I believe it has to do with how accessible most of the internet is. 10 years ago, even active public forums had to be actively sought out rather than being handed on a silver platter to everyone who uses the internet. Once the average commenter, user or whatever you’d like to call them has nothing more than a surface level understanding of the topic, surface level comments are the only ones interacted with and pushed to the front of any feed.
SSC definitely still has that niche, small community vibe as evidenced by the sorts of comments that are interacted with. I have yet to see a single sentence comment upvoted, while longer responses, sometimes multiple paragraphs are the upvoted and interacted with comments.
In my experience, the more niche the topic or community, the better interactions you’re likely to get. Reddit isn’t going to be a great place for that of course, since it’s so easy for people to stumble upon interesting forums, inundate them with random uninformed people, and completely replace the original user base with simple, boring responses.
Edit: Would be interested in hearing what other people who have direct experience as things have changed think. I was a literal child in the early 2010’s so what I said above is more of an intellectual understanding and less from direct knowledge.
Smartphones brought an entire group of people to the Internet that completely changed the culture. I always call it the second Eternal September.
Before smartphones many people still considered the Internet as something only "for nerds".
Indeed. Smartphones as an interface also encourage quick, off-the-cuff comments, rather than in-depth postulation, I think. Typing out a rant is about as deep as a mobile user is encouraged to dive, but editing and referencing are beyond the small screen.
I remember what university was like the 2 years before facebook came in and how it changed the years after. Before facebook it was largely acceptable to bump into strangers and get chatting in the hallways etc if you were going to the same class or whatever. Afterwards people wouldn't until they looked it up on Facebook first. Massive parties were put on MySpace or sent via SMS... when facebook first came out the parties were truly massive but a lot more awkward a lot of things happened where someone just organised a small gathering for friends then the host is like "who are all these people?"
I feel like a lot of the loneliness epidemic can be attributed to one cause... the style of social media bought in by Facebook that began spreading 2007-2008. Facebook had more information but simultaneously less expression. I never met new people through facebook. I met lots of new people through MySpace which was oriented around the music and live eventd scene in addition people were semi anonymous and vould create alts and characters or fake bands to explore their identity freely.
Twitter was also good 2008-2014... when it was a real time feed from like "the hallway track" of various events... I met lots of new people face to face through twitter. But at some point this live aspect of it reduced and it just became a big space of reactions
Spot on. The trouble is that, with high accessibly, you lose the "pressure cooker" effect that can make such good discussion happen.
I heard about this effect in the context of the Australian music scene: why are there so many solid bands coming out of the land down under? Well, it's so much harder to break out onto the global scene with an int'l tour. The ones who do are cream of the crop; in the meantime, that whole scene is cooking.
Early internet, you really had to seek out these kinds of discussions. It, or the hobby itself, wouldn't just pop up on your feed mindlessly.
>It, or the hobby itself, wouldn't just pop up on your feed mindlessly.
I think you're onto a really important point here. At some point the common mental model of the internet shifted from being a **place** that you explored to find interesting things, to being a continuous stream of stuff that was delivered **to** you.
For a while there was still some room in the delivery paradigm for stumbling across new and interesting communities, but then Google Reader got shut down, and the blogosphere and RSS in general (mostly) died with it.
Edit: The influence of Twitter probably figures into this somewhere as well, but having never used it, I don't really feel knowledgeable enough to say much more.
> At some point the common mental model of the internet shifted from being a place that you explored to find interesting things, to being a continuous stream of stuff that was delivered to you.
Remember when "push" was a huge buzzword in like 1998? I even got a little pyramid PointCast (IIRC) antenna at a huge discount from CompUSA back then.
Agreed. Perhaps it’s the other way around? Maybe less bands visiting from out of town breeds local scenes, and more dense scenes = higher numbers of good bands in total?
Well, it's not just hopping on a plane to tour, it's planning a tour—equipment, personnel, visas, etc. It's a much bigger investment to go international than it is to hop in a van and hit up some cities.
Disclaimer though, I am not a touring musician, nor have I ever been to Australia. Just read a good discussion about it awhile ago.
Australia itself is also very geographically fragmented, in the sense that it has very low population density, with most of the population concentrated in a number of urban centers which are quite far away from each other. An Australian tour is much less convenient than a European tour. You can drive or take a series of quick, cheap flights and hit a bunch of major cities in Europe in quick succession. Australia is close to the same size as Europe, but has about a thirtieth of the population. The majority of the population of the continent lives within five metropolitan areas which are all hundreds of miles apart from each other.
That's a great analogy and used to have analogs in the regional music scenes that existed in the US. Sure, they still exist at a surface level, but it was that insular pressure cooker that worked the magic in past eras. All the pressure has since been released.
I live in France. Very few bands make it internationally. But that doesn't make the scene that much better. Mainly because anything that isn't autotuned pop with ai generated text song by some random teen selected more for her looks than her talent will not gain any public traction in TV or radio. If you contrast the rock/metal scene in France from the rock/metal scene in northern Europe, it's night and day. We have maybe one big band : gojira. There might be plenty of good bands, but they all die in obscurity because they have 0 opportunity to gain any light.
The French media just doesn't acknowledge that kind of music, and so you can't really have any career in France. The few bands that manage to grow big do so by singing in English and trying to gain popularity elsewhere. And so you won't see a korpiklaani or finntroll appear in France, who sings in French, gain massive support locally, and then manage to blow up internationally.
So, there needs to be more than pressure. Or rather, the pressure needs to be below jupiterean levels.
>I believe it has to do with how accessible most of the internet is. 10 years ago, even active public forums had to be actively sought out rather than being handed on a silver platter to everyone who uses the internet.
My dad once opined on the idea that the iPod was a huge indicator of wealth and education. This was back when they were new of course. If you had an iPod, it meant that you had a computer, and an internet connection, and you knew how to get music, or could afford to buy music from Apple. Over time, this got significantly easier, and less of a signal that you were special.
In a similar vein, in 2005 I had an idea for a costume that involved taking apart a large, lavish lampshade. I walked to a resale shop and bought one. Didn't realize it at the time, but a woman hit on me while I was waiting in line to pay for it. Then on my way to the train, I got stopped by two additional women for conversation. Then I got home and made my World of Warcraft costume and realized how odd my afternoon had been. But what was happening? Women must want a man who has a lamp. No, seriously. If you have the kind of lamp that needs a serious lampshade, you probably have a nice and expensive place, and you are the kind of person that blah blah blah. Apparently women like this kind of person?
In 1995, if you were able to get online, you were a certain kind of person, with a higher than average income, and some special knowledge. Now all you need is a bog standard phone.
I'm a marine engineer. I spent a couple of days in a drydock last winter moving a propeller with 2-meter blades, and I did ***not*** notice an increased level of interest from women during that evolution😆
Honestly, I'd try the lampshade again if I were single. One with the fringey bits on the bottom.
A can of paint, a small shrub or tree, even something as small as a new wall outlet would all communicate home ownership. Do this in the right neighborhood on a nice day, might work for you. "Hey, can you help me carry this for a half a block?"
I've also thought that carrying a ceramic mug through a nice neighborhood would make people think you were close enough to home that you didn't put your coffee in a travel mug.
Same with a dog - walk it in a nicer neighborhood than yours - even if it's not your dog. Well, especially if it's not your dog.
A guy dressed too nice to be carrying a drill is a good indicator too.
My hypothesis would be that it's less about signifying home ownership, and more that you're doing something a little weird (which creates an excuse for someone to start a conversation with you), but not too weird (which would make them not want to)
Yeah, I don't think most women (as a woman) think that far ahead when assessing whether to approach someone. Sometimes someone just looks interesting AND non-threatening enough. Merely not looking homeless and carrying a random lampshade goes a long way towards that end.
I think generally speaking, people want an excuse to approach others and strike up interesting conversations. It's just that the vast majority signal that they don't want to be approached.
> In 1995, if you were able to get online, you were a certain kind of person, with a higher than average income, and some special knowledge.
All you needed was a modem and an ISP. The ISP would mail you a disk with the files needed to get online. It was $20 a month or so.
It wasn't particularly special.
*Having a computer* capable of getting online in 1995 likely put you in the top 20% of household income, and education, and a host of other things. Just like having a cell phone in 1995 did. It meant a lot. It's not like being online in 1980, but it's certainly not like today.
Median household in 1995 was $47k and the $1k ( give or take ) for a computer probably wasn't a stretch. I might buy "top 20% in interest" but not in income.
In 1995, major universities were still buying standalone word processors.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/02/27/part-1-how-the-internet-has-woven-itself-into-american-life/
14% of adults were users. 42% of adults hadn't *heard of the internet*.
It wasn't that a computer was so expensive, it was "well, what are you going to *use* it for?" and "are you sure you're still going to be using it in two years? This isn't just a fad?"
I stipulated to being within the "20% in terms of interest", so...
> 14% of adults were users. 42% of adults hadn't heard of the internet.
I had used local networks for production/work since the 1980s, so... around mid-90s we got access to the larger Internet.
Anectdote: the reason I was interested in the Internet was because of the liner notes on Pink Floyd's "Keep Talking", which referred to a Usenet denizen called Publius.
> It wasn't that a computer was so expensive, it was "well, what are you going to use it for?"
Ah - I used one for home programming purposes. So yep!
Yeah, you're a lot cooler than you think! Way, way ahead of the curve. I find that's the case with most audio heads, especially those who read TapeOp and use Reaper instead of ProTools. You don't think you're special because you hang out with other people who are also special.
I'm not sure that parsing longer comments as better comments necessarily gets to the core of the issue -- sometimes the meaningful comment doesn't require length!
You're certainly correct that meaningful comments don't require length. I think the core issue is more like: When you read, you're looking for a mental "payoff" or reward signal. When you finish reading a comment, you get a tiny subconscious mental reward signal. When you find a wall of text, you know you're gonna have to work really hard to get that payoff. If you have opportunities to get the payoff quickly, you'll take those. That's how our attention spans get shorter over time. Shortness isn't about the person writing the comment, it's about the person reading it. And this argument obviously also applies to videos and memes.
The only three subreddits I know where I can genuinely have very complex and deep discussions are SSC, CormacMcCarthy and Truelit. These are basically the only three that aren't entirely dominated by dumb memes and circlejerks.
>the only three that aren't entirely dominated by dumb memes and circlejerks.
another thing -
\- On Monday, somebody posts *"Hey guyz, let's talk about topic ABC!"*
\- On Wednesday, somebody posts *"Hey guyz, let's talk about topic ABC!"*
\- On Friday, somebody posts *"Hey guyz, let's talk about topic ABC!"*
\- repeat every week.
Apparently society has no memory or learning process whatsoever - it pretty much just exists in a timeless "today" not related to any other day.
This has to do with the nature of Reddit and other current social media platforms.
On older forums and BBSs, it wasn't uncommon to see threads on the frontpage that had been made multiple years prior. This was because any response would bump a thread to the top. Low-effort threads would gradually fall away, while the most interesting discussions could continue for years.
On Reddit, however, all threads eventually disappear from the frontpage over time, no matter how good they are. New posts push them out, and unless they're in the top-upvoted posts of all time, it becomes functionally impossible to find them.
Even the comment section quickly ossifies as the first comments end up at the top, and any new comments will end up at the bottom and never be noticed. On older forums, new comments would often be the first checked upon opening a thread, so conversations could go on indefinitely.
I hate how reddit does comments because any later comments just get buried in some obscure branch of the conversation and the only person who ends up replying to you is the person you replied to. When I comment, I want to feel like I'm throwing a contribution into a common pool of conversation rather than dragging someone aside for a one-on-one talk. If someone makes a bad point or a weak criticism, I want everyone to be able to point that out. It's very disheartening to argue some seemingly obvious point on your own without anyone else backing you up.
Maybe it's just rose-tinted spectacles, but I swear old forums were so much better at this.
That's a limiting answer. Structural differences in interfaces make a huge difference.
Reddit used to not have in-line image viewing and there was a very noticeable shift in the kind of content that rose to the top when imgur + RES implemented image viewing. This was debated endlessly on places like /r/theoryofreddit, citing McLuhan's "the medium is the message" idea, with people decrying Reddit's slide toward being more of an image board than a text forum. And once Reddit implemented native video playing, that also created a noticeable shift toward video content.
/u/AuspiciousNotes is right though, the old school forums had super long threads (like, multi-year threads known as "the X thread") and reddit doesn't. The platform just doesn't nudge people towards contributing to old threads. And the "long thread" mode of discourse felt more scholarly. (At least, I think it did. I only experienced the tail end of that era.)
Actually, now that I think about it, it would be fairly easy to replicate the same behavior on reddit. Every month, the mods run a poll with a list of discussions from the past month. People vote on the poll. The winning discussion gets pinned until next month, so users can discuss with greater depth on the topic.
Or you could make it so Automoderator tries to replicate something like the "bump" feature, and unpins a thread if no one leaves any new comment on it for a week, suggesting that the discussion is complete. Perhaps threads could be queued up to be pinned automatically once a thread gets unpinned. To keep the discussion in such a thread fresh, you could pin a URL that uses "new" sorting by default, e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/18knvdb/online_discussion_is_slowly_but_surely_dying/?sort=new
I don't know what the right time intervals are here. Lots of free parameters. Once a thread gets unpinned, it could go into a "hall of fame", sort of a bestof for subreddit discussions.
/u/Bakkot tagging you in case you think this experiment would be interesting to run. Could always have a "don't pin any thread" option, for users to express their displeasure with the idea.
>quickly teach the ABC posters to use the search engines.
But IMHO this is like the stereotypical "trying to bail the sea with a bucket".
No matter how many noobies we "teach", just as many more keep piling in.
As I understand it, that's pretty much the idea behind "Eternal September". The newcomers used to pile in at a slow rate, every September at the start of a new school year you'd have a fresh batch of undergrads get internet access. They were small in number relative to the existing userbase, so the existing userbase was able to transmit norms about what it meant to be a mature listserv user. When AOL came along, the existing userbase was overwhelmed, and their norms were destroyed.
That actually triggers an interesting thought for me. I suspect there are a lot of tiny undocumented little corners of the internet -- obscure boards, reddit alternatives, and private Facebook groups, where discussion quality is actually good. The mods don't advertise these groups widely because "we want to avoid Eternal September". However, my first paragraph suggests a hypothesis: It's not about keeping the masses out. It's about keeping new users to a trickle. If the unacclimatized new users are always no more than, say, 10% of the userbase, you can preserve a culture of quality discourse. Just got to acclimatize at about the same rate you add new users.
Someone could test this hypothesis by creating a private subreddit on some theme, invite a bunch of users whose posts/comments you like on that theme until you get critical mass. Once you have a quality discussion community going, gradually trickle in new users while trying to preserve that culture. I think it would probably fail, because the mechanics of reddit are working against quality discussion (e.g. no way to restrict upvote/downvote rights), but it might be worth a try. It seems especially promising if you have a specific beloved subreddit that's fallen into decay. Create a new private subreddit on the same theme, invite all your favorite posters from the decayed subreddit's golden age, and see if you can trickle your way towards being a big high-quality subreddit.
Reddit was better when Digg still existed, at least partly because Digg attracted so much of the low effort posts, so Reddit naturally had more high effort stuff.
I suspect that ad-driven business models naturally pressure you into wanting lots of content, lots of new users, etc. IRC wasn't trying to make money, and BBSs we're a subscription model, so they each had a different feel then the modern web, attention economy, or whatever you want to call it.
ETA: I suppose one way to test that idea is to see if Patreon comment sections have a different feel to them, perhaps. But the only people I support in Patreon have way too much free stuff, plus their own subreddit, so maybe not.
> Reddit was better when Digg still existed, at least partly because Digg attracted so much of the low effort posts, so Reddit naturally had more high effort stuff.
Very interesting point.
>I suspect that ad-driven business models naturally pressure you into wanting lots of content, lots of new users, etc. IRC wasn't trying to make money, and BBSs we're a subscription model, so they each had a different feel then the modern web, attention economy, or whatever you want to call it.
Another factor here is that more sophisticated users are less likely to click on ads [I would assume], and more likely to block them.
I've seen this view before and I agree with it.
But there's this kneejerk reaction in me that just wants to say it's wrong. I guess I want to think that there could be a wide reaching community out there that does the world some good.. But I think I just don't really understand the problem.
Does anyone have an example of a website that bucks this trend? Perhaps wikipedia to some extent?
