An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour.
HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that.
But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonalds: a generic commercial space built around spending money. It has no personality, it's not safe, and no one feels at home there. Why would you invest yourself in a space like that?
> An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour.
> HN is like that.
HN is the only place that is not a pub: jokes are frowned upon, and even moderated out. Post Valuable Content, or GTFO. You can joke and feel belonging literally everywhere else, catpost half drunk and high, noone cares really, from the small subreddits and discord servers and fb groups to the big subreddits, discord servers, fb groups.
> But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonalds: a generic commercial space built around spending money.
We must have a different internet, every other place I know is full of personality and total unique, people repeat the same sets of inside jokes over and over. HN is way the driest and most soulless.
My instinct was to agree with the comment above, but after giving it a few minutes I think I'd rather have a moderated "soulless" HN.
It seems to me that there is a fine line between innocent jokes and full-blown juvenile behaviour. The amount of effort you would need to invest into sustaining such a place is not worth it, best to just not allow it at all. There are plenty of places where you can get your dose of jokes and fun. One thing that keeps immature and rude people away is precisely the "dullness" that the post above speaks of. People get tired and move on, leaving the place clean and tidy for others to use.
HN has problems of course; downvote bullying is one of them. I'm not saying HN is perfect, but I'd rather not turn it into Reddit or Youtube. So I don't know where this leaves HN between the "pub" and "commercial street".
I come here because it is one of the very few places where you can have interesting discussions and read interesting comments from people with a similar intent and interest.
There are many very different kinds of humor. I think HN generally allows some "insightful" or "never thought of it that way" jokes. Which is probably a narrow subset of humor in general and often requires quite a lot of knowledge about the subject matter.
Only accepting humor if it's sufficiently serious is poser behavior. It reeks of insecurity.
Some of the most brilliant people in history also had an often juvenile sense of humor. Hacker culture was born out of puns and memes and Discordianism and Monty Python references.
But we don't do that here. We're serious people having serious discussions on serious topics. Look at how serious we are. Like that monocle guy meme, except replace the glass of wine with a can of Gamersupps mixed with adderall.
I think some of that stuff also works, if it is at least somewhat ambitious. Say, "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" is absurd and humorous but gets a lot of appreciation.
The café was the first pub-like place where people did mostly not drink alcohol. Reportedly, it was an inportant place for the enlightenment period of history. Let's not oversell HN here, though...
Central European cafes sell spirits, too. A cognac makes a fine accompaniment to a coffee. It is foreign franchise coffee places like Starbucks don't sell alcohol at all, and that is a major part of why they feel so foreign.
I prefer it this way. I would love to see original jokes on HN, but the issue is that if you allow "jokes" in general, there's a flood of low-effort repetition of popular phrases or comments where the only "comedic" value is that they've forced something into a cliche sentence structure. That feels more soulless than the way HN is, because comments get so samey. You see the same effect sort of start to creep in on certain political posts, where people feel that they can achieve a cheap sense of attention and comradery for expressing a trite idea instead of a joke (comments that mostly amount to "Elon Musk is a mean man! Who else agrees???")
On HN jokes are possible, but they've got to be quite good, and are typically best included as seasoning to a comment rather than as freestanding comments of their own. I've done this myself, notably in my Pompeii comment of a few years ago, which was well-received (better than most of my efforts):
Personally, when I read Reddit, I'm in awe of how good the best jokes are. The problem is that you can't have everything; with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor. HN's tradeoff is to optimize for signal-noise ratio, so that stuff gets hammered particularly hard.
People complain about HN's humorlessness, and they're right to a point. The trouble is that with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor, and HN wants to optimize for signal/noise ratio. It's not that we're killjoys—we like jokes and laughing—it's that the signal/noise problem is hard.
There are no jokes in here, but HN definitely has a posting/comment "culture", a vibe, as the OP calls it, that's for sure.
For example I could never understood how come the rationalist thing was not derided to the moon and the back, especially after that crypto debacle with the Bahamas guy. But while there was a slight reaction shorlty after the fact that rationalist mindset has returned here in full force.
That’s the thing I appreciate _most_ about HN. The focus is on shop talk. Discuss science, tech, philosophy and other interesting topics without a constant stream of nonsense.
I find it very difficult to not reply on HN with a quick joke or pun or flame with no substance, but I don’t, usually.
I really like the high S/N ratio. It’s why I come here every day.
I see jokes here often enough, but they have to be tasteful, original and clever. What doesn't fly here is the lazy reddit style of joking where you just quote some lame meme or movie quip for the millionth time.
