HN Reader

I know this sounds maybe a bit insane, or even self-aggrandizing but I don't comment on public websites for some benefit to myself. I write with the vague hope that some unique expression of myself makes some tiny difference to this universe.

Every once in a while I have some experience or some a point of view that I don't see reflected anywhere else. One of the benefits of the pseudo-anonymization of sites like Hacker News is that I feel a bit more comfortable stating things that don't really have a place to say anywhere else.

The only thing I regret is when I get into pointless arguments, usually when I feel that my comment was misunderstood or misinterpreted. But even those arguments sometimes force me to consider how to express myself more clearly or to challenge how deeply I hold the belief (or how well I know the subject) that lead me to the comment in the first place.

I actually made plenty of friends commenting, in the early days of the Internet, but it wasn't just commenting. It was that a comment on a message board would lead to following them on LiveJournal, which would lead to AIM chats, which would lead to volunteer positions and real-life meetups and being invited to their weddings and a job referral to Google in the late-00s.

I've got plenty of friends now. Most are not the ones I met online; that was a phase of our life that has largely passed us by, though I keep up with a couple. I still comment on things, but it leads to more shallow relationships if any, but perhaps that's because I'm not really looking for friends anymore.

But I think that the bigger reason I'm reconsidering commenting online is: I can never be sure if the other person is real anymore. And even if they are, it often doesn't feel like they're debating in good faith. A lot of recent Reddit comment threads have really felt like I'm arguing with an AI or Russian troll farm. Social media now feels like a propaganda cesspool rather than something where people come together to share disparate views.

Slashdot had a decent comment system where moderation points were assigned at random and a comment could be marked as insightful, troll, etc. This helped sustain discourse and resisted some of the usual “hive mind” pile ons that are common on reddit and here.

I think we are all pretty aware of how the up and down arrows are supposed to be used versus how they get used.

For content that doesn’t trigger an emotional response: the arrows are used appropriately, highlighting comments and silencing less useful discussion. HN is incredibly useful for discussion on non-controversial, almost mundane, topics.

However it all comes undone for any topic that carries emotional baggage. Where up and down arrows are clearly used as “like” and “dislike” buttons regardless of the facts or merit presented in each comment. Instead commenting becomes an exercise in PR. The first clue is the comment count. HN has some very predictable patterns in comment counts.

Platform operators may not be willing to change this as “hive mind” and “liked” content helps visitation, even if it doesn’t help discourse. The consequence of inaction however is that topic experts are pushed out by mobbing, because invariably not everything is sunshine and roses.

Commenting probably bothers me the least on a list of things I think are bad about the internet. Comments are one of the few places you can still read about topic X and then see "well, here's topic Y". This is about the only thing making the internet a world wide web and not a world wide expanse of tiny unconnected islands. Search engines are not effective at making these connections anymore, and AI makes the connection but hides it.

As for the worst thing, I think it's that you can have "kittens playing" and "terrorist attack" posts right next to each other. That can't be a good way to view what's going on.

I’ve been thinking a bit on how to improve discourse between disagreeing people and how the quick response style of comment sections don’t lend themselves to serious debate.

One idea I have is to mimic Lincoln–Douglas debates where two people debate each other in a fixed format and with structured time for rebuttal. The hope being by slowing down rebuttal the response becomes more mindful.

In general though I think its the speed and low quality of response leading to dissatisfaction of comment platforms.

Commenting is great. Reading replies and replying, not so much. I just fire off comments left and right, and never check back to see if anyone engaged. It's soothing without being aggravating.

Oh dear. Should I comment on this?

This post made me want to comment again

Gotosay: Come to HN for the comments...

I never regret not commenting.

comments to IRC to beer catchups were a thing in past.

> Broadly speaking, the online platforms we use are not built for connection; they are built for engagement. This is universally true for all internet spaces, from stories to newsfeeds, for the intellectual and the plebian alike.

It wasn't always like this, and the I feel the whole "engagement" blame is misplaced.

You don't post comments for engagement, you post it for recognition. And people post selfies on social media not to farm engagement, but to attract attention.

The engagement part come after it. Someone welcomed the content you posted, it's positive feedback from there. The social media platforms wants to farm engagement for profit, you, or rather most people at least, don't.

The connection part on the other hand, is your own effort, it don't happen automatically. Platforms are just a place, a pub, for people to gather, you need to do the work to find friends.

Commenting on HN helps me figure out what I think…in addition to learning what others think.

