I think a major factor is the fact that the internet is now mainstream. In the early days, you had something in common with everybody, simply by being on the internet. The place was silly with people absolutely floored by the idea that they were casually chatting with someone halfway across the continent, something only possible on very expensive phone calls until then. Everybody was also, by necessity, an early technology adopter.

It's much easier to strike up a conversation with a stranger when you have something meaningful in common, and the early internet was that. Today, it's the equivalent of walking down the street, it's just infrastructure. Infrastructure is great, but it doesn't help you make friends.

Internet data connection might be mainstream, but Internet, as in websites, blogs, genuine, independent content, is really not.

There are places where the internet is Facebook. I remember times when the internet was a blue E on the desktop, but at least that really did take people to the internet, and not a walled garden.

The idea that the Internet is just Facebook for most people is absurd. Yes, there exist people who essentially only use Facebook, but this is not the norm.

Google is worth 755 billion dollars, and they didn’t get there just by being the easiest way to find Facebook. Pinterest has amassed a 12 billion dollar valuation just for managing to insert themselves between Google search results and a the billion blogs you think most people don’t even know about.

> The idea that the Internet is just Facebook for most people is absurd.

I don't think he meant that, but rather the opposite. That while more people use the internet than ever before, they're subdivided in how they use it. To some people (not most; pmlnr's wording is "there are places") the internet is just Facebook, and that creates the effect of a smaller community of "internet users" where there is more in common between a pair of individuals than 2 strangers with vastly different uses of the real vast internet.

Note that the point of his post was to counter (though it doesn't entirely refute) the point of mseebach, which was that people had much less in common between strangers in the internet now that it's become mainstream.

It's very much what he said. "Internet data connection might be mainstream, but Internet, as in websites, blogs, genuine, independent content, is really not."

He specifically says that using the internet for blogs and websites (i.e. things other than Facebook) is not "mainstream". Maybe the Facebook comment was not intended to say that's what the "mainstream" use case is, but that's how it reads, and I'm frankly not sure what mainstream usage would be if it's not "websites".

There are countries and providers where free phone data is facebook and maybe a few other providers - see internet.org . For them, facebook, witn instant articles, is the internet, having no actual data connection.

Like it or not, the general public uses fb/google or wechat, maybe, but only maybe, read a few news site, do banking, even less buy things on amazon, which, out of US, UK and DE rather nonexistent, and that's it.

Think outside of the US, please.

4 billion people have internet connectivity. 2 billion use Facebook.

Literally half the people with internet connectivity do not use Facebook at all, much less exclusively.

While what you say is true, I can't see what this has to do with the US. For all we know, dpark might not even be in the US.

I can see how you can interpret that sentence in isolation as talking about websites in general. In fact, I'm not sure why I didn't interpret it that way first, too, but I interpreted it as talking about particular websites. In other words, it's not about HTTP vs FTP or IRC, but e.g. Facebook vs Twitter or StackOverflow or allrecipes.com.

I probably read it like that because of his following paragraph, which talks about how particular websites have this "walled garden" feel and how some people don't move much away from them to the point that they consider these particular websites to be the whole internet. Since the topic of this subthread is about how people of the internet have less in common now that it's become mainstream, that interpretation seemed to contribute better by raising the point that, to many people whose interpretation of the internet is a "walled garden" like Facebook, their "internet" has not become mainstream, or at least not on the level of the "internet data connection" or the real internet.

Actually it's not that absurd, Facebook has deals with mobile carriers which gives the users cheaper or even free access to Facebook compare to other "normal websites and apps".

There’s still some of that in IRC. IRC clients serve as a barrier that filters out a surprising number of people.

Just like in the real world: You don't go out on the street to meet people, you use the street to get to the place where the people you're likely to enjoy meeting are likely to be. IRC might be one such place, but there are many others - HN is one, even if not directly social in nature.

There's still some for sure, but I can't help but notice how empty IRC communities are these days.

Bigger ones like #node.js/#javascript on freenode are about 10 people strong if you actually count the regulars.

Frankly I think something like Slack is a better middleground for most communities. People are filtered out because they have to be bothered to install Slack and join the community. Yet it has community-building features that IRC doesn't have, like the likelihood that someone will get messages when they are offline/away and that they will actually come back.

EFNet is still running strong! Plenty of good chats and communities around if you look for them. Freenode operator abuse is antithetical to community chats.

Any channels in particular? I've seen mostly freenode mentioned everywhere.