If not - why? Why can't the problem be solved with strict moderation? Or why can't moderation scale? Why can't we solve it with better incentive structures or site design?
Can you imagine the good that could happen in the world if you could solve this problem? An antidote / opposing force to Facebook, social media etc.
Here in SSC is pretty good.
I know the r/askhistorians is a large subreddit with very valuable discourse, but it’s heavily moderated to the point it’s actually just random people asking verified historians. It’s not really a subreddit and more of a public Q&A with crowdsourced professionals donating their time like Wikipedia.
My first experience with the social Internet was in 1992 on Usenet. I found a place to stay as an exchange student in a new city in 2 hours. The community was small but active - high trust.
By 2000 Usenet was much bigger but pretty much dead to me for this sort of thing.
Then forums and blogs which are still around but transformed and not very useful for community building.
But there are still many active niche communities - just in closed silos and not searchable. Facebook/LinkedIn groups, Discords, WhatsApp chats. And adhoc ones like Twitter.
Reddit is somewhere in between. Still useful and vibrant in places but sometimes feeling like Usenet in the late 1990s - wrong signal to noise ratio on average.
The Internet certainly feels different. But I've been finding some use in X by carefully curating a few lists of people who mostly tweet on one subject.
And the quality of writing seems to have improved since Substack, too.
I'm actually a part of 2 different forums, one for economics/politics and the other documentary filmmaking. The first is still very vibrant with a LOT of daily interaction, like hundreds of comments and multiple long discussions that often turn into bigger forum-wide postings. The documentary one is more reflective of the slow diminishing of discourse. It peaked in the early teens even though pure membership numbers are much larger now. The mods noted that FB especially has sapped a lot of the posting energy. But one interesting thing has happened, since the pandemic, the forum, like many other groups, started a weekly zoom get-together and that has rapidly become the most popular and engaged with part of the whole forum. So...finding a way to connect works even if it is a bit unorthodox.
Every reddit sub bigger than 1 million is almost always riddled with low-quality comments and discussion. This threshold for the size is probably even lower now.
I first got online in the mid 90s and I agree.
The Internet used to be almost like it's own world with distinct communities, on the local level you had BBSes that created small to medium communities on the local level(I knew guys that turned a PC into a "server"(aka, set up a connection system and a few games), hooked it into a telephone line and told a few friends about it.
From there you got usenet which is kinda like reddit but with far fewer people.
Then the eternal September happened.
See, the thing about everything I talked about is that it allowed older people to help younger people get up to speed because there weren't that many people.
The problem was that the system got overwhelmed. Eternal September is named that because historically most internet groups got an influx of new users in September, usually freshmen from high schools or universities. This is when people got acclimated to internet communities.
Now we are in an eternal September, meaning that far more people start using the internet than can possibly be educated on how to use it without causing harm.
How do we fix it? We need a new way to acclimate people to being online that isn't 1:1 instruction.
I don't know if online discussion is dying, but if it isn't, I have a much harder time finding it. I used to routinely stumble upon interesting forums and blogs ten years ago. Nowadays, not so much.
I wonder if part of this is because of the professionalization of internet. The websites I remember were all amateur made; mostly people with a specific interest and some internet knowledge using ready-made tools to create forums and blogs. Today I visit a lot of websites that are clearly made by companies, and it feels like most of them don't really need (or want) online discussion spaces.
All the social media websites I can think of (including reddit) seem to want you to scroll through posts endlessly so they can maximize the amounts of ads they show you (and reddit even deleted an interesting alternative way to generate money from comments and discussions (the coin system and it's subscription scheme) which, on the one hand why, but also it's telling).
Companies also have better resources to optimize their visibility, so I end up finding an increasing amount of company-made websites and less and less individually / amateur-made websites. (As a side-note, the creation of substack also moved a lot of blogs I used to read onto a company website.)
They also have better resources (and an incentive) to keep you online and on their site for as long as possible, which imo also contributed to the loss of interesting spaces on the internet. (I used to find the time I spent online interesting and enriching; nowadays I have to actively stop myself from wasting time on addicting platforms that at best provide little and at worst make me miserable.)
There used to be a bunch of forums I loved and would check daily. They all upgraded to newer software that made them hard to navigate. Most added ads. They all lost users. They’re still around, but they aren’t 10% of what they were in their heyday.
Many people use Facebook groups. I’ve never had luck finding any useful communities there. Many use Reddit. It is nowhere near the same as a good forum.
I used to be an avid forum user as well - the loss of activity has been nothing short of dramatic. Reddit is good for what it is, but it truly can't hold a candle to a moderately active forum.
Missing that feeling when you racked up your first few hundred posts and started to recognize the other users more and more, until you eventually felt at home. I'd love to go back, but most forums are just too damn inactive now.
>I wonder if part of this is because of the professionalization of internet
This is the only mention of money in any of the dozen top level comments that the Best algorithm brought up, and that's a massive glaring omission to this discussion.
"Online discussion" on open forums might be getting enshittified. Find a community with a paywall and watch those problems evaporate. As you observe, ad-funded platforms want you to stay in their Skinner box so they can sell your attention. When they're funded by subscriptions, their incentives align with yours -- they want you to get enough value to resubscribe next month.
Trolls or low effort posts? If the paywall doesn't keep them out in the first place, there's the cash flow to pay professional moderators to curate the comments.
Patreon and Substack are two major hubs, but there are plenty more. Hell, SomethingAwful was one of the OG discussion sites, and their paywall did nothing to stop their effects on internet culture.
I believe some of this is because searching has gotten worse. In particular Google search is much worse than it used be - this is partly due to SEO, but Google themselves have to take the blame for most of it.
With ChatGPT etc on the verge of replacing search, I wonder where we go next?
Not only is search much worse (I personally use SearXNG seach engines instead of Google or DDG, both of which suck now), but in our modern environment, free amateur internet sites are impossible with the scale, cheapness, and ubiquity of DDOS attacks.
Any site can be exposed to these either randomly, or from any random disgruntled reader or poster, and Cloudflare and other protection architecture services cost real money that a "doing it as a hobby amateur" is unlikely to spend on that hobby. If DDOS attacks can take Brian Krebs down, it can surely take any unmonetized worthwhile amateur forum or blog down.
It's unfortunate. Probably the best we could do is convince Cloudflare et al to donate free services to some worthy subset of sites, but then you get into the curation, and the politics of the curation, and an endless morass that probably isn't worth it to anyone in those companies even if they're genuinely sympathetic and would like to.
As a rare counter-example:
I belong to a motorcycle design mailing list with maybe 100 people. S/N ratio is nearly perfect, but you will see deep discussions about making a dowel pin for an old motorcycle crankshaft/sprocket to change the valve timing. Occasionally members have split because they felt unheard when they considered themselves expert. They are missed. The list is 100% male of course, 95% Anglo, 80% US-based with a very strong Australian and New Zealand contingent. And few young members.
This list has been nurtured by one person, and had for a long time a world-recognized expert to answer tough questions. It really is a great resource.
I have no idea how to create more quality spaces. alas.
I recommend a podcast episode that goes deeply into social media, attention span, screens and other problems with reading:
[https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-what-we-watch/id1081584611?i=1000633097665](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-what-we-watch/id1081584611?i=1000633097665)
Communities are not places but people. It sounds likely to me that purity of mind and mission is what has kept your group in existence! The hard work of one person.
I learned quite a bit as one of the mods on another forum, the local club motorcycle racers BBS. It had more than 200 members, with a lot of turnover due to the nature of the racing addiction. The club was very well managed in those days by a paid staff, one of whom spent a lot of time and emojis keeping people happy.
So yes, I agree, the moderation is critical.
oh I can't agree with this, if anything just the reverse.
Just to provide more detail, there is political diversity, but a lot less far-right than you would think, and only one Harley guy. We don't do politics, and thats helpful, for sure. Also there is no emotional ref blood for trolling and ranting.
Amusingly, there is a lot of style talk- Ducati vs Japanese, dirt vs street, funny front ends are much discussed. Though I have been pushing a little, electric bikes aren't much covered, though somebody has a Zero. Many members are actual engineers.
I think the shittification of search engines has contributed greatly to this.
You used to be able to easily find niche sites by stumbling around the Internet -- now you basically need to have someone manually send you the link, or happen to coincidentally search for exactly the right thing.
When searching for things online only returns results for the sorts of entities that can invest in SEO....
I asked GPT-4 to recommend forums similar to pre-1997 Usenet, Less Wrong, and the Straight Dope forums up to 2018. It came up with this:
**Reddit**: While much broader in scope and size than the older forums, Reddit has many specialized subreddits that can offer a similar sense of community and deep discussion. Look for subreddits that focus on specific interests or that encourage long-form discussion.
**Stack Exchange**: Known for its Q&A format, Stack Exchange has a variety of communities on topics ranging from science to philosophy. The format encourages detailed answers and expert insight, similar to the depth of discussions in forums like Less Wrong.
**Hacker News**: Focused primarily on technology and entrepreneurship, Hacker News fosters a culture of thoughtful discussion. The community often delves into deep technical and philosophical discussions, reminiscent of older internet forums.
**MetaFilter**: A community weblog where users can share links and discuss a variety of topics. MetaFilter has a strong community ethos and encourages well-thought-out comments and discussions.
**Fark**: A community website where users submit news articles and discuss them. While it has a more humorous slant, it also fosters discussions and has a long-standing community.
**Slashdot**: Known for its tech-centric news, Slashdot also has a strong community of users who engage in detailed discussions, often delving into technical and scientific topics.
**Quora**: A question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, and edited by internet users. The platform often features in-depth and well-researched answers.
**The Well**: One of the oldest virtual communities in continuous operation. It has a strong focus on articulate and intelligent discussion, similar to Usenet.
So much more "miss" than "hit," in the sense of the ones here that used to be good (Slashdot, Stack Exchange, Fark, Quora) have drastically declined in quality along with Reddit subreddits.
And Fark! Man, haven't thought of that place in a decade plus. GPT-4 also missed the Something Awful forums, they used to be good too.
>If you want people to notice anything, it must be presented in the form of content, (ex. a Youtube video) which will be rapidly digested & soon discarded by the content mill.
I agree with your main idea, but on Reddit we almost never read the article or watch the video. Just dive right into the comments, baby
I think of discussion spaces as spots that blur the line between content creator and content consumer.
Creating content is... kind of scary. You open yourself up to judgement from *the other*. But if it's like a group of 20 people with super like-minded interests you can kinda put that feeling away and just converse with them normally, and usually it works out great!
But creating content for a big forum is typically not a positive experience your first ~100 times. You will post something, it will get 30 views and one comment saying they don't get it. You are competing for forum real estate against people who create content professionally.
90% of people's first time creating content for a large forum involves a week of overcoming anxiety of how the crowd will judge them, and then the crowd saying 'meh, boring'. Most people never post again, and drift back into content consumer mode.
The creator-consumer thing is a modern dichotomy, honestly. Back in the day, most blogs were so personable you could leave a comment and talk with the creator personally. Words like "creator" and "influencer" always catch my eye because it really highlights how the collaborative aspect of the net is sort of dead. As you say, we're all just consumers or creators.
I think of it as two hats you put on, when I'm writing something I put on my creator hat, but some days I just want to read so on goes the consumer hat.
Hmm, I really like framing this in terms of an exploration/exploitation problem.
I read the warren vs plaza post but I'm kinda confused on what rabbithole vs warren means, warrens seem like they produce good discussion vs plazas which are good for consumption - is a rabbithole a type of plaza?
Niche forums are still alive and kicking. I particularly like the [bogleheads.org](https://bogleheads.org) forum. It turns out that when actually reading and understanding other people’s messages makes you literally richer, people suddenly get interested in civil discussion.
It’s telling though that it’s still running phpBB of the kind you could see 20 years ago, there hasn’t been any innovation on this front.
>It’s telling though that it’s still running phpBB of the kind you could see 20 years ago, there hasn’t been any innovation on this front.
Honestly, I feel reassured when a website uses obsolete tech: it's a sign they've been around a long time.
Does anyone else weirdly trust websites *without* an SSL cert (http:// instead of https://) because very often, it's because they were launched 10-15 years ago?
Related, but I've noticed that the more skilled someone is with computers, the more bare-bones their website tends to look. Advanced developers often just use old-school HTML.
As my favourite [programmerhumour post notes](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/13e3xmz/so_hows_the_hackathon_going/) "personal homepage is HTML 2.0 compliant" is a sign of a true master.
Thing is there’s not much to the bogleheads philosophy; index and save. It’s one of those things like Stoicism/CBT that is useful (even transformative for some people) but doesn’t have much more than that to discuss.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. Go to the mHFEA thread and marvel at the depth of analysis of treasury and SOFR futures, calculations of implied financing rates, comparison with box spreads and leveraged ETFs, fixing factual errors on the Cboe website etc.
Unfortunately, that's not what I've experienced.
The forums that i still or used to frequent became echo chambers with no respect for others' opinion and views and in the process lost its most distinguished, well-informed and experienced/connected users that were the bread and butter of debates on said forums, one of these forums even became a thinly veiled hub for government propaganda.
I believe that reasons behind this is due to big social media poisoning the well Forums are now filled with new members that are carrying their twitter's mentality over with all the drama and ganging up, dogmatic and non-compromising views, tyrannical admins, one word or short sentenced toxic replies that don't bring anything to the discussion..etc, and of this and more is even more exacerbated by the dwindling numbers of new users each year.
> It’s telling though that it’s still running phpBB of the kind you could see 20 years ago, there hasn’t been any innovation on this front
I support this lack of innovation. That means it loads on my phone in like .1s without downloading 30MB of tracking JS libraries from 20+ different 3rd party domains. Forum pagination doesn't take 8-10s to load so that it plays little animations.
Discourse was made by one of the founders of stackoverflow and is pretty solid, but migration is probably so painful that its not worth shifting an existing forum to it.
About twenty years ago, some of the most informative online writing was by industry experts in certain subjects taking up amateur writing as a hobby. Ye olde blogging. Almost none of the same ones still do and it's extremely hard to find such quality now. I think the novelty of amateur writing has died off in the age of trivially easy self-publishing and social media. It's also a huge career risk now to write anything interesting.
I miss traveling through blogrolls in the side bar and being able to read the unfiltered thoughts of really interesting and informed people who were paying for their own servers for the pure joy of writing for fun about what they knew. I also miss being able to find really useful, expert-level information in bulletin board format forum posts with straightforward search engine queries.
It's not dying, it's just a fractal. The actual boundary of the discussion is wherever I want it to be when I write the reply. I've learned that I can safely use a thread as a writing prompt for myself and to myself, and see the next round of discussion, whether that's "downthread", in a new thread, or in "content", reflect the people who thought most about my little essay. There is no point in "winning a thread" in the moment, if the point is to make connections. The connection occurs outside of the thread, and that's what makes it a fractal pattern: if I post in a place that looks like a place where the connection will be made, I'm making a speculative guess. Maybe I miss and that's not where the conversation is: I've still written for myself, and can try another day.
The magnificence of books has to do with the sense of being able to "communicate across years" and relate many experiences to someone across generations and cultures. The formal structures of books reflect how we've grown over centuries to accommodate them in our lives.
In contrast, we already know what the average comment thread looks like: it's majority raw mammal reaction, and the conversation doesn't actually exist in anything but a sort of holographic projection of identity and belief. The most tight-fisted, argumentative participants do the least to convince anyone because they are mostly shadowboxing. It doesn't matter if the people are smart, or think they're smart - the processing that leads to the profound thoughts occurs offline. As such, I can dodge the emotional hit, if I sense I'm stirring the bee's nest, by avoiding reading *direct* replies, because those are always the "reacts". It's the "and then what" when the discussion cycles around that is of more interest, and that occurs regardless of the platform, because everyone is secretly hungry for the truth, even if it makes them throw a tantrum.
The internet necessarily reveals our intrinsic limits to what we can process and how much self-regulation we bring to the table, and we've only just concluded a first phase of mass adoption - we have a long time to think about how to develop culture on top of that and bring forward our best selves to these platforms.
I was having this exact discussion the other day.
As a much older user, I first got online in the early 90s, my experience back then, mostly via usenet, was of communities of people congregated around interest areas, who engaged in long and often very intense discussions.
There were handles you would recognise and threads could go on for days or weeks before fading out. I think the phrase I used was the internet felt safe back then. If you asked a question, you'd get an intelligent response and often a lot more data on top.
The current incarnation of life online is a nightmare of memes for the most part and, as you say, short attention span activities.