Maybe 20% of the time I don’t actually submit the comment because I read it and decide I have nothing substantial to say.

But the commenting is at least as formative and useful as the articles.

I've also been commenting a lot over the past decade. Partly for practicing my writing, like OP, partly to help maintain balance within the social order by shedding light on alternative perspectives which were often overlooked.

But now as my comments are likely being fed into AI for training for profit by specific individuals, it doesn't feel the same. I'm getting a stronger urge to keep my expertise to myself.

Also, the benefits of good writing aren't as great anymore. I still kind of benefit in terms of practicing my tough typing... It's valuable to be able to type AI prompts quickly.

I only recently learned that I have a severe case of ADD. It has helped me with a lot of work related things such as the need to fix problems. As a result of that if there's a problem I work on it until its resolved, which has benefited me greatly during my career.

But for every positive case there are just as many negative ones. I have an intrinsic need to answer questions and will often spend an inordinate amount of time doing so, when in fact I could have used that time far more productively.

Doing comments since the BBS days, it was never about meeting people in person, rather discussing stuff with similar liked minds, even if there is plenty of trolling as well.

Oh wow, the argument was not expected but also very compelling, I'd been wanting to quit commenting as it's a big waste of time and often leaves me sour, as you almost always comment in disagreement or engage in tough debates and so on. It rarely feels good.

But seeing it as a bad ROI in terms of social interactions that don't create any social bond, that's quite true. You spend all this time "socializing", and yet gain no social connection from it.

Anyone know any forums where you can be sure you're talking to humans and feel like you're in a close knit community?

I am not talking about reddit subs, maybe something more niche, even for hobbies outside computing.

The only place where I felt in company of real humans is a couple of niche IRC channels, where someone without fail always asks me how my day is going whenever I join, I am looking for places like that.

I made a bunch of friends during the early internet (ok, not that early: during the phpbb forums era), some of which I even met in real life. From other countries than mine, too!

But I think I've aged and the internet has changed too. Today, I have the friends I need in real life, and I don't make friends online. Not sure if it's me or the world has changed, or both. Probably mostly me.

Small but organised communities that are on Twitch and YouTube live streams seem to counter that “series of one-offs” the author is talking about.

I often watch YouTube live streamed sports watchalongs and have become familiar with the regular super chat contributors that are read out. Similarly on Twitch there are many regular streamers with small communities and regular chatters.

This started out well, but then there are other aspects to consider :

Discord, unlike IRC, is killing forums. And is on the Deep Web, meaning that all the lore, all the knowledge is lost to anyone searching for it, including Internet Archive crawlers.

And in addition to that it's a platform, so people using it are collaborating with totalitarian extremists that are turning our countries into (uncool) cyberpunk dystopias.

I found this interesting: "part of an elite society of people who put their voice out there instead of lurked." I never think of people who just read comments without posting. I grew up before the internet so the nearest equivalent was writing to newspaper letters pages, and anyone who did that regularly was a bit lonely or strange but certainly not elite.

I saw this thread and felt the need to comment pointlessly on it without aggrandizing the act of commenting simply to make some kind of point about the content but here I am making it out to be something important and meaningful when it isn’t oops how silly of me

Nobody dares commenting eh ?

This sounds right to me: most of the comments I've written, on most sites, haven't been useful to me socially. The people I was talking to were strangers and remained strangers. But sometimes the act of commenting helped me understand something; sometimes my comments helped other people understand something; and sometimes, very often, reading other people's comments helped me understand something. So it's not valuable for socializing, but it is valuable for other things.

That said, there's another problem with comment culture that seems worth mentioning. I seem to have gotten good at expressing thoughts that fit in a comment. That gives me a false sense of competence; but when I need to write something longer, like a blog post several pages long, the structure just completely falls apart. And writing a book I can't even imagine. It seems writing at different lengths is essentially different skills, which need to be practiced separately. And if that's the case, then as Annie Dillard says, why not just write something long to begin with? I'm actually thinking of that now.

Comment culture died for me in a different way.

I was browsing some thread and someone referenced a meme typed out as :.|:;

The comment had a few replies who recognized the meme. I had no idea what it meant so I asked Claude

Well the AI knew what it was! It was the “loss” meme but the explanation it gave made no sense.

Turns out the meme needs a strike through tag. This turns :.|:; into a four-panel diagram of a web comic.

