Agreed. I don’t even know what this elegy is for. “what was wonderful about the web, was that here was a machine for finding people with similar interests and experience, anywhere in the world. That’s the web I want back.” Is that no longer the web? It seems pretty easy to find communities these days.
The web I want back is the one powered by real people making real things. But rather than complain about it I think I’d rather be one of the people who is still here, making things.
From what I've seen, a lot - I'd say most - of the communities that existed outside of the major platforms have dried up or ended (the famous/infamous bodybuilding forum apparently just went down). Web forum communities, mailing list communities, communities built around an individuals website (it sounds strange to say now, but this was pretty common a couple of decades ago). Even the offline meeting sites like Couchsurfing and Meetup are a shadow of what they were in their heyday (about 15 years or so ago).
The actual number of people actively using the internet is much higher, yet the number of people outside of a few small social media silos are much lower. So I can only surmise that these social media silos are giving the vast majority - almost everyone - what they want (those gratifying instant hits). It's just sad to know that there's apparently only a tiny sliver of humanity interested in venturing off the main path and interacting with people outside of these silos.
It kind of is though. Maybe not with discord specifically, because it’s a closed platform. but communities on open ones like matrix are just as much part of the web as any forum.
It’s not a big platform with all users in one space. There are dedicated communities with passionate people talking, sharing ideas, helping each other out.
Would you’ve considered IRC chat rooms on freenode part of the web?
> From what I've seen, a lot - I'd say most - of the communities that existed outside of the major platforms have dried up or ended (the famous/infamous bodybuilding forum apparently just went down). Web forum communities, mailing list communities, communities built around an individuals website (it sounds strange to say now, but this was pretty common a couple of decades ago).
I would say that is simply because bodybuilding sucks and everyone with half a brain has moved to other activities like crossfit or similar that allows you to have a nice body that you can actually do something with instead of a useless one :)
More seriously this is not my experience. Two of the websites I visit the most in 2024 are the "traditionnal participative type", ie, privately owned, not social medias but with membership and comments and stuff. One is using a custom cms based on rails and has been launched in 1998, the other one is only 15y old but is running vbulletin.
And I still encounter many websites like this. Last time I had an issue with my Piaggio motorbike, I found a vespa dedicated web forum that was really helpful and active.
I think there are lots of people deep in social medias, reddit and discord and some who are fed up by this stuff and stay out of it. The issue is that privately owned websites cost money to run usually or are very stripped of customization/features/storage and moderation is a burden so you need very motivated people to keep the light on compared to say, a discord or reddit community that can stay online for months/years while the initial admins/founders aren't even connecting to it anymore.
I'm looking forward to reading an aging GenZ-er's elegy of the web that looks fondly back on the age of TikTok and algorithmic feeds, back when people actually made things.
"I miss when the internet was an international gathering place, not a carefully guarded forum for communicating misinformation-free messaging about foreign policy and corporate life in the United States of America, England and Wales. I had a friend from China."
100%. I've been writing HTML since 94, and there truly was no golden age. There have been (get ready for this) good and bad things about each era.
It has always been possible to create communities, or break away and do something different. I really like ActivityPub, but it does not really change the dynamic.
With all of that said, sometimes getting a fancy new notebook makes you more likely to draw/write, which seems to be essentially what Dave is experiencing. Nothing wrong with that!
>It seems pretty easy to find communities these days.
Outside of HN and a few niche subreddits, I can't think of many. Most good communities I'm part of are off the web on things like Discord which isn't addressable by search engines.
There has to be a barrier, a kept gate. Back "then", simply access to the internet was enough of a filter to get a good signal-to-noise ratio.
Today it's something else, such as knowing discords through word of mouth, knowing groups on other platforms, etc. If you're not getting through this knowledge filter, you need to try harder or accept not being in there.
HN can remain public and high quality due to strong moderation and an "ugly", text-only, imageless, emojiless UI that scares away "noise"-people.
This comment was very well-written. And, it stirs up thoughts about what works and what doesn't. "What abouts" like that one battle royale game (that failed) that coupled advancement to being a good sport and respectful to others, and it kindof worked. Could that kind of "good sport" thing be engineered into public forums somehow.
But in the end, all my feeble "what if's" collapse, and I end up agreeing with you.
Discord is honestly one of the worst things to happen to the internet, and I'd blame Gen-Z for most of its popularity since they seem to have no idea why the internet was created in the first place.
>AIM and forums coexisted because they serve different purposes.