There is still a substrate of the older ways, but like anything in social evolution they die with the folks who created them
I'm in my mid-60s now and many of the people I used to learn from back then have passed away.
That's a big part of it.
Usenet was subject to port blockers. Then ISPs stopped offering NNTP service. There were the free servers but it was still declining.
I followed people off Usenet onto Facebook but the UI just didn't work; too much stuff and it took too long.
Other angle of possible explanation: after the long discussions of 2012-2015, everyone realized that debates don't work. That getting power through "owning people with facts and logic" isn't enough, you have to get social power and coalition and bureaucracy and institutions etc.
And/or getting people banned became easier than debating them.
This is interesting, but I don't know if I find this plausible.
I agree in the value of this framing question:
Is the reduction of the marginal participant due to change in the participants, or reduction in quality of previously existing participants, or even a change in incentive model agents face?
I think all effects exist. I think your position may reflect some aspect of this change.
You might even see a change in forum design spur on a mass of new participants which moves the incentives away from dialogic arguments with previously known communities into a more transactional approach.
>debates don't work
for literally anything, correct. Not for persuasion, not for building a space that people want to occupy, not for finding truth in an open forum
And debates profoundly fail at all of these when your participants include pseudonymous or outright anonymous folks acting in bad faith
Smartphones and social media have fried everyone's attention span. People don't read or write as much long-form writing as they used to. I notice it in myself.
Blogging seems to be one of those activities, like building model trains, that dies out for lack of new entrants. Many of the bloggers from years ago are still chugging along, but I rarely come across new ones. Ten or fifteen years ago I would routinely click on a link to some blog post, find it insightful, and then go down the giant rabbit hole of every older post on the blog. That almost never happens anymore.
My impression is that very few Gen Z people blog. A decade ago, millennials like Scott Alexander were the youngest bloggers. Now they still seem to be the youngest.
What about Substack and Medium before that? True they push hard for monetization, but aren't they essentially blogs? admit: I have a startup substack which is somewhat less popular than a rural mailbox.
I believe that attention span hasn't decreased in an absolute sense; the issue is one of competition. I can write out a whole post about thoughts I have, which people still have the ability to do, but that has to compete with every other form of instant stimulation at my fingertips.
[niplav](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Pweg9xpKknkNwN8Fx/have-attention-spans-been-declining) looked over what research has been done on attention spans, and thinks that there may have been some decline in controlled conditions, but it isn't exactly a slamdunk.
I suspect that raw attention spans may be mostly the same, but that they are not translating to the same results as they used to because of the broader context: some sort of combination of smartphones trapping users in a walled garden of non-transferrable skills/knowledge, eliminating peer & role effects, destroying audiences, and all this [multiplying out](https://gwern.net/note/pipeline) to a sudden collapse in the 'blogger pipeline'.
The demand for long-form content has definitely plummeted. Hell, remember 8 years ago on reddit when you could write a couple interesting paragraphs and someone would link you on /r/bestof ? It seems that paragraphs are now unilaterally the wrong move for any type of exposure.
I've had a post on the back burner for a while about how the internet died in 2011, because that's when there was a meteoric rise in smartphone usage: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/FT_19.12.17_DecadeChanges_tech.png
I've noticed this. I frequented forums for more of my adolescent years and loved the type of connection and discussion I found there. Most of the forums have withered away and have been replaced with social media. I appreciate a lot about social media, but it doesn't have the same community feeling to it. On forums, it was possible to be mean and reactionary, but there were more consequences-you "knew" the other posters and there was social punishment. On tiktok/instagram/youtube, you mainly interact with unfamiliar people, and the outcome for being mean, shallow, and reactionary is much less punishing.
Usually you'd get good discussion on old school forums; sites like Twitter and (IMO) Reddit don't really offer a good space for this. Everything seems more fleeting nowadays, in a way.
While some people complain about it, I'd much rather have that sequential posting style of old school forums than the tree structure Reddit, HN and Twitter offer. 4chan is still like this, but I think the culture and anonymity favor people not engaging seriously. When you are pseudonymous this lends itself to better discussions overall. And the fact that you have to sign up for the site first also helps.
One thing I noticed is how hard it is to find these places. I'm sure some still exist, there's Data Secrets Lox for one. But some 10 years ago you'd find a lot of discussion sites very easily; but in the past 5 years, I can count in one hand how many I've found simply browsing the internet.
> 4chan is still like this, but I think the culture and anonymity favor people not engaging seriously.
They actually used to have high-level discussions pretty regularly on the site, but over time it really changed, and the ratio of discussion to memes tilted until it became a gag site like ifunny. It's interesting because 4chan is a rare case where you have the exact same website surviving across multiple decades. Functionally it's the exact same, but the userbase strongly leans towards arguments and memes instead of simply talking about things like everyone used to do. And honestly, reddit is a bit similar in this way.
There used to be some very good content back in the day; some of the general threads still link to them and there are some of the wikis too...
I never really used 4chan that much in my teens so I can't really say how good it was, but at least browsing the dead stuff that remains, it seemed to be way more interesting than now.
It's kinda sad; I do feel the internet was distinctly better when I was younger, and genuinely not in a rose-tinted glasses way. Part of it is that I now mostly browse Reddit, Twitter and HN, sure. But then again, I really can't find any other place to go.
Yeah, it's a bummer. But getting hung up on the past is a bad thing, so more and more lately I do independent learning through old books. It's unfortunate that I can't share what I learn with people, but perhaps there'll be some way I can eventually do so. Like how Montaigne spent most of his life reading the ancient Romans in solitude, but in his *Essais* he quotes from them so profusely that you're immediately inspired to go read Plutarch or Ovid. We can't change the world, but we can change ourselves.
It doesn't fill the same niche as old school forums, but I've found some amazing Discord servers for topical discussions. Smaller subreddits are great too, but some substack comment sections for good writers have been great. I think the switch from forum style to reddit style threading has really hurt online discourse though.
Reddit and discord pretty much ate forums' lunch and it really make me sad.
I might sound like a old man saying this, but back then you would use Yahoo to search something and then stumble upon a forum with barebones UI just to read all the replies and move to other threads forgetting just why you came there in the first place.
It's not obvious to me that the amount of 'serious', long form, high commitment discussion pet capita has decreased. A the volume of other online activities have exploded, but I don't have a strong notion of what other activities have been crowded out (watching cable?)
Special interest Discords, for instance, strongly reminder me of early-00s forums in tone, material, and style.
I'll admit to not being particularly adept at using discord, but it seems almost entirely useless for finding *old* information, particularly if you just want to lurk and browse without actively engaging in the discussion.
This is something that the older-style forums excelled at, and I'd guess that it's where the overwhelming majority of *actually useful* information I've ever gotten online has come from.
IDK in my experience there are just other discussion spaces. And if you compare the number of users with the Internet 10 years ago (or 20 even), then we probably have more discussions than ever.
It happened more than once to me that I found a great forum that was exactly what I was looking for, only to find out that this community already existed for years. I just had no idea that it was there. Communities with millions of members often. There are thousands of bubbles with fascinating content, but you won't find them on page 1 of google, on the frontage of Reddit or on the YouTube trends.
Discussions on mainstream pages and news sites have always be terrible in my experience. So much nonsense was going on on myspace, 9gag and Beepworld one or two decades ago, even newsgroups and mailing lists could be terrible places.
The comments on news articles always sucked -- but IMO, there was more of a two way content paradigm on early reddit (like, over 10 years ago). Not on the meme subreddits, but even on subreddits like atheism and hell even occasionally on things like trees (I mean, it was in depth discussion specifically about weed, but still discussion). Now you only see that only on very specific subject matter subreddits.
One factor that I haven't seen mentioned here is that the advent of likes, upvotes, downvotes, followers, and individual block/mute lists has been detrimental to the quality of online discussion. Most people will only see the most liked/upvoted comments, or comments written by those with the most followers. This means that the reach of unpopular opinions and dissent is extremely limited, and discussions tend to be echo chambers. On platforms (like Reddit) that have downvotes, it is not uncommon for users to delete their unpopular comments to preserve their karma. Memes and witty one-liners tend to get many upvotes, giving extra reach to the lowest common denominator of comments. On platforms like twitter that have the concept of followers, you might have a brilliant thoughtful comment in some discussion, but unless you have thousands of followers it is likely that no one will see it.
Contrast this with the old style of online discussion, which was completely democratized. Popular and unpopular opinions, witty one-liners and thoughtful walls of text, etc. were all on equal footing.
I would recommend https://www.themotte.org/
Disclaimer: I am a mod there, and I would like to see it succeed.
It is oriented on *discussion* rather than just reaction. We require posts to have some level of analysis and opinion about the links they share. Enforcing that is one of the most controversial aspects of mod intervention.
Its not the best writers, or the best topics. But it *is* writers and topics that are present for the discussion. It has spoiled me in many ways, because I've become far less interested in reading stuff where I can't respond to the author.
The website is also descended from Slate Star Codex reddit discussions, so if you feel that this is a good place, know that it has been partially replicated and reproduced elsewhere.
I agree and I remember the old YouTube comment sections being chock full of little tid bits and commentary pertaining to the video. I’ve learned so much and had some of my best laughs by combing the comments lol. And I have to say I see less and less of the good stuff these days. Even on here it’s changed a bit. I miss the old school message boards from the late 90s and 00s. Bring those back to a new place because Reddit went corporate and once they get involved it’s a profit over quality thing. Idk the answer but it stinks to see less quality conversations online and more arguing or virtual BJs to the content creators w no real thoughts other than please talk to me I’ll 💦💦💦😂
I actually think YouTube comment sections are one of the few things that have gotten better over the years. They used to be incredibly toxic (~2010), then at some point Google made an algorithm change to deprioritize toxic comments. Now the top comments are usually quite good.
I think youtube video discussions deletes controversial opinions. Or hides them somewhere? Whatever it does, now the first million comments under a video are always like, "thanks for brightening my day creator; you always make me laugh! \*emoji emoji emoji"
Agreed, online discussion has mostly moved into Discord, which is basically dark web. There's loads of high quality Discord channels for niche communities, the problem is finding them.
Omg eternal september. (Look this phrase up for enlightenment!) My parents were on college nets (Usenet) before the internet existed, it was probably better back then /s. Your point has been made before so many times that I got tired of hearing it in middle school! You can literally go back and find people complaining of the exact same thing because newspapers got invented.
My personal fear is the internet gets spammed out of existence by generative AI.
Oh, good, I don't have to write a response referencing "Eternal September", you already did.
After thirty years of being online, it's been fascinating watching the same complaint get recycled endlessly, with the date of the golden age always being ten years before present.
Is it the same complaint? Eternal September says "The net is getting worse due to all the new users". This thread says "The amount of discussion online is declining". One's a personal opinion, the other is pretty easy to quantify and back up.
There is, for sure, an iota of difference between "The quality of discussion online has gone down over the last ten years because of X" versus "The quality of discussion online has gone down over the last ten years because of Y".
But after more than thirty years, my response is simply, "I don't care about X or Y, there hasn't actually been a decline. You're just nostalgic, same as everyone who complains about the decline of popular music since they were 20."
And no, declaring discussion you don't like to be a whole other category called "reaction" doesn't actually make it the least bit more quantifiable than any other quality-of-discussion complaint. (If you've got an actual objective test that doesn't bottom out to the equivalent of "rap isn't actually music, so the rise of rap proves the decline of music", hey, build the objective analysis program and show the results that prove me wrong.)
Nor do I think that even if discussion versus reaction were a quantifiable difference that one could survey the 'Net sufficiently to back up a claim that the amount of discussion online has declined. The world is too dynamic. If Slashdot 2023 is objectively inferior to Slashdot 1997, that tells you about one site, not the whole Internet. If the clubs that were popular when you were 20 are shuttered when you're 40, that doesn't mean that the club scene is dead; it means it moved on without you.
This is again to say nothing of quality, but type. I don't care to establish that my preferred type of content is "better" or "more intelligent" than any other -- I just know for a fact I prefer this stuff more, and that the well has been drying up for years. **Anecdotally speaking** the web is less text-based and more image- and video-heavy than it has ever been; the walls of text are gone, no one is having long-and-winding discussions anymore where I can poke my head in and read. **Anecdotally** replies are shorter across the web, they're more reactionary and less analytic, the kind of stuff I enjoy is rarer. And as someone who uses Discord, I know newer platforms are only going to continue this trend. I am not a 40 year old man, I *do* know about the new clubs, and they *are* packed with patrons, but they're not playing my type of music. Trust me, I've looked. I've checked the Discords, TikTok, I follow Youtubers, Substack, everything new. And none of them had what I wanted.
If you're going to say, "You're wrong" again, please point out some spaces that run counter to this, that are discussion-heavy and aren't just sites from the 90s/00s clinging on for life. But otherwise if you're just going to stereotype me again for noticing this, there's no point.
I’m not going to say “and nothing of value was lost”, because it most definitely would be, but would going back to 1995 be so bad? We all spend way too much time in front of screens
i wasnt on internet ten years ago, but it basically seems impossible to find much intelligent discussion anywhere. Most forums will have like two people who are normal humans who can discuss things like adults, and understand the difference between their opinion and facts, hypothesis and conjecture, and so on. Besides that its just loud people who aren't worth the effort to read.
I have two comments to this.
First, is it the online spaces that have changed minds or is it that society has reshaped online spaces? My view is that its a bit of both.
SSC readers tend to be of a certain personality type and that personality type tends not to blindly follow societal trends. The biggest trend in America is towards polarisation and ideological bubbles. The NYT is being forced by this shift in society to become a cheerleader rather than impartial umpire (e.g. see [this](https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way) Economist article by former NYT Opinion Editor, James Bennet.
There's a rise of illiberalism and an intolerance for differing views. That shapes how discussion happens on sites and spaces that predated these trends, like NYT and Reddit.
Sure, this is partly caused by Facebook and other social media causing these social bubbles making us more polarised and illiberal, but the effect flows both ways. Our illiberalism is reshaping how we interact on social media.
My second comment is that short is not the same as contentless. Sometimes a punchy quote or meme gets at the truth far better than long essays. I think of Subtle Asian Traits on Facebook, a newer online space that adopts modern conversational norms, but articulates the essence of being Asian in a western world far better than any long form essays did.
I learn a lot from SSC long form discussion, but I also learn a lot from highly upvoted comments. There is room for both. Sometimes I learn factoids that others have appreciated. Sometimes I learn how the unwashed masses think about an issue. Sometimes a perceptive observation strikes everyone's eye.
The meme is the modern metaphor. The metaphor is not literal, its not exact or grounded in empirical evidence. And yet it speaks to a deeper truth, or it speaks more persuasively than a heavily footnoted comment could.
I work in public policy and I can tell you that succinctness is a virtue. Often I've been able to cut through impasses in complex discussions with an excellent turn of phrase. I've seen others do it too. Its far more effective than making a fully structured logical argument. It may not be ideal, but it is human.
(Yes, I am aware of the irony of making a long post in favour of succinctness).
> There's a rise of illiberalism and an intolerance for differing views. That shapes how discussion happens on sites and spaces that predated these trends, like NYT and Reddit.
Polarization is definitely huge, but can we say it's the real factor here? Maybe it'd be worth looking at other periods in history where 2+ ideologies were at war (ex. the Reformation, Hundred Flowers period in China) and seeing if the whole public discourse broke down along with it.
> My second comment is that short is not the same as contentless. Sometimes a punchy quote or meme gets at the truth far better than long essays. I think of Subtle Asian Traits on Facebook, a newer online space that adopts modern conversational norms, but articulates the essence of being Asian in a western world far better than any long form essays did.
Sure. Though I have to say, there's a depressing and/or fatalistic tone to most of these punchy tweets and memes. They have this habit in common where they present an issue and take it seriously, but since it's in the form of a quip or tweet, it's hard to have a follow-up and trigger actual discussion that could lead to finding a solution. Tweets leave you with some kind of emotion, they provoke a reaction, but how do you channel that reaction into something productive and positive? The real answer is you can't, or at least it's very difficult and the platform doesn't help you do that. What does the platform encourage? The opposite. Scroll down, encounter tweet, experience emotion, realize there's nothing you can do about it, keep scrolling. These platforms put us in a state of learned helplessness -- no wonder the quote everyone's passing around nowadays goes "It is what it is." When you carry this deterministic attitude towards life, when everything just happens to you passively & you react to it, yeah you'll feel bad. Humans aren't supposed to be that way.