That’s when I realize that whatever trained Claude stripped out the formatting, and thus the entire meaning of the meme. And the comment I originally saw was a repost bot that also failed to retain the formatting when it reposted it.

And the replies that understood the reference were all reposted by bots.

So who even knows if we CAN make relationships on the internet anymore?

I can’t trust that any comment is actual human expression any more. Or is it just bullshit stripped of any context or meaning

I find typing the comment out, then deleting it and not submitting kinda gives my brain the 90% feeling of needing to say something. Only place I don't have to do this is 4chan, where the worst thing to happen is that your comment gets ignored or something mean is said to me (oh dear!)

I unironically just closed this tab before submitting out of habit and reopened it to submit this

i'll tell you what my shrink tells me: you're not commenting, you're looking for friends, for the feeling of connection or community.

stop thinking about the nature of comments, the content, the responses you get. start thinking about the thoughts/emotions that come up when trying to make connections irl.

It's not really a social activity, but an intellectual one to stay informed about and discuss technology. You can stop visiting if you don't need to keep up. If I were retired, I'd be doing other things.

Weird! Sorry to hear that commenting (including on HN) didn't make this person any friends. It has made me a bunch of friends, including some very close in-person ones. I don't think I'm an oddball in that regard!

Of particular note: comment culture is how I managed to engage with local politics here in Chicagoland, through which I met a ton of my neighbors and got actively involved with campaigns and the local government itself. Those are all in-person relationships that were (and remain) heavily mediated by comments.

When I comment I’m engaging with the content - not trying to make connections.

> I’ve benefited incredibly from commenting.

> It has made me a (mostly) better person.

> All of that social activity with zero ROI.

Sorry you didn't make friends from it, but "zero ROI" seems pretty at odds with the rest of your results.

Yeah, mostly anonymous commenting tyranny-of-the-nitpickers is really unfulfilling.

I miss phpBB as the dominant mode of internet socialization. Communities with norms, in-jokes, reputation. Take me back!

On the note of alienation in commenting, this perspective is the strongest one I've heard yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26640203.

Read it; it's only a few paragraphs. If I could, I would distill that warning into the guidelines of any serious forum.

Not just because it fits my lived experience. But because one of the people in thread who disagreed — a prolific developer who sought friends on the internet — later killed themselves because of the internet.

> That scares me. All of that social activity with zero ROI.

We really don't need to assign ROI to every single thing we do.

And I don't think comment culture takes away from any of the activites that lead to more meaningful relationships. Like, how do you imagine this works - "I'm not going to comment on this tech blog post while I'm having my cofee this morning so that later this week I can meet with people at a local book club"? One has nothing to do with the other.

My entire career on tech is thanks to my comments at the bottom of TechCrunch articles in the early 2010s (and I did hang out with the TechCrunch writers once I moved to SF). That was more a time where trolling in comment sections on blogs was more understood to be in good fun.

Comment culture died starting in 2016, as the internet as a whole became more polarized and making maliciously edgy is both commonplace and rewarded. Hacker News is an outlier in that aspect as it avoided that fate.

One of the most useful advice I got (forgot the name and the link) is to never got further than two replies deep. Every time I broke that, in hindsight, it was dumb to do so.

It's not just comments but the entire concept of virtual life. We lived many lives through a glass which made amazing things possible without any of the physical consequences. But AI is putting all this to death, because talking to a machine is not (virtual) social activity, and every question has been answered. It s becoming a slowly rising trend of people returning to the physical world only to find most people hunched over their phones. Things are happening, change is good

comment culture is an adventure for me it's teaching me how to be a better writer, by bieng able to see the responses to various styles of dialog, which is generaly impossible to do in the rural environment that surrounds me most of the time, and realy makes a difference when I venture into the city or have to engage beurocratic institutions, lawyers, bankers, and others working in more structured environments, devoid of wild and domesticated animals ,heavy equipment, perhaps simultaneously, which is the sort of thing that when included into general conversation in the form of "what have you been.up to", tends to derail conversations in an irecoverable way, so the internet gives me a place to test how that all works. thanks ,by the way

Is anyone old enough to have taken part in BBS culture? You had handles, so it was somewhat anonymous, and you argued heatedly, but teens and adults alike made real life friends that last lifetimes.

There's something different about social media culture and polarization, and it's not as much the polarization as something else.

I think it's the volume. Maybe I'm an elitist but there's something niche about agreeing to disagree. And building communities in other ways even when disagreeing.