Sometimes I feel this way and then I come across a post where dang hasn’t gotten around to blowing away the low effort joke comments. Turns out it sucks
Much of this has to do with scale. In small communities, interactions are more likely to skew positive, meaningful, and desired. The discussions that rise to the top are those that are most interesting and relevant to the community.
In giga-networks like Twitter, you might get some vague sense of a belonged-to community, but the boundaries are fuzzy at best and when posts find their way beyond those boundaries, context is lost and you end up with scores of randos whose full-time job is seemingly to surf the service searching for posts to clout farm with by either replying to them with their entirely uninformed (often inflammatory) opinion or quote-tweet with similarly uninformed ridicule, which can turn disastrous for the quoted poster if it goes viral. The posts that rise to the top are the ones that are the most flame-baity and controversial. It's a much more negative experience overall.
Scale and boundaries yes. A community is participative. If everyone is just passing through, the community can't feel familiar and it can't self-police its vibe.
I have been on the internet for a while, and I always loved online communities because I did not have access early in my life to resources that I was interested in, and those communities gave me a sense of belonging and intuitive resources that fulfilled my life.
While this was great, for the last 6 years I have stuck to nurturing small communities with no more than 20 people because even gated communities (especially big ones in Reddit and Slack) are not fun anymore.
Several behaviors that I noticed in those small communities were:
- status game with participants receiving attention and dictating the "discourse" more based on social status than content
- Safeticism: tons of artificial rules that contradict even local and national laws
- Tons of non-contributing people are shitting on the water and pushing great contributors away.A lot of great contributors are leaving, creating the dead sea effect on the community.
I don't see any real difference between your "online pub" and globalized-entity "pedestrian street" examples.
They're both highly-controlled and highly-curated venues.
Environments like those just encourage conformity. That, in turn, results in interaction/discussion that's rather bland, homogeneous, and sterile.
I definitely find this site to be like that. The "showdead" setting very slightly mitigates it, but even then, I almost never find any sort of truly thought-provoking discussion here.
Those venues seem to exhibit a false sense of community to me. There's interaction, but the participants are either ruthlessly conforming, or they're walking on eggshells.
The only way communities work is if people engage in some level of self-policing with regards to their behavior. Sites that fail to keep the kind of community necessary for people to largely self-police end up requiring top-down policing, or descend into cesspits.
I think online communities aren't. A pub is a healthy, proper, community experience. Any human interaction that isn't face-to-face is injurious to your health.
That's just a ridiculous statement. My friends gathering on Discord to play some board games or video games or TTRPG is not any more injurous to your health than any other social leisure activity.
I very strongly disagree, without online interactions I probably would've gone crazy during lockdown. Even now that's all (mostly) over, I still rely on online interaction for communicating with most of my family.
Disagree, unironically physical world is discriminating, full of high educational adults, acting as big childs with wrong assumptions and nothing to talk about. Hackersnews is the opposite with smart individuals.
> Why would you invest yourself in a space like that?
Low barrier to entry. Convenience. Ease of use. Sign-up and now you can talk to your friends from across the world!
Now, you have to be force-fed shit ads along the way.
I don’t think anyone who values their social life would like it if you put it like that, but inertia and the gravity of network effects are a bitch.
The real problem is these private platforms have the power of public utilities, and we treat them like public utilities until they pull the rug from under us, and siphon our data to profit psychopathic overlords.
Furthermore, these companies don’t just throw ads at you, they also aid the surveillance state which can compromise your basic rights to privacy and fair elections. Malicious foreign governments use it to influence elections with false information and propaganda. Malicious domestic government can use it as a easy spying tool by buying or scraping data.
No one will be safe on these things until we get proper government regulation. The EU’s GDPR is a step in the right direction but more work needs to be done.
Although not exactly generic shopping streets you describe, but “anonymous” places also have been theorized and dubbed a “non-place” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-place)
My soccer club's message board is exactly like this. Old school phpBB, lots of cantankerous regulars and useless back and forth chatter, just like a pub. Design wise it's completely unchanged from the 00s look except for a mobile friendly stylesheet introduced some years ago.
vBulletin/phpBB forums and IRC were for me peak internet.
I would maybe add early Facebook for the social, but not funniest part.
Some discord servers do a good job at recreating the vacuum of IRC (albeit every single one of them has always way too many channels) but the vacuum of forums is just not well replaced.
HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that.
But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonalds: a generic commercial space built around spending money. It has no personality, it's not safe, and no one feels at home there. Why would you invest yourself in a space like that?