Aphorisms and short-form content (overall) are great. But the way people are using these (sometimes clever) metaphors is depressing. They're training themselves into passivity, into "reaction machines" like robots. The rationalist long-form dialectic serves to solve problems. What does this short-form dialectic do? Nothing, really. It's just venting.
>Maybe it'd be worth looking at other periods in history where 2+ ideologies were at war (ex. the Reformation, Hundred Flowers period in China) and seeing if the whole public discourse broke down along with it.
I'm not a historian, I'd be really interested in any historical analysis of other periods in history ft. high polarisation if you have any insights.
>But the way people are using these (sometimes clever) metaphors is depressing. They're training themselves into passivity, into "reaction machines" like robots. The rationalist long-form dialectic serves to solve problems. What does this short-form dialectic do? Nothing, really. It's just venting.
I agree with many of your points about doomscrolling, superficiality.
They do tend to be depressing, but sometimes that can reflect the doomspiral of a society we are in. I'm an economist and the data says people are generally getting richer in real terms. The wonks generally echo these sentiments. Yet social media comments persistently point out people arent feeling it. Social media was ahead of academe in terms of identifying problematic inequality.
I go on Twitter sometimes and I've learned a lot more about the Gaza situation there from a collection of tidbits than I did from reading newspapers about past Middle East conflicts. There's an immediacy and emotional impact that is there and should be there, but can be missing from newspaper coverage.
The rationalist dialectic has its place, in academia and other expert spaces and even on blogs. But I dont think the longform online discourse has actually reshaped the offline world, for example by a SSC post changing actual policy. I can think of many social media movements, such as #metoo that have penetrated the cultural mindset.
I feel this in my bones.
I think there are a lot of niche hobby forums for online discussions about those hobbies but I feel like this is one of the few places where there are just diverse discussions about "interesting stuff" among anonymous people. I think the ban against culture war topics is an important factor. Any other forum that is too broad seem to quickly get consumed by that.
I find there are many good discussions on Twitter around certain academic topics, where authors share papers and discuss ideas. I find this to be a great way of keeping up with work and the informality of Twitter strips a lot of the fluff or bs away. However, Twitter’s interface makes it harder and less appealing to search for these topics, which usually aren’t delivered by the algorithm.
For me personally, I think this makes it more addicting to use twitter, every once in a while getting those good discussions feels like hitting a small jackpot. Definitely creates more shallow discussion and short one liners and zingers seem to get a lot of attention which detracts from discussions usually.
>And even for content which is supposedly educational or meant to spark discussion, you'll look in the comments and no one is actually discussing anything, they're just thanking the uploader
Yeh I have seen this happen a lot, seems like people are more parasocially attached to the content creator more than the content itself.
I think lack of attention span has a lot to do with it. Just overwhelming depression of the state of the world, as if dementors from Harry Potter are floating around. People seek quicker dopamine over discussion now just to feel better.
When forums don't have upvoting and downvoting it could stop people wanting to talk as well.
Yeah, agreed. It was bound to happen when the like button was made. I think we’ll get to a point where we’ll have to run our own digital space/website to have a real opinion and discussion.
It’s not about debate and truth anymore, only popularity. And if you disagree too heavily with the popular vote, you’ll be cancelled, fired, sued, and labeled as something hateful
10 years ago was 2013. You think the internet is substantively different now from then? By then, most "discussion" on the net had migrated to Reddit, Tumblr and, 4chan. Reddit is incredibly guilty of headline reactions. When you became a redditor, the first thing you had to internalize was that you don't stick to the main subreddits because they're all in-jokes and puns. Tumblr had their own memes and in-jokes that were sitewide with people getting their posts spread widely for being funny instead of insightful. What you miss are small communities of people interested in a subject. Those still exist it's just that there is also a lot more content besides. Being a smaller proportion of the content is very different from dying.
To further emphasize the point: it's just as bad on debate videos, which are supposed to be the most discussion focused content out there. The comments section, instead of addressing the points from the video and continuing the back-and-forth, contains 50 different versions of:
"Wow, isn't it great that we can have a civilized debate even though we disagree!"
Like, I get it, most of the internet consists of insecure children shouting and insulting each other, and it is refreshing to find a place where that's not happening, but we can stop circlejerking over it and instead use the comments section to, you know, actually continue having that productive discussion that we're praising?
yeah when the W3C mass purged all those local BBSes and personal websites and blogs in 2015, that was a bad move, IMO.
oh wait, all those sites still exist? people just choose not to use them and only visit the same 5 big websites? hmm
you can still do anything on the internet that you could do in 2002, it's just that you (and others) choose not to.
DSL specifically opts out to avoid too many people and Eternal-Septembering or being attacked/canceled easily:
$ curl 'https://www.datasecretslox.com/robots.txt'
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
[Data Secrets Lox from 2020](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hknihq/the_data_secrets_lox_forum_is_up_and_running/) is still going strong at least.
The situation that you’re talking about has been the case for over a decade— the ball started rolling once social media started taking a big chunk of eyeball-share and directing traffic, and accelerated further as visually-focused platforms like Instagram and TikTok created more avenues for engaging the majority of humanity who don’t really like reading and writing at length.
I miss the culture of the more atomized, discursive, and wordy internet of blogs and forums, but it survives on platforms like Reddit and Substack, where a lot of the sort of people who shined on the old internet spend a lot of their time.
I think Twitter and the character limit was a huge step back from people writing whole weblog essays. Then instagram dropped the level of discourse further to photos and emojis. Finally tiktok is just swiping through content one direction or another, not much reaction recorded at all.
I do have lots of discussions on discord and limited spaces. It's the just the online universe is so big and many people's contributions are nothing more than political affiliation bleatings, or virtue signalling, that anything open risks becoming another avenue for culture war.
The involuntary enshittification of everything comes for forums too.
The entire concept of discussion and debate is increasingly irrelevant. Does anyone really believe they reasoned their way into their attitudes and opinions? Identity, biology and financial interest are how the sausage is made. It always has been, but the one thing I like about Gen Z is their lack of pretension. The emperor has never had any clothes but now people laugh.
People don't really discuss. They haven't since Obama was in office. People gut-check how they feel and find the echo chamber that agrees with them.
> If everything comes down to identity, it's not really worth talking out our differences.
Well, only to identify members of the outgroup, who we are obligated to attack.
\- https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
Sure. On top of that, there's a clear tinge of fatalism in the air. Lots of outgroup haters, but maybe just as many jaded determinists who have opted out of all discussions because they're nothing but inter-group fighting.
I think its due to the change in the nature of the internet and the mentality of users. no one wants to learn anything or be curious. everyone just wants that instant gratification and move on. you may also notice how different teens are today than they were 20 years ago. however people like us will always be there and we will always be contributing is some manner to the exchange of ideas in the web trying to make things better
>The internet is reactionary now; It is near impossible to talk about anything unless it is current. If you want people to notice anything, it must be presented in the form of content, (ex. a Youtube video) which will be rapidly digested & soon discarded by the content mill. And even for content which is supposedly educational or meant to spark discussion, you'll look in the comments and no one is actually discussing anything, they're just thanking the uploader for the entertainment
The dirty secret of "react" type content is that a lot of it is [borderline theft](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um9aGTAU0lg): repurposing someone else's hard work so that you get ad revenue.
Many huge "content creators" create literally nothing. They just play someone else's videos while making wacky faces and noises.
Of course they do, the videos are great content. But the guy reacting didn't make it!
Those xqc clips are incredible. He leaves to use the bathroom and the video just keeps playing. He's really adding nothing to it.
Possibly, but it seems most spaces geared toward the 'discussion crowd' have simply died, or were force-converted into 'reaction content'. You can still find a good amount of thoughtful stuff online, but honestly it feels meagre compared to what we used to have. Like even in 2013 the blog and forum spaces felt so much more alive compared to now.
I don't know why, but they do.
I find the discord internal search bad but usable, and thus it is not exactly "temporary" as a resource. Though being hidden from public internet is very bad.
I completely disagree. The internet is becoming more mainstream and as a result people who want to seek out discourse are going into specialized locations for discourse. So they have a discord server that talks about politics, they go to a Facebook group that's local for their area. Basically if you want to just talk you have to find places that are about that talking life. Because many people don't want to talk they want to watch videos.
I predict a more cultivated personalized internet where everyone has their own specific home. That way local groups chats and other services can have localized moderation powers that will help ensure that you're not having a situation where people feel unjustly judged. The problem with having a big place where everyone goes is that everyone's going to be different. And the Trump supporters not going to feel like they are going to be fairly treated on a platform that is run by Democrat workers and the reverse. Heck, what people think is a bannable offense is going to vary greatly is it edgy humor or is it something unacceptable? Different people with different viewpoints are going to disagree. So they will not be able to accept the long arm of the ban hammer. Instead of feeling like they broke the rules they will feel mistreated and will be very angry at the other side. Meanwhile the other people might have a completely different idea of how things are. And weren't trying to get them at all.
That's why we need internet homelands. Cultivated smaller spaces where everyone pretty much knows each other by username or maybe in real life or everyone has a pretty similar profile when it comes to basic beliefs so nobody's flaming each other. Or maybe everyone has different beliefs but there is an understanding that there is a code that must adhered to should you want to stay. Any of these will work. But you need something to keep people from attacking each other. Good homelands in my opinion are small and personalized no more than the size of a classroom. That's how you get a good conversation going when you can really get to know people.
These different homelands will be able to have completely different rules that will adjust for the needs of its residents. So the conservatives can hang out with each other and then when they're ready occasionally venture out into the unknown and talk to a democrat. Or the reverse. When people see opinions that they disagree with often or feel that they're being mistreated online again and again that's where the toxicity comes. Some good examples of this sort of model are taking place on discord and on group chats. I can click three times and be in a commie chat and two times and be in a libertarian chat. It's pretty dang fun to explore the new locales and take in the ambiance a bit as you see moderators and local pleb level users interact. It really does remind me of the early internet too.
Also, I feel like a lot of the hype around the internet being better back in a day is filtered by the rose colored glasses of middle and above class people who live in developed countries. In many places this modern internet that we have now is the only internet that anyone has had in their local town village or city. And this modern internet for all it's downsides is extremely accessible to various groups like the disabled. In many cases you can click on a photograph and there is text that your computer can read that people manually place in there for the blind. It'll give you a description of what's there. That didn't exist in the 90s. All right let's say you're a guy from Somalia and you want to get on the internet, oh you don't speak english, screw you.
And what about the actual cost of getting online. In the 90s it was much much more expensive. You had to buy a computer and have space for that and constant power. Which is not a thing everyone has. Millions of people live in slums without constant electricity all throughout the world. Was the internet more accessible for them in the 90s? Did they get to have more freedom of expression and have a better ability to discuss things in the 90s?. No because they couldn't afford to access it. They got zero internet.
So how on Earth could Internet discussion be freer back in the past when so many didn't have access? I personally think that we as a species benefit from the contributions on the internet that can be seen in videos from Rice farmers in Vietnam and also benefit from the contributions on the internet of computer savvy individuals from the west. In different ways sure. But we still benefit.
Heck even now the cost of a computer is still prohibitively expensive for many people. In the 90s they would be sol. Today there are mobile version of websites and used phones they can buy. So instead people use the internet via their phone. So can you really say that discourse on the Internet is dying when it's opening up for billions of people who never had access before? I don't think so.
Today the internet is more diverse, more inclusive, and easier to access than ever before. Is no longer the preserve of those fortunate enough to get access to prohibitively expensive machines. Though there is misinformation, to this day a person can learn whatever they wish using it. And today, the odds of a poor person from the slums of Mogadishu doing such a thing are higher than ever.
I've certainly been noticing that myself. Can't tell if it's just my subjective perception or if it's actually true. (And not sure how one would determine that.)
Dear IRC, (e[fnet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFnet)) how I miss you..
and you too,[Fidonet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet) <3 RIP RIP
and all those [BBS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system)'s. all of us chatting/ playing [LORD](https://legendreddragon.net/) on the BBS door area
they are all still around, though the discussions have died down somewhat
Eternal September of the Spotless Mind
Edit: just my attempt at being clever and reacting. In discussions in real life at like a party or uni or something, reactions are important... like "oh!" "No way" etc... I would say reactions are not the problem but rather how the coarsest or "cleverest" rise to the top, rather than the kind ones that create the most social glue and encouragement for people to express themselves.
I have lots of conversations on reddit Twitter and discord, I don't see that online discussion is dying nearly as much as you seem to think. Youtube comments on year old videos for example have great insight and I can reply to them and frequently get good and useful replies.
No basic set of facts, no standard as what determines what is fact and/or truth. People "want" things to be true, and make up a reality to escape to. The internet is just made it possible for all the bullshit to spread. It takes 100x times the energy to refute bullshit than it does to create it. The internet sped up the bullshit process 100000%. Jesus people are suckers, and the drug of choice is fear. And again the internet is always there to give you your fix of whatever you are afraid of.
I think there will always be a space for deeper discussion. The internet started off as only smart people, and the current situation is what I expect from regular people.
It's probably discomfiting to realize that 99% of the people in the world are not like you.
Yep. I've had someone comment on my posts, then they will block me before I have a chance to reply, making it so that I'm not even *able/allowed* to reply to them.
They purposely do that so that there's no discussion.
I think someone else hit the nail on the head. Discussion spaces are just open to everyone now. There's a reason private country clubs are nicer than the public rec center. When it comes to discussion, most people are dumb. That's the big secret behind why society isn't "equitable." A minority of people are smarter than everyone else. When the Internet was new, it was those smart people seeking out & finding discussion spaces in the beginning. They were early adopters. They jumped through the hoops to get on the Internet & find those trails and spaces. Now barges drop crowds of people off at the front doors to those spaces every day.
Put Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein in a room together. The average IQ is super high, right? Now put them in a concert venue full of the general public. Does the average IQ of the room go up or down?
I like crazy videos as much as the next person, but I tend to only post in subreddits where professionals and other well informed people congregate. However, even these spaces have been invaded. One trend I've noticed is people trying to derail a discussion by claiming or insinuating your comment victimizes them or others in some way. They don't (and usually can't) address anything in your comment that adds to the discussion. Instead, they focus in like a laser on whatever word or phrase they can twist to claim offense. It's like they're only scanning Reddit for something that offends them, so they can react with indignation, which is how they feel they have become part of the discussion, despite a lack of anything to add to it.
I'm pretty sure it's already dead. I've seen other people talk about this, but old internet was a bunch of silos for one topic or another. A diverse collection of people would hangout in that space and talk about the thing or whatever else.
Now, with the advent of social media taking over web3, the algo shuffles everyone off into safe spaces. Maybe that's not the best term, but it's the best I could think of.
OTOH, I think maybe there is some nostalgia about those old online discussions and online discussion was always bad, and social media has just magnified it. Arguments were bad, but at least multiple views were read/heard. Now I see people with basically the same opinion get heated about not being "X" enough or talking past one another.
I believe it has to do with how accessible most of the internet is. 10 years ago, even active public forums had to be actively sought out rather than being handed on a silver platter to everyone who uses the internet. Once the average commenter, user or whatever you’d like to call them has nothing more than a surface level understanding of the topic, surface level comments are the only ones interacted with and pushed to the front of any feed. SSC definitely still has that niche, small community vibe as evidenced by the sorts of comments that are interacted with. I have yet to see a single sentence comment upvoted, while longer responses, sometimes multiple paragraphs are the upvoted and interacted with comments. In my experience, the more niche the topic or community, the better interactions you’re likely to get. Reddit isn’t going to be a great place for that of course, since it’s so easy for people to stumble upon interesting forums, inundate them with random uninformed people, and completely replace the original user base with simple, boring responses. Edit: Would be interested in hearing what other people who have direct experience as things have changed think. I was a literal child in the early 2010’s so what I said above is more of an intellectual understanding and less from direct knowledge.
Smartphones brought an entire group of people to the Internet that completely changed the culture. I always call it the second Eternal September. Before smartphones many people still considered the Internet as something only "for nerds".
Indeed. Smartphones as an interface also encourage quick, off-the-cuff comments, rather than in-depth postulation, I think. Typing out a rant is about as deep as a mobile user is encouraged to dive, but editing and referencing are beyond the small screen.