There's a bunch of niche channels I like such as #mircart and #efnetnews for just having a laugh. #2600 seems to be one of the main "lobby" channels. Other channels like #electronics and #chemistry for more technical talk. There are a bunch of troll factories like #stress and #depression which some people enjoy I guess.

Great metaphor, the infrastructure. Like a street you go somewhere, if there is somewhere to go. And like a pipe something come down the shoot, but do you want it in the first place?

Thanks, but it's not really a metaphor. The internet is literally infrastructure. Sometimes, when new and exciting infrastructure opens, such as the first metro line in a city, it's a destination in it's own regard for a brief while, and a good place to meet fellow railroad nerds, but then it just becomes infrastructure, and it's not a particular good place to meet anyone.

It's definitely changed and it happened slowly so we didn't notice at first. In the 90s and the early aughts the social fabric of the Internet was comprised of a number of small communities, each of which had a distinct membership and culture.

By the 2010's the big players had come along and supplanted these Internet communities. Facebook talks all the time about its "community" but it's more like a theme park which gets visited by billions of people, and your friends all hang out around one ride but so do a thousand other randoms. You'd have to be a PR spokesperson to look at that and call it a community.

All the big social networks employ this model of throwing everyone into the same arena but humans aren't wired to feel at home in that environment, so we get all these weird side effects like social media causing depression, loneliness, and the angst expressed by this writer.

Reddit is the only one that hearkens back to the old days a bit -- each community has local moderators and a somewhat distinct culture, but the corporate overlord is still there sanitizing, monetizing, and occasionally messing with people's posts.

I think the language issue is especially interesting, did we fail to recognize that our communities were dying because we lack a word for the thing that supplanted them?

> All the big social networks employ this model of throwing everyone into the same arena but humans aren't wired to feel at home in that environment, so we get all these weird side effects like social media causing depression, loneliness, and the angst expressed by this writer.

That is an amazingly good point - its very easy to be lost and lonely in a crowd.

Mayhaps not perfectly applicable, but your last line reminded me of this:

> Sheridan: Once during the war, my fighter was disabled. I sat there, radio out, power out, for eight hours, which seemed like eight years. I didn't think I'd ever see another living being. Well, I was rescued, obviously, but.. I'll never forget that.. feeling of helplessness. I, I never thought there could be anything worse than being all alone in the night.

> Delenn: But there is. Being all alone in a crowd. You feel cut off from your people, from your government. You even begin to doubt yourself. I understand it so well, that it cuts to my heart.

-Babylon 5 2x14, There All the Honor Lies, 1995

I doubt one can ever be truly depressed in a Intergalactic Starfighter - sounds too much fun ;-)

This is pretty much how I felt as a long-time TF2 player super excited for Overwatch to come out, and then very sad once I realized what kind of game it was. You grab your friends and play Overwatch, while you play TF2 and meet your friends.

And also a parallel, TF2 obviously still exists, but all of the servers I used to play on are gone now.

Haven’t found anything else quite yet. FFXIV actually was super enjoyable from a community perspective, but I’m not super into MMOs.

This is a thing that's bugged me for a long time: the death of dedicated game servers. Game servers had to be run by communities, and they were gateways and feeding grounds for those communities.

However, games don't typically use dedicated servers anymore; they use matchmaking. You're right -- matchmaking means you gather your friends first. More insidiously, it means you probably won't see the same players again, and even if you did, there's nowhere to find them again later. There's no community to join.

> More insidiously, it means you probably won't see the same players again, and even if you did, there's nowhere to find them again later. There's no community to join.

This actually reflects a change I remember WoW making and finding really hard to accept. They changed the rules for "find a dungeon" such that you didn't match people on your own server. Which seems great - because now there's no need to wait 10 mins for a group to accumulate! No spamming in regional chats to see if anyone is interested. Brilliant non?

Except when you made groups with people on your own server, you bumped into them again. You were probably a similar level/gear. You might add them as a friend and then ping them for instances because they were competent (especially if tank/healer). Heck, if they're in a guild maybe you think it'd be a cool group of people to play with or vice versa you might try and add them to your guild.

When every person you meet in game is a "single serving friend" there's no point making an effort. People will treat those they play with as essentially NPCs helping towards a quest because why wouldn't you?

