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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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
So do you think it is completely normal to recognize :̶.̶|̶:̶;̶ as a meme, but then it is completely unreasonable to recognize just :.|:; and it should definitely be AI bots? Really?
To convert the comic to :̶.̶|̶:̶;̶ is a very very distance, to remove the strikethrough is nothing.
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
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
71 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 63.6 ms ] threadOf 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I unironically just closed this tab before submitting out of habit and reopened it to submit this
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.
I miss phpBB as the dominant mode of internet socialization. Communities with norms, in-jokes, reputation. Take me back!
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 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
To convert the comic to :̶.̶|̶:̶;̶ is a very very distance, to remove the strikethrough is nothing.
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