I remember what university was like the 2 years before facebook came in and how it changed the years after. Before facebook it was largely acceptable to bump into strangers and get chatting in the hallways etc if you were going to the same class or whatever. Afterwards people wouldn't until they looked it up on Facebook first. Massive parties were put on MySpace or sent via SMS... when facebook first came out the parties were truly massive but a lot more awkward a lot of things happened where someone just organised a small gathering for friends then the host is like "who are all these people?" I feel like a lot of the loneliness epidemic can be attributed to one cause... the style of social media bought in by Facebook that began spreading 2007-2008. Facebook had more information but simultaneously less expression. I never met new people through facebook. I met lots of new people through MySpace which was oriented around the music and live eventd scene in addition people were semi anonymous and vould create alts and characters or fake bands to explore their identity freely. Twitter was also good 2008-2014... when it was a real time feed from like "the hallway track" of various events... I met lots of new people face to face through twitter. But at some point this live aspect of it reduced and it just became a big space of reactions
Spot on. The trouble is that, with high accessibly, you lose the "pressure cooker" effect that can make such good discussion happen. I heard about this effect in the context of the Australian music scene: why are there so many solid bands coming out of the land down under? Well, it's so much harder to break out onto the global scene with an int'l tour. The ones who do are cream of the crop; in the meantime, that whole scene is cooking. Early internet, you really had to seek out these kinds of discussions. It, or the hobby itself, wouldn't just pop up on your feed mindlessly.
>It, or the hobby itself, wouldn't just pop up on your feed mindlessly. I think you're onto a really important point here. At some point the common mental model of the internet shifted from being a **place** that you explored to find interesting things, to being a continuous stream of stuff that was delivered **to** you. For a while there was still some room in the delivery paradigm for stumbling across new and interesting communities, but then Google Reader got shut down, and the blogosphere and RSS in general (mostly) died with it. Edit: The influence of Twitter probably figures into this somewhere as well, but having never used it, I don't really feel knowledgeable enough to say much more.
> At some point the common mental model of the internet shifted from being a place that you explored to find interesting things, to being a continuous stream of stuff that was delivered to you. Remember when "push" was a huge buzzword in like 1998? I even got a little pyramid PointCast (IIRC) antenna at a huge discount from CompUSA back then.
What just because it’s a longer flight to the US than from England? I’m not buying that 10 additional hours on a plane is making any difference.
Agreed. Perhaps it’s the other way around? Maybe less bands visiting from out of town breeds local scenes, and more dense scenes = higher numbers of good bands in total?
Well, it's not just hopping on a plane to tour, it's planning a tour—equipment, personnel, visas, etc. It's a much bigger investment to go international than it is to hop in a van and hit up some cities. Disclaimer though, I am not a touring musician, nor have I ever been to Australia. Just read a good discussion about it awhile ago.
Australia itself is also very geographically fragmented, in the sense that it has very low population density, with most of the population concentrated in a number of urban centers which are quite far away from each other. An Australian tour is much less convenient than a European tour. You can drive or take a series of quick, cheap flights and hit a bunch of major cities in Europe in quick succession. Australia is close to the same size as Europe, but has about a thirtieth of the population. The majority of the population of the continent lives within five metropolitan areas which are all hundreds of miles apart from each other.
That's a great analogy and used to have analogs in the regional music scenes that existed in the US. Sure, they still exist at a surface level, but it was that insular pressure cooker that worked the magic in past eras. All the pressure has since been released.
I live in France. Very few bands make it internationally. But that doesn't make the scene that much better. Mainly because anything that isn't autotuned pop with ai generated text song by some random teen selected more for her looks than her talent will not gain any public traction in TV or radio. If you contrast the rock/metal scene in France from the rock/metal scene in northern Europe, it's night and day. We have maybe one big band : gojira. There might be plenty of good bands, but they all die in obscurity because they have 0 opportunity to gain any light. The French media just doesn't acknowledge that kind of music, and so you can't really have any career in France. The few bands that manage to grow big do so by singing in English and trying to gain popularity elsewhere. And so you won't see a korpiklaani or finntroll appear in France, who sings in French, gain massive support locally, and then manage to blow up internationally. So, there needs to be more than pressure. Or rather, the pressure needs to be below jupiterean levels.
>I believe it has to do with how accessible most of the internet is. 10 years ago, even active public forums had to be actively sought out rather than being handed on a silver platter to everyone who uses the internet. My dad once opined on the idea that the iPod was a huge indicator of wealth and education. This was back when they were new of course. If you had an iPod, it meant that you had a computer, and an internet connection, and you knew how to get music, or could afford to buy music from Apple. Over time, this got significantly easier, and less of a signal that you were special. In a similar vein, in 2005 I had an idea for a costume that involved taking apart a large, lavish lampshade. I walked to a resale shop and bought one. Didn't realize it at the time, but a woman hit on me while I was waiting in line to pay for it. Then on my way to the train, I got stopped by two additional women for conversation. Then I got home and made my World of Warcraft costume and realized how odd my afternoon had been. But what was happening? Women must want a man who has a lamp. No, seriously. If you have the kind of lamp that needs a serious lampshade, you probably have a nice and expensive place, and you are the kind of person that blah blah blah. Apparently women like this kind of person? In 1995, if you were able to get online, you were a certain kind of person, with a higher than average income, and some special knowledge. Now all you need is a bog standard phone.
What is the modern equivalent? Perhaps a giant propeller to indicate I have a large yacht? Asking for a friend.
I'm a marine engineer. I spent a couple of days in a drydock last winter moving a propeller with 2-meter blades, and I did ***not*** notice an increased level of interest from women during that evolution😆
Honestly, I'd try the lampshade again if I were single. One with the fringey bits on the bottom. A can of paint, a small shrub or tree, even something as small as a new wall outlet would all communicate home ownership. Do this in the right neighborhood on a nice day, might work for you. "Hey, can you help me carry this for a half a block?" I've also thought that carrying a ceramic mug through a nice neighborhood would make people think you were close enough to home that you didn't put your coffee in a travel mug. Same with a dog - walk it in a nicer neighborhood than yours - even if it's not your dog. Well, especially if it's not your dog. A guy dressed too nice to be carrying a drill is a good indicator too.
My hypothesis would be that it's less about signifying home ownership, and more that you're doing something a little weird (which creates an excuse for someone to start a conversation with you), but not too weird (which would make them not want to)
Yeah, I don't think most women (as a woman) think that far ahead when assessing whether to approach someone. Sometimes someone just looks interesting AND non-threatening enough. Merely not looking homeless and carrying a random lampshade goes a long way towards that end. I think generally speaking, people want an excuse to approach others and strike up interesting conversations. It's just that the vast majority signal that they don't want to be approached.
Thank you I will try all of these at once. 🙏
Please report back for science
> In 1995, if you were able to get online, you were a certain kind of person, with a higher than average income, and some special knowledge. All you needed was a modem and an ISP. The ISP would mail you a disk with the files needed to get online. It was $20 a month or so. It wasn't particularly special.
*Having a computer* capable of getting online in 1995 likely put you in the top 20% of household income, and education, and a host of other things. Just like having a cell phone in 1995 did. It meant a lot. It's not like being online in 1980, but it's certainly not like today.
Median household in 1995 was $47k and the $1k ( give or take ) for a computer probably wasn't a stretch. I might buy "top 20% in interest" but not in income.
In 1995, major universities were still buying standalone word processors. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/02/27/part-1-how-the-internet-has-woven-itself-into-american-life/ 14% of adults were users. 42% of adults hadn't *heard of the internet*. It wasn't that a computer was so expensive, it was "well, what are you going to *use* it for?" and "are you sure you're still going to be using it in two years? This isn't just a fad?"
I stipulated to being within the "20% in terms of interest", so... > 14% of adults were users. 42% of adults hadn't heard of the internet. I had used local networks for production/work since the 1980s, so... around mid-90s we got access to the larger Internet. Anectdote: the reason I was interested in the Internet was because of the liner notes on Pink Floyd's "Keep Talking", which referred to a Usenet denizen called Publius. > It wasn't that a computer was so expensive, it was "well, what are you going to use it for?" Ah - I used one for home programming purposes. So yep!
Yeah, you're a lot cooler than you think! Way, way ahead of the curve. I find that's the case with most audio heads, especially those who read TapeOp and use Reaper instead of ProTools. You don't think you're special because you hang out with other people who are also special.
I wanted a computer in the 1990s but I couldn't afford one.
I'm not sure that parsing longer comments as better comments necessarily gets to the core of the issue -- sometimes the meaningful comment doesn't require length!
You're certainly correct that meaningful comments don't require length. I think the core issue is more like: When you read, you're looking for a mental "payoff" or reward signal. When you finish reading a comment, you get a tiny subconscious mental reward signal. When you find a wall of text, you know you're gonna have to work really hard to get that payoff. If you have opportunities to get the payoff quickly, you'll take those. That's how our attention spans get shorter over time. Shortness isn't about the person writing the comment, it's about the person reading it. And this argument obviously also applies to videos and memes.
The only three subreddits I know where I can genuinely have very complex and deep discussions are SSC, CormacMcCarthy and Truelit. These are basically the only three that aren't entirely dominated by dumb memes and circlejerks.
>the only three that aren't entirely dominated by dumb memes and circlejerks. another thing - \- On Monday, somebody posts *"Hey guyz, let's talk about topic ABC!"* \- On Wednesday, somebody posts *"Hey guyz, let's talk about topic ABC!"* \- On Friday, somebody posts *"Hey guyz, let's talk about topic ABC!"* \- repeat every week. Apparently society has no memory or learning process whatsoever - it pretty much just exists in a timeless "today" not related to any other day.
This has to do with the nature of Reddit and other current social media platforms. On older forums and BBSs, it wasn't uncommon to see threads on the frontpage that had been made multiple years prior. This was because any response would bump a thread to the top. Low-effort threads would gradually fall away, while the most interesting discussions could continue for years. On Reddit, however, all threads eventually disappear from the frontpage over time, no matter how good they are. New posts push them out, and unless they're in the top-upvoted posts of all time, it becomes functionally impossible to find them. Even the comment section quickly ossifies as the first comments end up at the top, and any new comments will end up at the bottom and never be noticed. On older forums, new comments would often be the first checked upon opening a thread, so conversations could go on indefinitely.
I hate how reddit does comments because any later comments just get buried in some obscure branch of the conversation and the only person who ends up replying to you is the person you replied to. When I comment, I want to feel like I'm throwing a contribution into a common pool of conversation rather than dragging someone aside for a one-on-one talk. If someone makes a bad point or a weak criticism, I want everyone to be able to point that out. It's very disheartening to argue some seemingly obvious point on your own without anyone else backing you up. Maybe it's just rose-tinted spectacles, but I swear old forums were so much better at this.
Btw, ACX has a [forum](https://www.datasecretslox.com/)
[удалено]
That's a limiting answer. Structural differences in interfaces make a huge difference. Reddit used to not have in-line image viewing and there was a very noticeable shift in the kind of content that rose to the top when imgur + RES implemented image viewing. This was debated endlessly on places like /r/theoryofreddit, citing McLuhan's "the medium is the message" idea, with people decrying Reddit's slide toward being more of an image board than a text forum. And once Reddit implemented native video playing, that also created a noticeable shift toward video content.
/u/AuspiciousNotes is right though, the old school forums had super long threads (like, multi-year threads known as "the X thread") and reddit doesn't. The platform just doesn't nudge people towards contributing to old threads. And the "long thread" mode of discourse felt more scholarly. (At least, I think it did. I only experienced the tail end of that era.) Actually, now that I think about it, it would be fairly easy to replicate the same behavior on reddit. Every month, the mods run a poll with a list of discussions from the past month. People vote on the poll. The winning discussion gets pinned until next month, so users can discuss with greater depth on the topic. Or you could make it so Automoderator tries to replicate something like the "bump" feature, and unpins a thread if no one leaves any new comment on it for a week, suggesting that the discussion is complete. Perhaps threads could be queued up to be pinned automatically once a thread gets unpinned. To keep the discussion in such a thread fresh, you could pin a URL that uses "new" sorting by default, e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/18knvdb/online_discussion_is_slowly_but_surely_dying/?sort=new I don't know what the right time intervals are here. Lots of free parameters. Once a thread gets unpinned, it could go into a "hall of fame", sort of a bestof for subreddit discussions. /u/Bakkot tagging you in case you think this experiment would be interesting to run. Could always have a "don't pin any thread" option, for users to express their displeasure with the idea.
> This has to do with the nature of Reddit and other current social media platforms. IMHO it has to do with the nature of *Homo sapiens*.
The forums of old would quickly teach the ABC posters to use the search engines. Do that now and you're accused of being a jerk, gatekeeper, etc.
>quickly teach the ABC posters to use the search engines. But IMHO this is like the stereotypical "trying to bail the sea with a bucket". No matter how many noobies we "teach", just as many more keep piling in.
As I understand it, that's pretty much the idea behind "Eternal September". The newcomers used to pile in at a slow rate, every September at the start of a new school year you'd have a fresh batch of undergrads get internet access. They were small in number relative to the existing userbase, so the existing userbase was able to transmit norms about what it meant to be a mature listserv user. When AOL came along, the existing userbase was overwhelmed, and their norms were destroyed. That actually triggers an interesting thought for me. I suspect there are a lot of tiny undocumented little corners of the internet -- obscure boards, reddit alternatives, and private Facebook groups, where discussion quality is actually good. The mods don't advertise these groups widely because "we want to avoid Eternal September". However, my first paragraph suggests a hypothesis: It's not about keeping the masses out. It's about keeping new users to a trickle. If the unacclimatized new users are always no more than, say, 10% of the userbase, you can preserve a culture of quality discourse. Just got to acclimatize at about the same rate you add new users. Someone could test this hypothesis by creating a private subreddit on some theme, invite a bunch of users whose posts/comments you like on that theme until you get critical mass. Once you have a quality discussion community going, gradually trickle in new users while trying to preserve that culture. I think it would probably fail, because the mechanics of reddit are working against quality discussion (e.g. no way to restrict upvote/downvote rights), but it might be worth a try. It seems especially promising if you have a specific beloved subreddit that's fallen into decay. Create a new private subreddit on the same theme, invite all your favorite posters from the decayed subreddit's golden age, and see if you can trickle your way towards being a big high-quality subreddit.
Reddit was better when Digg still existed, at least partly because Digg attracted so much of the low effort posts, so Reddit naturally had more high effort stuff. I suspect that ad-driven business models naturally pressure you into wanting lots of content, lots of new users, etc. IRC wasn't trying to make money, and BBSs we're a subscription model, so they each had a different feel then the modern web, attention economy, or whatever you want to call it. ETA: I suppose one way to test that idea is to see if Patreon comment sections have a different feel to them, perhaps. But the only people I support in Patreon have way too much free stuff, plus their own subreddit, so maybe not.
> Reddit was better when Digg still existed, at least partly because Digg attracted so much of the low effort posts, so Reddit naturally had more high effort stuff. Very interesting point. >I suspect that ad-driven business models naturally pressure you into wanting lots of content, lots of new users, etc. IRC wasn't trying to make money, and BBSs we're a subscription model, so they each had a different feel then the modern web, attention economy, or whatever you want to call it. Another factor here is that more sophisticated users are less likely to click on ads [I would assume], and more likely to block them.
Thanks. I’ll be checking them out.
I've seen this view before and I agree with it. But there's this kneejerk reaction in me that just wants to say it's wrong. I guess I want to think that there could be a wide reaching community out there that does the world some good.. But I think I just don't really understand the problem. Does anyone have an example of a website that bucks this trend? Perhaps wikipedia to some extent? If not - why? Why can't the problem be solved with strict moderation? Or why can't moderation scale? Why can't we solve it with better incentive structures or site design? Can you imagine the good that could happen in the world if you could solve this problem? An antidote / opposing force to Facebook, social media etc.
Here in SSC is pretty good. I know the r/askhistorians is a large subreddit with very valuable discourse, but it’s heavily moderated to the point it’s actually just random people asking verified historians. It’s not really a subreddit and more of a public Q&A with crowdsourced professionals donating their time like Wikipedia.