Agreed. I met my late wife on social media. You could definitely make friends on things like forums, but the people on modern social media platforms are different; there's a complete, pervasive lack of trust among today's users.

In the 90s and into the mid-aughts, we would give out our names, phone numbers, and addresses no problem. It's a world where cryptocurrency could sprout because it was built around chat rooms and forums with like-minded individuals, or individuals working/playing in particular niches. Today, most people seem to assume giving your address is something only an idiot would do, or that times have changed drastically so it was fine then but stupid now.

I think we live in a world now where people are conditioned to no longer speak to each other. This is a world where Jesus would be very strange indeed, even if we do find ourselves under a nominally Christian nationalist government. Imagine letting a stranger into your house, or even talking to a stranger in a parking lot. There will, for sure, be no kind of foot-washing.

I agree this is largely conditioning coming from the gamification of socializing brought on by social media and other websites to drive engagement. I don't think the average Internet user would be like this without conditioning by big technology companies. I think it can be beaten by recognizing it as a harmful addiction, and an addiction that can be pretty tough to beat. Government and tech companies aren't going to fix it; it's something you have to want to fix for yourself.

I'm addicted to commenting on the internet. I was like, top 1% of comment karma on reddit something like 10 years ago, not because I was popular, but I think just out of sheer volume of comments getting 10-100 upvotes. Then to twitter, much shorter dopamine loop but a much worse comment experience because the threading is shit and it's impossible to know whose talking to who about what and there's a character limit. I was trying to break both addictions so I thought I'd try a "lower engagement" platform like Hacker News, and lo and behold, addicted here. Thank god they throttled my posting here, or I'd probably post at just as high a volume as I did back in the day on reddit.

Anyway like the author I often wonder, why tf am I commenting? I don't recognize any of you, even though I've had very pleasant interactions and have learned some interesting things here and there from you (like yesterday I learned about claude sub-agents), but it isn't what draws me. It's some kind of compulsion. Dopamine hits from replies? I do love talking to people IRL as well, so maybe it's just that? My friends tried to get me back into world of warcraft and an hour after logging in all I'd done was sat in a capital city arguing with people in Trade chat. Bizarre compulsion.

I don't understand ROI thinking but what frequently breaks my addiction is remembering that my comments are adding value to some rich bastard's wallet at probably no return to me, maybe harm. At least on reddit and twitter. HN isn't so bad, I mostly have good interactions here, but I'm an addict so what is useful to some is to me, falling off the wagon. Which is what I'm doing right now :P

I really understand the author's point of view, because it really reflects my perception of the ever-degrading internet.

What were interesting ways to share interests, hobbies, projects and free knowledge degraded post-social media into a cesspool of engagement, with the exception being the AI generated jesus or cat pictures.

Pretty much everything else went to shit and is created to make you mad, because that's when you talk or click the most.

A couple years ago when I was targeted by APT28 the first time, I decided that the only healthy internet time is around twice a day for a couple minutes and that should be it. So I introduced the toilet rule: I only use social media on the toilet, and I don't even have the passwords on another device.

This way I guarantee the same level of content quality that social media expects me to have, without the emotional aftermath when the bots try to reinforce you in their absolutist beliefs of why killing someone is actually okay.

It's great, I can fully recommend it. I've never been more productive.

> I’ve benefited incredibly from commenting.

> All of that social activity with zero ROI.

Pick one

I think HN is one of the worthwhile places to participate in. It's sort of what LinkedIn wishes it was in many ways, drawing all sorts of big names and subject matter experts to participate and connect without all the business suits and insights on B2B sales.

It shouldn't be taken as a replacement for having a social life, but can be a very good complement if your social life isn't as intellectually stimulating as you would like.

A lot of my more important (to me/IMHO) blog posts started out as seed crystal HN comments that I developed into full articles.

I should quit myself, I've been on HN and various websites commenting for years if not decades; top 100 commenter on one big popular website.

But it's shallow and self-aggrandizing, because I comment, hit post, and... never look at it again because what if I'm actually held to account on what I just said?

But also, nobody's ever read a comment and thought "whoa I need to get to know this person better!" and reached out - but that's normal because I never read a comment and have that thought.

Publishing my opinion is great, that's why so many people have blogs and twitter and such as well, it's their own soapbox. But conversing over comments, not so much.

HN's issue is that you don't get notifications if someone replied to you. Someone may reply to you, you may reply to them again, but who knows if they read it and reply again? Reddit's issue is that I ignore notifications.