That's the problem with Discord. As an AIM replacement, it's fine, because no one cares about being able to access other peoples' ephemeral private chats. But when large communities discuss things, it's very useful for that information to be publicly available and accessible from a search engine, and Discord prevents that, locking it all away from any outsiders. If your group really wants to be secret and private for some reason, I guess that's fine, but if you're a group discussing, for instance, bicycle maintenance tips, why do you want to keep others from seeing this helpful info? And why do you want to keep others out? Specialty subreddits don't have this problem.
So where do you suggest people post that is zero cost and advertisement free?
These communities were pushed onto discord because there isn't a better place for them.
The regional live music discord I'm in would be much better served by being on a web forum but running a forum costs money. Or they could use facebook but not everyone in the community has/wants a facebook account. Not everyone uses reddit/twitter/insert your favorite social media.
> why do you want to keep others from seeing this helpful info?
How paranoid would one have to be to think people are moving to discord to be malicious? The garden doesn't have walls to keep you out, the walls are to keep the advertisers/bots out.
>So where do you suggest people post that is zero cost and advertisement free?
These days, Reddit seems to be the best option available (unfortunately).
Back during better days, we had lots of independent forums running software like PhpBB, which served this purpose well. For some reason that I don't really understand, back then (when computers were less powerful and efficient than now) that worked well enough, but now everyone's screaming about hosting costs and how expensive it is to run even a single bulletin board on the internet so they turn to Discord when they don't like Reddit. Why hosting costs apparently weren't such a big deal 15-20 years ago with crappier hardware and much less storage space, I honestly don't know.
> Why hosting costs apparently weren't such a big deal 15-20 years ago with crappier hardware and much less storage space, I honestly don't know.
Back in the so called "golden days", I actually hosted a forum with a friend. His uncle offered his old office PC(bought at a bargain) and internet with fixed IP for us to tinker with. Our tiny forum has local kids and some "supervising adults" doing moderation. Many of our international members were mostly on dialup, so even if we didn't have lovely CDN, the slowness was accepted as normal thing. We did not face much spamming, grifting and any trouble makers were policed out immediately by moderators.
In present days, I am very afraid to put something online, because if the moderators are not vigilant, I could very well expect a police letter by a week or two asking about certain type fo contents and my infra provider banning or null routing my forum. It was easy back in days, now the risks are too high and trouble makers have more resources than well intent folks.
It is starting to change, for me, Discord has being going downhill for a couple of years.
Client updates are becoming more common and more buggy, as if we were on a beta channel. Marketing for Nitro is becoming more agressive, and now, there are "Quests", which are essentially ad banners for games.
I still remember the screen names of folks I interacted with in and on IRC, AIM, ezboard, IGN boards, forums, etc.
I only remember a handful of HN usernames and absolutely zero handles from elsewhere.
Forums used to have large avatars and signatures you could customize and communities were much more tightly-knit. I imagine that's what Discord and VRChat do now.
> I still remember the screen names of folks I interacted with in and on IRC, AIM, ezboard, IGN boards, forums, etc.
> I only remember a handful of HN usernames and absolutely zero handles from elsewhere.
Same. It's strange that in terms of interpersonal communication, we appear to be worse off than where were 25 years ago with AIM and e-mail. Back then it was common to carry on pretty deep conversations and relationships with people from all over the world. Part of my nightly routine was going over the day with my friends (both near and far). I would send long e-mail to my distant friends on their birthday, talking about all the things that had happened in my life, and they would do the same. I'd even keep in contact for years with pen pals I had met all over the world.
There's no reason this couldn't be done today, but I suppose most people prefer the much shallower interactions we have now.
That's a feature. HN is expressly built to encourage high-quality content in the comments - by removing or discouraging things that tend to bring poor content with them. Not showing up/down-votes counts, not allowing avatars and discouraging lengthy signatures, not showing previews of images linked, not allowing to reply immediately to comments (and the length of "immediately" getting longer the deeper the thread) - the HN is coded this way to encourage sticking to guidelines and making thoughtful comments focused on informative, interesting content.
It does make HN a worse place for building interpersonal relations, no question about it - but it also eliminates or blocks many of the enshitiffication vectors. Not all of them, and we do see changes over time in what's acceptable, going in the direction that some will dislike, but I think the fact that HN still existing in relatively constant form almost 20 years later shows that the strategy works, to an extent.
The web I want back is the one powered by real people making real things. But rather than complain about it I think I’d rather be one of the people who is still here, making things.