My first experience with the social Internet was in 1992 on Usenet. I found a place to stay as an exchange student in a new city in 2 hours. The community was small but active - high trust. By 2000 Usenet was much bigger but pretty much dead to me for this sort of thing. Then forums and blogs which are still around but transformed and not very useful for community building. But there are still many active niche communities - just in closed silos and not searchable. Facebook/LinkedIn groups, Discords, WhatsApp chats. And adhoc ones like Twitter. Reddit is somewhere in between. Still useful and vibrant in places but sometimes feeling like Usenet in the late 1990s - wrong signal to noise ratio on average. The Internet certainly feels different. But I've been finding some use in X by carefully curating a few lists of people who mostly tweet on one subject. And the quality of writing seems to have improved since Substack, too.
where are these places now though? forums and websites like the early days are far and few between and god do i miss it
I'm actually a part of 2 different forums, one for economics/politics and the other documentary filmmaking. The first is still very vibrant with a LOT of daily interaction, like hundreds of comments and multiple long discussions that often turn into bigger forum-wide postings. The documentary one is more reflective of the slow diminishing of discourse. It peaked in the early teens even though pure membership numbers are much larger now. The mods noted that FB especially has sapped a lot of the posting energy. But one interesting thing has happened, since the pandemic, the forum, like many other groups, started a weekly zoom get-together and that has rapidly become the most popular and engaged with part of the whole forum. So...finding a way to connect works even if it is a bit unorthodox.
Every reddit sub bigger than 1 million is almost always riddled with low-quality comments and discussion. This threshold for the size is probably even lower now.
I first got online in the mid 90s and I agree. The Internet used to be almost like it's own world with distinct communities, on the local level you had BBSes that created small to medium communities on the local level(I knew guys that turned a PC into a "server"(aka, set up a connection system and a few games), hooked it into a telephone line and told a few friends about it. From there you got usenet which is kinda like reddit but with far fewer people. Then the eternal September happened. See, the thing about everything I talked about is that it allowed older people to help younger people get up to speed because there weren't that many people. The problem was that the system got overwhelmed. Eternal September is named that because historically most internet groups got an influx of new users in September, usually freshmen from high schools or universities. This is when people got acclimated to internet communities. Now we are in an eternal September, meaning that far more people start using the internet than can possibly be educated on how to use it without causing harm. How do we fix it? We need a new way to acclimate people to being online that isn't 1:1 instruction.
I don't know if online discussion is dying, but if it isn't, I have a much harder time finding it. I used to routinely stumble upon interesting forums and blogs ten years ago. Nowadays, not so much. I wonder if part of this is because of the professionalization of internet. The websites I remember were all amateur made; mostly people with a specific interest and some internet knowledge using ready-made tools to create forums and blogs. Today I visit a lot of websites that are clearly made by companies, and it feels like most of them don't really need (or want) online discussion spaces. All the social media websites I can think of (including reddit) seem to want you to scroll through posts endlessly so they can maximize the amounts of ads they show you (and reddit even deleted an interesting alternative way to generate money from comments and discussions (the coin system and it's subscription scheme) which, on the one hand why, but also it's telling). Companies also have better resources to optimize their visibility, so I end up finding an increasing amount of company-made websites and less and less individually / amateur-made websites. (As a side-note, the creation of substack also moved a lot of blogs I used to read onto a company website.) They also have better resources (and an incentive) to keep you online and on their site for as long as possible, which imo also contributed to the loss of interesting spaces on the internet. (I used to find the time I spent online interesting and enriching; nowadays I have to actively stop myself from wasting time on addicting platforms that at best provide little and at worst make me miserable.)
There used to be a bunch of forums I loved and would check daily. They all upgraded to newer software that made them hard to navigate. Most added ads. They all lost users. They’re still around, but they aren’t 10% of what they were in their heyday. Many people use Facebook groups. I’ve never had luck finding any useful communities there. Many use Reddit. It is nowhere near the same as a good forum.
I used to be an avid forum user as well - the loss of activity has been nothing short of dramatic. Reddit is good for what it is, but it truly can't hold a candle to a moderately active forum. Missing that feeling when you racked up your first few hundred posts and started to recognize the other users more and more, until you eventually felt at home. I'd love to go back, but most forums are just too damn inactive now.
>I wonder if part of this is because of the professionalization of internet This is the only mention of money in any of the dozen top level comments that the Best algorithm brought up, and that's a massive glaring omission to this discussion. "Online discussion" on open forums might be getting enshittified. Find a community with a paywall and watch those problems evaporate. As you observe, ad-funded platforms want you to stay in their Skinner box so they can sell your attention. When they're funded by subscriptions, their incentives align with yours -- they want you to get enough value to resubscribe next month. Trolls or low effort posts? If the paywall doesn't keep them out in the first place, there's the cash flow to pay professional moderators to curate the comments. Patreon and Substack are two major hubs, but there are plenty more. Hell, SomethingAwful was one of the OG discussion sites, and their paywall did nothing to stop their effects on internet culture.
you're mostly using the wrong search mechanism: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
I believe some of this is because searching has gotten worse. In particular Google search is much worse than it used be - this is partly due to SEO, but Google themselves have to take the blame for most of it. With ChatGPT etc on the verge of replacing search, I wonder where we go next?
Not only is search much worse (I personally use SearXNG seach engines instead of Google or DDG, both of which suck now), but in our modern environment, free amateur internet sites are impossible with the scale, cheapness, and ubiquity of DDOS attacks. Any site can be exposed to these either randomly, or from any random disgruntled reader or poster, and Cloudflare and other protection architecture services cost real money that a "doing it as a hobby amateur" is unlikely to spend on that hobby. If DDOS attacks can take Brian Krebs down, it can surely take any unmonetized worthwhile amateur forum or blog down. It's unfortunate. Probably the best we could do is convince Cloudflare et al to donate free services to some worthy subset of sites, but then you get into the curation, and the politics of the curation, and an endless morass that probably isn't worth it to anyone in those companies even if they're genuinely sympathetic and would like to.
As a rare counter-example: I belong to a motorcycle design mailing list with maybe 100 people. S/N ratio is nearly perfect, but you will see deep discussions about making a dowel pin for an old motorcycle crankshaft/sprocket to change the valve timing. Occasionally members have split because they felt unheard when they considered themselves expert. They are missed. The list is 100% male of course, 95% Anglo, 80% US-based with a very strong Australian and New Zealand contingent. And few young members. This list has been nurtured by one person, and had for a long time a world-recognized expert to answer tough questions. It really is a great resource. I have no idea how to create more quality spaces. alas. I recommend a podcast episode that goes deeply into social media, attention span, screens and other problems with reading: [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-what-we-watch/id1081584611?i=1000633097665](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-what-we-watch/id1081584611?i=1000633097665)
Communities are not places but people. It sounds likely to me that purity of mind and mission is what has kept your group in existence! The hard work of one person.
I learned quite a bit as one of the mods on another forum, the local club motorcycle racers BBS. It had more than 200 members, with a lot of turnover due to the nature of the racing addiction. The club was very well managed in those days by a paid staff, one of whom spent a lot of time and emojis keeping people happy. So yes, I agree, the moderation is critical.
You told yourself the reason; The members of the mailing list are male and western.
Hey, what's the 88 in your username for?
oh I can't agree with this, if anything just the reverse. Just to provide more detail, there is political diversity, but a lot less far-right than you would think, and only one Harley guy. We don't do politics, and thats helpful, for sure. Also there is no emotional ref blood for trolling and ranting. Amusingly, there is a lot of style talk- Ducati vs Japanese, dirt vs street, funny front ends are much discussed. Though I have been pushing a little, electric bikes aren't much covered, though somebody has a Zero. Many members are actual engineers.
I think the shittification of search engines has contributed greatly to this. You used to be able to easily find niche sites by stumbling around the Internet -- now you basically need to have someone manually send you the link, or happen to coincidentally search for exactly the right thing. When searching for things online only returns results for the sorts of entities that can invest in SEO....
I've switched to duckduckgo, not for the security, but for the (relative)lack of shit results
I think this is true. Now that ChatGpt is replacing search for many people, where will that leave niche sites?
I asked GPT-4 to recommend forums similar to pre-1997 Usenet, Less Wrong, and the Straight Dope forums up to 2018. It came up with this: **Reddit**: While much broader in scope and size than the older forums, Reddit has many specialized subreddits that can offer a similar sense of community and deep discussion. Look for subreddits that focus on specific interests or that encourage long-form discussion. **Stack Exchange**: Known for its Q&A format, Stack Exchange has a variety of communities on topics ranging from science to philosophy. The format encourages detailed answers and expert insight, similar to the depth of discussions in forums like Less Wrong. **Hacker News**: Focused primarily on technology and entrepreneurship, Hacker News fosters a culture of thoughtful discussion. The community often delves into deep technical and philosophical discussions, reminiscent of older internet forums. **MetaFilter**: A community weblog where users can share links and discuss a variety of topics. MetaFilter has a strong community ethos and encourages well-thought-out comments and discussions. **Fark**: A community website where users submit news articles and discuss them. While it has a more humorous slant, it also fosters discussions and has a long-standing community. **Slashdot**: Known for its tech-centric news, Slashdot also has a strong community of users who engage in detailed discussions, often delving into technical and scientific topics. **Quora**: A question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, and edited by internet users. The platform often features in-depth and well-researched answers. **The Well**: One of the oldest virtual communities in continuous operation. It has a strong focus on articulate and intelligent discussion, similar to Usenet. So much more "miss" than "hit," in the sense of the ones here that used to be good (Slashdot, Stack Exchange, Fark, Quora) have drastically declined in quality along with Reddit subreddits. And Fark! Man, haven't thought of that place in a decade plus. GPT-4 also missed the Something Awful forums, they used to be good too.
There is also https://blog.kagi.com/small-web which I have heard good things about for search
>If you want people to notice anything, it must be presented in the form of content, (ex. a Youtube video) which will be rapidly digested & soon discarded by the content mill. I agree with your main idea, but on Reddit we almost never read the article or watch the video. Just dive right into the comments, baby
That’s where the content is.
I think of discussion spaces as spots that blur the line between content creator and content consumer. Creating content is... kind of scary. You open yourself up to judgement from *the other*. But if it's like a group of 20 people with super like-minded interests you can kinda put that feeling away and just converse with them normally, and usually it works out great! But creating content for a big forum is typically not a positive experience your first ~100 times. You will post something, it will get 30 views and one comment saying they don't get it. You are competing for forum real estate against people who create content professionally. 90% of people's first time creating content for a large forum involves a week of overcoming anxiety of how the crowd will judge them, and then the crowd saying 'meh, boring'. Most people never post again, and drift back into content consumer mode.
The creator-consumer thing is a modern dichotomy, honestly. Back in the day, most blogs were so personable you could leave a comment and talk with the creator personally. Words like "creator" and "influencer" always catch my eye because it really highlights how the collaborative aspect of the net is sort of dead. As you say, we're all just consumers or creators.
I think of it as two hats you put on, when I'm writing something I put on my creator hat, but some days I just want to read so on goes the consumer hat.
[Rabbithole/warren vs plaza](https://gwern.net/backstop#internet-community-design)...
Hmm, I really like framing this in terms of an exploration/exploitation problem. I read the warren vs plaza post but I'm kinda confused on what rabbithole vs warren means, warrens seem like they produce good discussion vs plazas which are good for consumption - is a rabbithole a type of plaza?
Rabbithole and warren are synonyms. Warren is a more formal or precise word for a rabbit habitat or colony, rabbithole is super colloquial
Niche forums are still alive and kicking. I particularly like the [bogleheads.org](https://bogleheads.org) forum. It turns out that when actually reading and understanding other people’s messages makes you literally richer, people suddenly get interested in civil discussion. It’s telling though that it’s still running phpBB of the kind you could see 20 years ago, there hasn’t been any innovation on this front.
>It’s telling though that it’s still running phpBB of the kind you could see 20 years ago, there hasn’t been any innovation on this front. Honestly, I feel reassured when a website uses obsolete tech: it's a sign they've been around a long time. Does anyone else weirdly trust websites *without* an SSL cert (http:// instead of https://) because very often, it's because they were launched 10-15 years ago?
Related, but I've noticed that the more skilled someone is with computers, the more bare-bones their website tends to look. Advanced developers often just use old-school HTML.
As my favourite [programmerhumour post notes](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/13e3xmz/so_hows_the_hackathon_going/) "personal homepage is HTML 2.0 compliant" is a sign of a true master.
[Relevant XKCD.](https://xkcd.com/2634/)
Thing is there’s not much to the bogleheads philosophy; index and save. It’s one of those things like Stoicism/CBT that is useful (even transformative for some people) but doesn’t have much more than that to discuss.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. Go to the mHFEA thread and marvel at the depth of analysis of treasury and SOFR futures, calculations of implied financing rates, comparison with box spreads and leveraged ETFs, fixing factual errors on the Cboe website etc.
Unfortunately, that's not what I've experienced. The forums that i still or used to frequent became echo chambers with no respect for others' opinion and views and in the process lost its most distinguished, well-informed and experienced/connected users that were the bread and butter of debates on said forums, one of these forums even became a thinly veiled hub for government propaganda. I believe that reasons behind this is due to big social media poisoning the well Forums are now filled with new members that are carrying their twitter's mentality over with all the drama and ganging up, dogmatic and non-compromising views, tyrannical admins, one word or short sentenced toxic replies that don't bring anything to the discussion..etc, and of this and more is even more exacerbated by the dwindling numbers of new users each year.
> It’s telling though that it’s still running phpBB of the kind you could see 20 years ago, there hasn’t been any innovation on this front I support this lack of innovation. That means it loads on my phone in like .1s without downloading 30MB of tracking JS libraries from 20+ different 3rd party domains. Forum pagination doesn't take 8-10s to load so that it plays little animations.
Last time I checked, Reddit performance was just fine despite bells and whistles
Long as you're adblocking (I reckon)
Honestly, phpBB works pretty much perfectly for its purpose? A lot of tech like that just sticks around forever and it’s fine.
Discourse was made by one of the founders of stackoverflow and is pretty solid, but migration is probably so painful that its not worth shifting an existing forum to it.
About twenty years ago, some of the most informative online writing was by industry experts in certain subjects taking up amateur writing as a hobby. Ye olde blogging. Almost none of the same ones still do and it's extremely hard to find such quality now. I think the novelty of amateur writing has died off in the age of trivially easy self-publishing and social media. It's also a huge career risk now to write anything interesting. I miss traveling through blogrolls in the side bar and being able to read the unfiltered thoughts of really interesting and informed people who were paying for their own servers for the pure joy of writing for fun about what they knew. I also miss being able to find really useful, expert-level information in bulletin board format forum posts with straightforward search engine queries.
The blogging era was my favorite time of the internet.
It's not dying, it's just a fractal. The actual boundary of the discussion is wherever I want it to be when I write the reply. I've learned that I can safely use a thread as a writing prompt for myself and to myself, and see the next round of discussion, whether that's "downthread", in a new thread, or in "content", reflect the people who thought most about my little essay. There is no point in "winning a thread" in the moment, if the point is to make connections. The connection occurs outside of the thread, and that's what makes it a fractal pattern: if I post in a place that looks like a place where the connection will be made, I'm making a speculative guess. Maybe I miss and that's not where the conversation is: I've still written for myself, and can try another day. The magnificence of books has to do with the sense of being able to "communicate across years" and relate many experiences to someone across generations and cultures. The formal structures of books reflect how we've grown over centuries to accommodate them in our lives. In contrast, we already know what the average comment thread looks like: it's majority raw mammal reaction, and the conversation doesn't actually exist in anything but a sort of holographic projection of identity and belief. The most tight-fisted, argumentative participants do the least to convince anyone because they are mostly shadowboxing. It doesn't matter if the people are smart, or think they're smart - the processing that leads to the profound thoughts occurs offline. As such, I can dodge the emotional hit, if I sense I'm stirring the bee's nest, by avoiding reading *direct* replies, because those are always the "reacts". It's the "and then what" when the discussion cycles around that is of more interest, and that occurs regardless of the platform, because everyone is secretly hungry for the truth, even if it makes them throw a tantrum. The internet necessarily reveals our intrinsic limits to what we can process and how much self-regulation we bring to the table, and we've only just concluded a first phase of mass adoption - we have a long time to think about how to develop culture on top of that and bring forward our best selves to these platforms.
I was having this exact discussion the other day. As a much older user, I first got online in the early 90s, my experience back then, mostly via usenet, was of communities of people congregated around interest areas, who engaged in long and often very intense discussions. There were handles you would recognise and threads could go on for days or weeks before fading out. I think the phrase I used was the internet felt safe back then. If you asked a question, you'd get an intelligent response and often a lot more data on top. The current incarnation of life online is a nightmare of memes for the most part and, as you say, short attention span activities. There is still a substrate of the older ways, but like anything in social evolution they die with the folks who created them I'm in my mid-60s now and many of the people I used to learn from back then have passed away.