Forums were great 15-20 years ago, I'd go there several times a day, go through ALL the unread posts, read everything, reply, and there would be actual conversations going. But also usually not one to one, so you'd rarely stand alone in any discussions.

But for me, that time has passed. I haven't been to these forums in ages (and I run them, lol), I just don't read long posts, especially from people I know who write long posts, the personal conversations have mostly died out and moved to Discord or private chats - because over time, people shared too much, were too trusting, and got hurt because of it.

TL;DR, I'm still on the internet but it's a husk of the mid 2000s - or at least my experience thereof is, the generation following will probably say the same in 20 years time. It matters more what time in your life you are than the online communities themselves I think.

I still do it, but as harm reduction, I never read the replies to my comments

> Comment culture requires your social energy.

It actually doesn't anymore. LLMs can transform you into Diogenes in a mech suit.

You can minimize your expended energy, maintain emotional cool-ness (vital to being perceived as 'winning' to the audience), and ultimately turn every discussion into a war of attrition. If your opponent is getting emotional heated and burnt out, they eventually drop out.

If you get off on winning online arguments, it turns comment culture into an asymmetric warfare. We're going to I expect this to destroy forums. Ideologies and untreated anti-social personality disorders cannot, at scale, co-exist with the commons.

I agree with the author on the positive side of commenting. In addition to every they said, it learns you to accept being proven wrong, learn how ignorant you are, and is a great introspection tool.

The point of commenting is not being social or a socialite. The best comments are questions - asking others, questioning yourself.

Looking back at some of my comments, some were clearly toxic and I know why: it was time when things weren't going my way at work (cause most of my comment activity is in tech-related forums). It reminds me when I was bullied at school, which made me at times not the nicest brother. Took me too long to notice I had this tendency.

But their reasoning then becomes unsound: "All of that social activity with zero ROI." They throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It seems that the author belong to the same regeneration as mine, so they might be in that period of their life - the "forties blues" or "middle age crisis" (1). This doesn't "invalidate" this post, except for the false dichotomy between Internet acquaintances and IRL friends. It is a warning to be heard, at a time when we see more and more smartphone zombies in the streets.

(1) it becomes really ironic when you been looking at teens and their identity crisis with a patronizing eye in your thirties-forties and then you experience it a second time yourself.

Writing comments just takes too much time, which is why I don't do it anymore.

Expecting commenting to make you friend like connections is the Ur internet faux pas

I can't remember the last time I commented on an internet forum

dumb movie, comment people are some the richest in the world

> All of that social activity with zero ROI. At first, I thought that I needed to change my commenting habits, and, you know, try to make connections. But the more I considered how to make friends in comment culture, the more I realized that it wasn’t just my own social ineptitude. Comment culture has a problem. Systemically, it produces an internet of strangers.

I can't tell if Hacker News is less affected by this, or if it lends itself to parasocial relationships, but I've started to recognize a few other users who seem to frequently read and comment on the same topics that I do.

I don't think these will blossom into friendships, but many friendships of mine have started with frequenting the same location or event until you see who else is usually there, and then introducing yourself.

If this kind of comment-acquaintance is common on HN though, it probably comes back (as always) to the self-selecting user base, the text-only interface, and of course, the moderation. Because I certainly haven't experienced it on Reddit, Twitter, or Meta platforms.

I’m convinced

sadly agree, as a gymrat girl in my early 20s it's hard to find friends online, everyone asks me to send a few pictures as soon as we start talking ૮₍•᷄ ༝ •᷅₎ა

Even just yesterday I had a constructive reply where we were initially snarky and reconciled to a good outcome. That’s not representative, perhaps 1/3 of the outcomes when I’m commenting here, and 1/10th on broader social media.

I struggle with comments, where I try to be succinct and to the point. I’ve been soft-banned on HN – to the mods credit they worked with me to restore my account, and had good intentions.

Commenters and moderators tend to favor vague, long-winded language and double-entendre over direct & succinct comments.

Hence my frequent downvotes and soft-bans.

private communities is where it's at, like Discord

I like my comments, they’re little droppings of my thoughts at the time that I can go back to. I delete many of them, if they get a single downvote, or if I think about them for 10 minutes after and decide not to have them permanently recorded. They don’t run my life, and it’s only HN and lobsters I leave them on. I just don’t assign much of my life’s purpose to these farts in the wind, and turns out it’s fine.

I comment to get downvotes and it mostly works.

yeah me too. never commented since. life is awesome