. Don't really see much difference with phones. It's just the same "kids these days" and the same obliviousness as always that they've become the "old man yelling at cloud".

It's pretty hard to argue with the plain fact that teen suicide rates are WAY up compared to the last 40 years.

So if you're going to take the opinion "this is just old people being curmudgeons" I don't really see you making a compelling argument that they're wrong. If anything - maybe they're right...?

>It's pretty hard to argue with the plain fact that teen suicide rates are WAY up compared to the last 40 years.

This isn't true:

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/8gKudTKiGtcT11FPjKsB27qh86Q=...

Rates went way down in the 90s & early 2000s before rising back to where they were before.

>I don't really see you making a compelling argument that they're wrong. If anything - maybe they're right...?

When someone cries wolf in the same way that adults have for basically all of human history you don't need a compelling argument to dismiss them. If I had to look at what is different for kids today than when I grew up I'd point to:

(1) Their economic future is uncertain and general economic stress level is higher

(2) Related to (1) the pressure around college is dramatically up. Schoolwork is up, resume building activities are up, and parental pressure is up.

(3) Opioid crisis

(4) Much more likely to get shot at school

(5) Kids are more inactive and way fatter.

Yes, that graph is the same graph I looked at, which shows we are (as of the last data point) at the literal highest spot ever.

Spiking back up from a very good drop in the 90s/2000s.

Edit - to add, three of your 5 items in that list can be correlated pretty well with online activity (social pressure, school shootings, inactivity)

>school shootings

See this is exactly what I'm talking about. 20 years ago the prevailing wisdom was that this was caused by violent video games and explicit music. This is what you sound like to me:

https://youtu.be/d3GTJOZLaPY

>social pressure

I said economic pressure.

>inactivity

Possibly but there's not a strong proven link between phones and anything.

Hmm this chart shows that we aren't at all time highs yet: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm

(Difference is that it's 15-19 instead of 15-24?)

> Don't really see much difference with phones

except, you know, the topic we're discussing. Teenage unhappiness. With actual hard data, for example, the number of suicides. So it might just be this time is different.

And, last but not least: past performance is not indicative of future results.

I think you’re just using the wrong platforms for that experience.

I’ve been on Telegram for ages and talk daily to people who live on the other side of the world. I’ve never met them in person but we’ve had rich, personal, discussions and I consider them my friends.

On the meatspace side I video call daily with my childhood friends even though we’re hours away. I’m not sure how I could have kept up my friendship if I didn’t have modern technology to video call, game, instant message etc. We always end up grounding it with visits every two months or so but it’s essential to my relationship to stay in the loop.

It's not they are using the wrong platform exactly... FB for example started with the idea that people should talk to each other.

But then it's worth a lot more money if they stop talking and start buying

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...

I’m hopeful for protocols like Matrix and ActivityPub continue taking off where monetization is an issue but they place communication as paramount.

More “modern retro-tech” like Gemini is also promising. I made a great friend there which I feel is related to self-selection - as in, maybe most of the people on Twitter and Facebook aren’t a good fit for a HN netizen.

One of the few places I was able to recapture the early internet magic was on Discord from 2015-2018.

Unfortunately, that is very difficult nowdays with the popularity it's found. When I was using the internet in the late 90's/early 2000's it felt like a safe haven for a geek like me to be myself without being punished for it. A lot of that magic wears off when the people who used to kick my ass for being a nerd became chronically online.

I think another part to this drop was home-computers vs. portable computers like laptops rise in popularity. I remember an emphasis of seperation with a home-computer that didn't move with me vs. a portable computer that was always there. I still practice this and advocate others to do the same. Hell a lot of people just end up using their laptops as home-computers anyway with a monitor and dock setup. Funny how that is

In my country, the internet was frustratingly slow and expensive. To enjoy online gaming with my friends, we resorted to hosting LAN parties at someone's house. These gatherings were incredibly enjoyable, far surpassing the experience of playing alone online.

Moreover, our LAN parties had an unexpected benefit: we all became TCP/IP network experts. Each of us knew how to construct our cables.

I would be shocked if there wasn't a monotonic increase in group chat/private chat during all those years to now. AIM just never made the transition to phones successfully.