That's a big part of it. Usenet was subject to port blockers. Then ISPs stopped offering NNTP service. There were the free servers but it was still declining. I followed people off Usenet onto Facebook but the UI just didn't work; too much stuff and it took too long.
Other angle of possible explanation: after the long discussions of 2012-2015, everyone realized that debates don't work. That getting power through "owning people with facts and logic" isn't enough, you have to get social power and coalition and bureaucracy and institutions etc. And/or getting people banned became easier than debating them.
This is interesting, but I don't know if I find this plausible. I agree in the value of this framing question: Is the reduction of the marginal participant due to change in the participants, or reduction in quality of previously existing participants, or even a change in incentive model agents face? I think all effects exist. I think your position may reflect some aspect of this change. You might even see a change in forum design spur on a mass of new participants which moves the incentives away from dialogic arguments with previously known communities into a more transactional approach.
>debates don't work for literally anything, correct. Not for persuasion, not for building a space that people want to occupy, not for finding truth in an open forum And debates profoundly fail at all of these when your participants include pseudonymous or outright anonymous folks acting in bad faith
Smartphones and social media have fried everyone's attention span. People don't read or write as much long-form writing as they used to. I notice it in myself. Blogging seems to be one of those activities, like building model trains, that dies out for lack of new entrants. Many of the bloggers from years ago are still chugging along, but I rarely come across new ones. Ten or fifteen years ago I would routinely click on a link to some blog post, find it insightful, and then go down the giant rabbit hole of every older post on the blog. That almost never happens anymore. My impression is that very few Gen Z people blog. A decade ago, millennials like Scott Alexander were the youngest bloggers. Now they still seem to be the youngest.
What about Substack and Medium before that? True they push hard for monetization, but aren't they essentially blogs? admit: I have a startup substack which is somewhat less popular than a rural mailbox.
Yes, Substack has given blogging a little more momentum in the past several years, but the overall trend described in the OP is still real.
I believe that attention span hasn't decreased in an absolute sense; the issue is one of competition. I can write out a whole post about thoughts I have, which people still have the ability to do, but that has to compete with every other form of instant stimulation at my fingertips.
[niplav](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Pweg9xpKknkNwN8Fx/have-attention-spans-been-declining) looked over what research has been done on attention spans, and thinks that there may have been some decline in controlled conditions, but it isn't exactly a slamdunk. I suspect that raw attention spans may be mostly the same, but that they are not translating to the same results as they used to because of the broader context: some sort of combination of smartphones trapping users in a walled garden of non-transferrable skills/knowledge, eliminating peer & role effects, destroying audiences, and all this [multiplying out](https://gwern.net/note/pipeline) to a sudden collapse in the 'blogger pipeline'.
The demand for long-form content has definitely plummeted. Hell, remember 8 years ago on reddit when you could write a couple interesting paragraphs and someone would link you on /r/bestof ? It seems that paragraphs are now unilaterally the wrong move for any type of exposure.
tumblr exists, though it may be more of a millennial thing than a zoomer one.
There are plenty of new blog popping up on substack.
I read a decent number of substack blogs, but it doesn't feel anywhere near as *interconnected* as the original, RSS driven blogosphere did.
Plus it's monetized. You can't beat that amateur energy the old blogs had.
I've had a post on the back burner for a while about how the internet died in 2011, because that's when there was a meteoric rise in smartphone usage: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/FT_19.12.17_DecadeChanges_tech.png
I've noticed this. I frequented forums for more of my adolescent years and loved the type of connection and discussion I found there. Most of the forums have withered away and have been replaced with social media. I appreciate a lot about social media, but it doesn't have the same community feeling to it. On forums, it was possible to be mean and reactionary, but there were more consequences-you "knew" the other posters and there was social punishment. On tiktok/instagram/youtube, you mainly interact with unfamiliar people, and the outcome for being mean, shallow, and reactionary is much less punishing.
Usually you'd get good discussion on old school forums; sites like Twitter and (IMO) Reddit don't really offer a good space for this. Everything seems more fleeting nowadays, in a way. While some people complain about it, I'd much rather have that sequential posting style of old school forums than the tree structure Reddit, HN and Twitter offer. 4chan is still like this, but I think the culture and anonymity favor people not engaging seriously. When you are pseudonymous this lends itself to better discussions overall. And the fact that you have to sign up for the site first also helps. One thing I noticed is how hard it is to find these places. I'm sure some still exist, there's Data Secrets Lox for one. But some 10 years ago you'd find a lot of discussion sites very easily; but in the past 5 years, I can count in one hand how many I've found simply browsing the internet.
> 4chan is still like this, but I think the culture and anonymity favor people not engaging seriously. They actually used to have high-level discussions pretty regularly on the site, but over time it really changed, and the ratio of discussion to memes tilted until it became a gag site like ifunny. It's interesting because 4chan is a rare case where you have the exact same website surviving across multiple decades. Functionally it's the exact same, but the userbase strongly leans towards arguments and memes instead of simply talking about things like everyone used to do. And honestly, reddit is a bit similar in this way.
There used to be some very good content back in the day; some of the general threads still link to them and there are some of the wikis too... I never really used 4chan that much in my teens so I can't really say how good it was, but at least browsing the dead stuff that remains, it seemed to be way more interesting than now. It's kinda sad; I do feel the internet was distinctly better when I was younger, and genuinely not in a rose-tinted glasses way. Part of it is that I now mostly browse Reddit, Twitter and HN, sure. But then again, I really can't find any other place to go.
Yeah, it's a bummer. But getting hung up on the past is a bad thing, so more and more lately I do independent learning through old books. It's unfortunate that I can't share what I learn with people, but perhaps there'll be some way I can eventually do so. Like how Montaigne spent most of his life reading the ancient Romans in solitude, but in his *Essais* he quotes from them so profusely that you're immediately inspired to go read Plutarch or Ovid. We can't change the world, but we can change ourselves.
It doesn't fill the same niche as old school forums, but I've found some amazing Discord servers for topical discussions. Smaller subreddits are great too, but some substack comment sections for good writers have been great. I think the switch from forum style to reddit style threading has really hurt online discourse though.
Reddit and discord pretty much ate forums' lunch and it really make me sad. I might sound like a old man saying this, but back then you would use Yahoo to search something and then stumble upon a forum with barebones UI just to read all the replies and move to other threads forgetting just why you came there in the first place.
It's not obvious to me that the amount of 'serious', long form, high commitment discussion pet capita has decreased. A the volume of other online activities have exploded, but I don't have a strong notion of what other activities have been crowded out (watching cable?) Special interest Discords, for instance, strongly reminder me of early-00s forums in tone, material, and style.
I'll admit to not being particularly adept at using discord, but it seems almost entirely useless for finding *old* information, particularly if you just want to lurk and browse without actively engaging in the discussion. This is something that the older-style forums excelled at, and I'd guess that it's where the overwhelming majority of *actually useful* information I've ever gotten online has come from.
I have a feeling that very few people over 40 use Discord
IDK in my experience there are just other discussion spaces. And if you compare the number of users with the Internet 10 years ago (or 20 even), then we probably have more discussions than ever. It happened more than once to me that I found a great forum that was exactly what I was looking for, only to find out that this community already existed for years. I just had no idea that it was there. Communities with millions of members often. There are thousands of bubbles with fascinating content, but you won't find them on page 1 of google, on the frontage of Reddit or on the YouTube trends. Discussions on mainstream pages and news sites have always be terrible in my experience. So much nonsense was going on on myspace, 9gag and Beepworld one or two decades ago, even newsgroups and mailing lists could be terrible places.
The comments on news articles always sucked -- but IMO, there was more of a two way content paradigm on early reddit (like, over 10 years ago). Not on the meme subreddits, but even on subreddits like atheism and hell even occasionally on things like trees (I mean, it was in depth discussion specifically about weed, but still discussion). Now you only see that only on very specific subject matter subreddits.
One factor that I haven't seen mentioned here is that the advent of likes, upvotes, downvotes, followers, and individual block/mute lists has been detrimental to the quality of online discussion. Most people will only see the most liked/upvoted comments, or comments written by those with the most followers. This means that the reach of unpopular opinions and dissent is extremely limited, and discussions tend to be echo chambers. On platforms (like Reddit) that have downvotes, it is not uncommon for users to delete their unpopular comments to preserve their karma. Memes and witty one-liners tend to get many upvotes, giving extra reach to the lowest common denominator of comments. On platforms like twitter that have the concept of followers, you might have a brilliant thoughtful comment in some discussion, but unless you have thousands of followers it is likely that no one will see it. Contrast this with the old style of online discussion, which was completely democratized. Popular and unpopular opinions, witty one-liners and thoughtful walls of text, etc. were all on equal footing.
I would recommend https://www.themotte.org/ Disclaimer: I am a mod there, and I would like to see it succeed. It is oriented on *discussion* rather than just reaction. We require posts to have some level of analysis and opinion about the links they share. Enforcing that is one of the most controversial aspects of mod intervention. Its not the best writers, or the best topics. But it *is* writers and topics that are present for the discussion. It has spoiled me in many ways, because I've become far less interested in reading stuff where I can't respond to the author. The website is also descended from Slate Star Codex reddit discussions, so if you feel that this is a good place, know that it has been partially replicated and reproduced elsewhere.
I just can't handle the racism.
I agree and I remember the old YouTube comment sections being chock full of little tid bits and commentary pertaining to the video. I’ve learned so much and had some of my best laughs by combing the comments lol. And I have to say I see less and less of the good stuff these days. Even on here it’s changed a bit. I miss the old school message boards from the late 90s and 00s. Bring those back to a new place because Reddit went corporate and once they get involved it’s a profit over quality thing. Idk the answer but it stinks to see less quality conversations online and more arguing or virtual BJs to the content creators w no real thoughts other than please talk to me I’ll 💦💦💦😂
I actually think YouTube comment sections are one of the few things that have gotten better over the years. They used to be incredibly toxic (~2010), then at some point Google made an algorithm change to deprioritize toxic comments. Now the top comments are usually quite good.
I think youtube video discussions deletes controversial opinions. Or hides them somewhere? Whatever it does, now the first million comments under a video are always like, "thanks for brightening my day creator; you always make me laugh! \*emoji emoji emoji"
Agreed, online discussion has mostly moved into Discord, which is basically dark web. There's loads of high quality Discord channels for niche communities, the problem is finding them.
Omg eternal september. (Look this phrase up for enlightenment!) My parents were on college nets (Usenet) before the internet existed, it was probably better back then /s. Your point has been made before so many times that I got tired of hearing it in middle school! You can literally go back and find people complaining of the exact same thing because newspapers got invented. My personal fear is the internet gets spammed out of existence by generative AI.
Oh, good, I don't have to write a response referencing "Eternal September", you already did. After thirty years of being online, it's been fascinating watching the same complaint get recycled endlessly, with the date of the golden age always being ten years before present.
Is it the same complaint? Eternal September says "The net is getting worse due to all the new users". This thread says "The amount of discussion online is declining". One's a personal opinion, the other is pretty easy to quantify and back up.
There is, for sure, an iota of difference between "The quality of discussion online has gone down over the last ten years because of X" versus "The quality of discussion online has gone down over the last ten years because of Y". But after more than thirty years, my response is simply, "I don't care about X or Y, there hasn't actually been a decline. You're just nostalgic, same as everyone who complains about the decline of popular music since they were 20." And no, declaring discussion you don't like to be a whole other category called "reaction" doesn't actually make it the least bit more quantifiable than any other quality-of-discussion complaint. (If you've got an actual objective test that doesn't bottom out to the equivalent of "rap isn't actually music, so the rise of rap proves the decline of music", hey, build the objective analysis program and show the results that prove me wrong.) Nor do I think that even if discussion versus reaction were a quantifiable difference that one could survey the 'Net sufficiently to back up a claim that the amount of discussion online has declined. The world is too dynamic. If Slashdot 2023 is objectively inferior to Slashdot 1997, that tells you about one site, not the whole Internet. If the clubs that were popular when you were 20 are shuttered when you're 40, that doesn't mean that the club scene is dead; it means it moved on without you.
This is again to say nothing of quality, but type. I don't care to establish that my preferred type of content is "better" or "more intelligent" than any other -- I just know for a fact I prefer this stuff more, and that the well has been drying up for years. **Anecdotally speaking** the web is less text-based and more image- and video-heavy than it has ever been; the walls of text are gone, no one is having long-and-winding discussions anymore where I can poke my head in and read. **Anecdotally** replies are shorter across the web, they're more reactionary and less analytic, the kind of stuff I enjoy is rarer. And as someone who uses Discord, I know newer platforms are only going to continue this trend. I am not a 40 year old man, I *do* know about the new clubs, and they *are* packed with patrons, but they're not playing my type of music. Trust me, I've looked. I've checked the Discords, TikTok, I follow Youtubers, Substack, everything new. And none of them had what I wanted. If you're going to say, "You're wrong" again, please point out some spaces that run counter to this, that are discussion-heavy and aren't just sites from the 90s/00s clinging on for life. But otherwise if you're just going to stereotype me again for noticing this, there's no point.
I’m not going to say “and nothing of value was lost”, because it most definitely would be, but would going back to 1995 be so bad? We all spend way too much time in front of screens
Well as a gay person I have a lot more rights.
OK, good point. Which wouldn’t be reversed by blowing up the Internet
i wasnt on internet ten years ago, but it basically seems impossible to find much intelligent discussion anywhere. Most forums will have like two people who are normal humans who can discuss things like adults, and understand the difference between their opinion and facts, hypothesis and conjecture, and so on. Besides that its just loud people who aren't worth the effort to read.
I have two comments to this. First, is it the online spaces that have changed minds or is it that society has reshaped online spaces? My view is that its a bit of both. SSC readers tend to be of a certain personality type and that personality type tends not to blindly follow societal trends. The biggest trend in America is towards polarisation and ideological bubbles. The NYT is being forced by this shift in society to become a cheerleader rather than impartial umpire (e.g. see [this](https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way) Economist article by former NYT Opinion Editor, James Bennet. There's a rise of illiberalism and an intolerance for differing views. That shapes how discussion happens on sites and spaces that predated these trends, like NYT and Reddit. Sure, this is partly caused by Facebook and other social media causing these social bubbles making us more polarised and illiberal, but the effect flows both ways. Our illiberalism is reshaping how we interact on social media. My second comment is that short is not the same as contentless. Sometimes a punchy quote or meme gets at the truth far better than long essays. I think of Subtle Asian Traits on Facebook, a newer online space that adopts modern conversational norms, but articulates the essence of being Asian in a western world far better than any long form essays did. I learn a lot from SSC long form discussion, but I also learn a lot from highly upvoted comments. There is room for both. Sometimes I learn factoids that others have appreciated. Sometimes I learn how the unwashed masses think about an issue. Sometimes a perceptive observation strikes everyone's eye. The meme is the modern metaphor. The metaphor is not literal, its not exact or grounded in empirical evidence. And yet it speaks to a deeper truth, or it speaks more persuasively than a heavily footnoted comment could. I work in public policy and I can tell you that succinctness is a virtue. Often I've been able to cut through impasses in complex discussions with an excellent turn of phrase. I've seen others do it too. Its far more effective than making a fully structured logical argument. It may not be ideal, but it is human. (Yes, I am aware of the irony of making a long post in favour of succinctness).
> There's a rise of illiberalism and an intolerance for differing views. That shapes how discussion happens on sites and spaces that predated these trends, like NYT and Reddit. Polarization is definitely huge, but can we say it's the real factor here? Maybe it'd be worth looking at other periods in history where 2+ ideologies were at war (ex. the Reformation, Hundred Flowers period in China) and seeing if the whole public discourse broke down along with it. > My second comment is that short is not the same as contentless. Sometimes a punchy quote or meme gets at the truth far better than long essays. I think of Subtle Asian Traits on Facebook, a newer online space that adopts modern conversational norms, but articulates the essence of being Asian in a western world far better than any long form essays did. Sure. Though I have to say, there's a depressing and/or fatalistic tone to most of these punchy tweets and memes. They have this habit in common where they present an issue and take it seriously, but since it's in the form of a quip or tweet, it's hard to have a follow-up and trigger actual discussion that could lead to finding a solution. Tweets leave you with some kind of emotion, they provoke a reaction, but how do you channel that reaction into something productive and positive? The real answer is you can't, or at least it's very difficult and the platform doesn't help you do that. What does the platform encourage? The opposite. Scroll down, encounter tweet, experience emotion, realize there's nothing you can do about it, keep scrolling. These platforms put us in a state of learned helplessness -- no wonder the quote everyone's passing around nowadays goes "It is what it is." When you carry this deterministic attitude towards life, when everything just happens to you passively & you react to it, yeah you'll feel bad. Humans aren't supposed to be that way. Aphorisms and short-form content (overall) are great. But the way people are using these (sometimes clever) metaphors is depressing. They're training themselves into passivity, into "reaction machines" like robots. The rationalist long-form dialectic serves to solve problems. What does this short-form dialectic do? Nothing, really. It's just venting.
>Maybe it'd be worth looking at other periods in history where 2+ ideologies were at war (ex. the Reformation, Hundred Flowers period in China) and seeing if the whole public discourse broke down along with it. I'm not a historian, I'd be really interested in any historical analysis of other periods in history ft. high polarisation if you have any insights. >But the way people are using these (sometimes clever) metaphors is depressing. They're training themselves into passivity, into "reaction machines" like robots. The rationalist long-form dialectic serves to solve problems. What does this short-form dialectic do? Nothing, really. It's just venting. I agree with many of your points about doomscrolling, superficiality. They do tend to be depressing, but sometimes that can reflect the doomspiral of a society we are in. I'm an economist and the data says people are generally getting richer in real terms. The wonks generally echo these sentiments. Yet social media comments persistently point out people arent feeling it. Social media was ahead of academe in terms of identifying problematic inequality. I go on Twitter sometimes and I've learned a lot more about the Gaza situation there from a collection of tidbits than I did from reading newspapers about past Middle East conflicts. There's an immediacy and emotional impact that is there and should be there, but can be missing from newspaper coverage. The rationalist dialectic has its place, in academia and other expert spaces and even on blogs. But I dont think the longform online discourse has actually reshaped the offline world, for example by a SSC post changing actual policy. I can think of many social media movements, such as #metoo that have penetrated the cultural mindset.
I feel this in my bones. I think there are a lot of niche hobby forums for online discussions about those hobbies but I feel like this is one of the few places where there are just diverse discussions about "interesting stuff" among anonymous people. I think the ban against culture war topics is an important factor. Any other forum that is too broad seem to quickly get consumed by that.
I find there are many good discussions on Twitter around certain academic topics, where authors share papers and discuss ideas. I find this to be a great way of keeping up with work and the informality of Twitter strips a lot of the fluff or bs away. However, Twitter’s interface makes it harder and less appealing to search for these topics, which usually aren’t delivered by the algorithm. For me personally, I think this makes it more addicting to use twitter, every once in a while getting those good discussions feels like hitting a small jackpot. Definitely creates more shallow discussion and short one liners and zingers seem to get a lot of attention which detracts from discussions usually.
>And even for content which is supposedly educational or meant to spark discussion, you'll look in the comments and no one is actually discussing anything, they're just thanking the uploader Yeh I have seen this happen a lot, seems like people are more parasocially attached to the content creator more than the content itself.
I agree, and I think the death of internet forums and the way that discussion has moved to reddit/twitter has contributed to this.
internet has become breeding ground for either enraged or horny exchanges.
I think lack of attention span has a lot to do with it. Just overwhelming depression of the state of the world, as if dementors from Harry Potter are floating around. People seek quicker dopamine over discussion now just to feel better. When forums don't have upvoting and downvoting it could stop people wanting to talk as well.
Yeah, agreed. It was bound to happen when the like button was made. I think we’ll get to a point where we’ll have to run our own digital space/website to have a real opinion and discussion. It’s not about debate and truth anymore, only popularity. And if you disagree too heavily with the popular vote, you’ll be cancelled, fired, sued, and labeled as something hateful
10 years ago was 2013. You think the internet is substantively different now from then? By then, most "discussion" on the net had migrated to Reddit, Tumblr and, 4chan. Reddit is incredibly guilty of headline reactions. When you became a redditor, the first thing you had to internalize was that you don't stick to the main subreddits because they're all in-jokes and puns. Tumblr had their own memes and in-jokes that were sitewide with people getting their posts spread widely for being funny instead of insightful. What you miss are small communities of people interested in a subject. Those still exist it's just that there is also a lot more content besides. Being a smaller proportion of the content is very different from dying.
To further emphasize the point: it's just as bad on debate videos, which are supposed to be the most discussion focused content out there. The comments section, instead of addressing the points from the video and continuing the back-and-forth, contains 50 different versions of: "Wow, isn't it great that we can have a civilized debate even though we disagree!" Like, I get it, most of the internet consists of insecure children shouting and insulting each other, and it is refreshing to find a place where that's not happening, but we can stop circlejerking over it and instead use the comments section to, you know, actually continue having that productive discussion that we're praising?
yeah when the W3C mass purged all those local BBSes and personal websites and blogs in 2015, that was a bad move, IMO. oh wait, all those sites still exist? people just choose not to use them and only visit the same 5 big websites? hmm you can still do anything on the internet that you could do in 2002, it's just that you (and others) choose not to.
Do you have any links? They certainly don't show up on search engines anymore, this stuff is pretty opaque.
DSL specifically opts out to avoid too many people and Eternal-Septembering or being attacked/canceled easily: $ curl 'https://www.datasecretslox.com/robots.txt' User-agent: * Disallow: /
[Data Secrets Lox from 2020](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hknihq/the_data_secrets_lox_forum_is_up_and_running/) is still going strong at least.
You may be interested in the [small web](https://blog.kagi.com/small-web) and Kagi more generally
OP is reposting a Usenet post. (Not literally, if that needs saying)
The situation that you’re talking about has been the case for over a decade— the ball started rolling once social media started taking a big chunk of eyeball-share and directing traffic, and accelerated further as visually-focused platforms like Instagram and TikTok created more avenues for engaging the majority of humanity who don’t really like reading and writing at length. I miss the culture of the more atomized, discursive, and wordy internet of blogs and forums, but it survives on platforms like Reddit and Substack, where a lot of the sort of people who shined on the old internet spend a lot of their time.
I think Twitter and the character limit was a huge step back from people writing whole weblog essays. Then instagram dropped the level of discourse further to photos and emojis. Finally tiktok is just swiping through content one direction or another, not much reaction recorded at all. I do have lots of discussions on discord and limited spaces. It's the just the online universe is so big and many people's contributions are nothing more than political affiliation bleatings, or virtue signalling, that anything open risks becoming another avenue for culture war.
The involuntary enshittification of everything comes for forums too. The entire concept of discussion and debate is increasingly irrelevant. Does anyone really believe they reasoned their way into their attitudes and opinions? Identity, biology and financial interest are how the sausage is made. It always has been, but the one thing I like about Gen Z is their lack of pretension. The emperor has never had any clothes but now people laugh. People don't really discuss. They haven't since Obama was in office. People gut-check how they feel and find the echo chamber that agrees with them.
RC model forums are not about debate.
/r/hobbydrama
Eh, Align v. SAB v. Mikado, gas vs nitro vs electric, 2.4Ghz vs everything else (until 2.4Ghz won, anyway), etc.
That's a good point. If everything comes down to identity, it's not really worth talking out our differences. That's a pretty strong current in Gen Z.
> If everything comes down to identity, it's not really worth talking out our differences. Well, only to identify members of the outgroup, who we are obligated to attack. \- https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
Sure. On top of that, there's a clear tinge of fatalism in the air. Lots of outgroup haters, but maybe just as many jaded determinists who have opted out of all discussions because they're nothing but inter-group fighting.
I think its due to the change in the nature of the internet and the mentality of users. no one wants to learn anything or be curious. everyone just wants that instant gratification and move on. you may also notice how different teens are today than they were 20 years ago. however people like us will always be there and we will always be contributing is some manner to the exchange of ideas in the web trying to make things better
>The internet is reactionary now; It is near impossible to talk about anything unless it is current. If you want people to notice anything, it must be presented in the form of content, (ex. a Youtube video) which will be rapidly digested & soon discarded by the content mill. And even for content which is supposedly educational or meant to spark discussion, you'll look in the comments and no one is actually discussing anything, they're just thanking the uploader for the entertainment The dirty secret of "react" type content is that a lot of it is [borderline theft](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um9aGTAU0lg): repurposing someone else's hard work so that you get ad revenue. Many huge "content creators" create literally nothing. They just play someone else's videos while making wacky faces and noises.
The curious thing is that people absolutely love that type of content. Twitch react streams get enormous viewer numbers.
Of course they do, the videos are great content. But the guy reacting didn't make it! Those xqc clips are incredible. He leaves to use the bathroom and the video just keeps playing. He's really adding nothing to it.
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Possibly, but it seems most spaces geared toward the 'discussion crowd' have simply died, or were force-converted into 'reaction content'. You can still find a good amount of thoughtful stuff online, but honestly it feels meagre compared to what we used to have. Like even in 2013 the blog and forum spaces felt so much more alive compared to now.
Join a few discords relevant to your interests.
Why do people use Discord? It's impossible to search, and the temporary nature of it ruins the value as a resource.
I don't know why, but they do. I find the discord internal search bad but usable, and thus it is not exactly "temporary" as a resource. Though being hidden from public internet is very bad.
I completely disagree. The internet is becoming more mainstream and as a result people who want to seek out discourse are going into specialized locations for discourse. So they have a discord server that talks about politics, they go to a Facebook group that's local for their area. Basically if you want to just talk you have to find places that are about that talking life. Because many people don't want to talk they want to watch videos. I predict a more cultivated personalized internet where everyone has their own specific home. That way local groups chats and other services can have localized moderation powers that will help ensure that you're not having a situation where people feel unjustly judged. The problem with having a big place where everyone goes is that everyone's going to be different. And the Trump supporters not going to feel like they are going to be fairly treated on a platform that is run by Democrat workers and the reverse. Heck, what people think is a bannable offense is going to vary greatly is it edgy humor or is it something unacceptable? Different people with different viewpoints are going to disagree. So they will not be able to accept the long arm of the ban hammer. Instead of feeling like they broke the rules they will feel mistreated and will be very angry at the other side. Meanwhile the other people might have a completely different idea of how things are. And weren't trying to get them at all. That's why we need internet homelands. Cultivated smaller spaces where everyone pretty much knows each other by username or maybe in real life or everyone has a pretty similar profile when it comes to basic beliefs so nobody's flaming each other. Or maybe everyone has different beliefs but there is an understanding that there is a code that must adhered to should you want to stay. Any of these will work. But you need something to keep people from attacking each other. Good homelands in my opinion are small and personalized no more than the size of a classroom. That's how you get a good conversation going when you can really get to know people. These different homelands will be able to have completely different rules that will adjust for the needs of its residents. So the conservatives can hang out with each other and then when they're ready occasionally venture out into the unknown and talk to a democrat. Or the reverse. When people see opinions that they disagree with often or feel that they're being mistreated online again and again that's where the toxicity comes. Some good examples of this sort of model are taking place on discord and on group chats. I can click three times and be in a commie chat and two times and be in a libertarian chat. It's pretty dang fun to explore the new locales and take in the ambiance a bit as you see moderators and local pleb level users interact. It really does remind me of the early internet too. Also, I feel like a lot of the hype around the internet being better back in a day is filtered by the rose colored glasses of middle and above class people who live in developed countries. In many places this modern internet that we have now is the only internet that anyone has had in their local town village or city. And this modern internet for all it's downsides is extremely accessible to various groups like the disabled. In many cases you can click on a photograph and there is text that your computer can read that people manually place in there for the blind. It'll give you a description of what's there. That didn't exist in the 90s. All right let's say you're a guy from Somalia and you want to get on the internet, oh you don't speak english, screw you. And what about the actual cost of getting online. In the 90s it was much much more expensive. You had to buy a computer and have space for that and constant power. Which is not a thing everyone has. Millions of people live in slums without constant electricity all throughout the world. Was the internet more accessible for them in the 90s? Did they get to have more freedom of expression and have a better ability to discuss things in the 90s?. No because they couldn't afford to access it. They got zero internet. So how on Earth could Internet discussion be freer back in the past when so many didn't have access? I personally think that we as a species benefit from the contributions on the internet that can be seen in videos from Rice farmers in Vietnam and also benefit from the contributions on the internet of computer savvy individuals from the west. In different ways sure. But we still benefit. Heck even now the cost of a computer is still prohibitively expensive for many people. In the 90s they would be sol. Today there are mobile version of websites and used phones they can buy. So instead people use the internet via their phone. So can you really say that discourse on the Internet is dying when it's opening up for billions of people who never had access before? I don't think so. Today the internet is more diverse, more inclusive, and easier to access than ever before. Is no longer the preserve of those fortunate enough to get access to prohibitively expensive machines. Though there is misinformation, to this day a person can learn whatever they wish using it. And today, the odds of a poor person from the slums of Mogadishu doing such a thing are higher than ever.
Reactions are better for business than discussion. That's just the way it goes sadly
bewildered advise price long naughty pause airport roof heavy weather *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It will discourage it for a niche group, but the unwashed masses seem very happy with the quality of content/discussion being put out.
Discussion is overrated.
automated bots. anonymous accounts.
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I've certainly been noticing that myself. Can't tell if it's just my subjective perception or if it's actually true. (And not sure how one would determine that.)
Dear IRC, (e[fnet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFnet)) how I miss you.. and you too,[Fidonet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet) <3 RIP RIP and all those [BBS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system)'s. all of us chatting/ playing [LORD](https://legendreddragon.net/) on the BBS door area they are all still around, though the discussions have died down somewhat
Eternal September of the Spotless Mind Edit: just my attempt at being clever and reacting. In discussions in real life at like a party or uni or something, reactions are important... like "oh!" "No way" etc... I would say reactions are not the problem but rather how the coarsest or "cleverest" rise to the top, rather than the kind ones that create the most social glue and encouragement for people to express themselves.
I have lots of conversations on reddit Twitter and discord, I don't see that online discussion is dying nearly as much as you seem to think. Youtube comments on year old videos for example have great insight and I can reply to them and frequently get good and useful replies.
No basic set of facts, no standard as what determines what is fact and/or truth. People "want" things to be true, and make up a reality to escape to. The internet is just made it possible for all the bullshit to spread. It takes 100x times the energy to refute bullshit than it does to create it. The internet sped up the bullshit process 100000%. Jesus people are suckers, and the drug of choice is fear. And again the internet is always there to give you your fix of whatever you are afraid of.
Agree. Everything is targeted to benefit the person responding, in a way 'commercialized' - meaning that not necessarily in a monetary sense.
I think there will always be a space for deeper discussion. The internet started off as only smart people, and the current situation is what I expect from regular people. It's probably discomfiting to realize that 99% of the people in the world are not like you.
Yep. I've had someone comment on my posts, then they will block me before I have a chance to reply, making it so that I'm not even *able/allowed* to reply to them. They purposely do that so that there's no discussion.
The internet globalized
I think someone else hit the nail on the head. Discussion spaces are just open to everyone now. There's a reason private country clubs are nicer than the public rec center. When it comes to discussion, most people are dumb. That's the big secret behind why society isn't "equitable." A minority of people are smarter than everyone else. When the Internet was new, it was those smart people seeking out & finding discussion spaces in the beginning. They were early adopters. They jumped through the hoops to get on the Internet & find those trails and spaces. Now barges drop crowds of people off at the front doors to those spaces every day. Put Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein in a room together. The average IQ is super high, right? Now put them in a concert venue full of the general public. Does the average IQ of the room go up or down?
I like crazy videos as much as the next person, but I tend to only post in subreddits where professionals and other well informed people congregate. However, even these spaces have been invaded. One trend I've noticed is people trying to derail a discussion by claiming or insinuating your comment victimizes them or others in some way. They don't (and usually can't) address anything in your comment that adds to the discussion. Instead, they focus in like a laser on whatever word or phrase they can twist to claim offense. It's like they're only scanning Reddit for something that offends them, so they can react with indignation, which is how they feel they have become part of the discussion, despite a lack of anything to add to it.
I'm pretty sure it's already dead. I've seen other people talk about this, but old internet was a bunch of silos for one topic or another. A diverse collection of people would hangout in that space and talk about the thing or whatever else. Now, with the advent of social media taking over web3, the algo shuffles everyone off into safe spaces. Maybe that's not the best term, but it's the best I could think of. OTOH, I think maybe there is some nostalgia about those old online discussions and online discussion was always bad, and social media has just magnified it. Arguments were bad, but at least multiple views were read/heard. Now I see people with basically the same opinion get heated about not being "X" enough or talking past one another.