I refuse to believe that it made people more engaged (considering the friends I made were a good chunk of the motivation to keep playing)

I quit WOW at about that time, I played from release, the golden days were TBC && WoTLK, but the rot set in when 40 mans were retired. Doing a 40 man and getting the gear from a 40 man was a defining ambition of guilds, not many guilds managed to set themselves up to do regular 40 man runs and you had to ladder up the 40 man content when you did - molten core and on and up. This pressure and ambition drove really strong social behaviour; act up and you'd be kicked, and that's your chance of the end game gone. Tolerate idiots in the guild and risk a split or a leak of defectors. The problem was that the spreadsheets at Blizzard showed that only about 5% of the players were getting to experience the end game. So... they went to 25 man, then they opened 25 man to pickup queues and the drivers for pve guilds faded.

I readily agree that old school WoW was much more social and fun, but personally, most of the enjoyment of the game for me was only possible because I was a 20-something with no spouse, no kids, and no real responsibilities outside of showing up to work during the day.

Now that I'm a practicing Adult®, I still kinda dream of WoW Classic being what we all remember the original game being, but I also know that if I got that involved in planning and running raids now, people who rely on me to be responsible would suffer. I'm content with being part of the 95% that don't have that kind of free time to commit to planning before actually playing a game.

Yes - there's no going back, life changes! It's like Rugby.

I used to enjoy Rugby, but I was 17, if I played Rugby now I would enjoy it. But I am glad it's available for 17 year olds who want a go.

One thought though, my guild has actually re-awoken in the last few months. I'm still on the mail list - as apparently was everyone else, and now people are talking about doing instances and so on. I couldn't have done it until recently, because I had small children - so as everybody knows, fugetaboutit. But, if WOW was in TBC state with some interesting new content I'm pretty sure I would jump in.

Part of this is the access to engagement within the game. As games rely more and more on multiplayer (think LoL/DotA, Overwatch, WoW Raids requiring a group), to get to the actual content you want you need to assemble a team, either programmatically via matchmaking or by existing friends.

And the waits can be very long in competitive scopes to have a good match. I can only speak from LoL as an example, but our group like most had people bounding around all levels of play, so matchmaking could take a long time. The team's MMR undoubtedly was an accurate representation, but this also probably meant there was a very narrow set of ready to go teams that were reasonably fair matches. Prior to Riot's heavy handed overhaul of the Matchmaking, this sometimes would result in some absolutely uneven matches (a bunch of Diamonds getting piled onto a group with 1 Diamond and several bronzes/unranked.

Pre-overhaul, it often mean a 20 minute stomp. Post-overhaul, it means waiting, sometimes 20 minutes+ to get a simple game, when most of us only have an hour or two spare.

It's a difficult balance for designers, and I don't envy what they have, but the nature of a lot of games has changed to require the participation. The logistical challenges of providing fair/balanced as well as fast matchmaking while still letting players play with their friends (however many they have) is a real hellish problem to solve, as the solutions are often at odds with one another.

“Convenience” or getting the player to get the next dopa hit, is not the way the real world is built.

The real world has slow periods and other issues which are usually where the various other aspects of humanity play out.

By definition, games and social media optimize for whatever measurables are measurable AND accretive to the bottom line.

On top of it, most of this current tech world is built on American sensibilities in terms of optimization and business models.

The rest of the human part of existence is.... not optimized for in this universe.

Also do note, people still figure out a way to make friends.

People end up recognizing each other even through random match making, or due to local lobbies.

It’s not all doom and gloom.

Yeah I was talking with some people about this a few days ago actually. The change is not entirely bad, though. For example, in my own case, I actually like the change. I'm not 22 years old anymore (as I was when Burning Crusade came out and I was at the height of my 'raiding career'). I don't have the time to join a raiding guild to see end-game content, and I don't have the time to sit in Stormwind spamming Trade to form groups for things. I like how the group finder makes it easier to just do the content and get some gear and experience the game without time commitment.

Of course nothing is free and as you've rightly pointed out it has come at the expense of the cohesion of individual server communities. The WoW Forums, back in the old days, were full of inter-server rivalries for raiders and when they brought in cross-realm matchmaking in the patch prior to BC there was some nice rivalry for PvP within server groups -- you could still only group with people from your own server but you would be matched against other servers. That's all gone now. It seems like it's impossible to know if you're even on your "own" server because of the way the phasing works now.

Anyway not sure where I'm going with this. tl;dr I agree with you but the change isn't entirely bad.

If you friend them through whatever walled-garden chat system that game has, then you might have a chance. But good luck getting conversions to a proper gaming community.

I think a lot of this has to do with how casual the gaming community has become. Not that there are fewer hardcore players, just that the very games that killed the dedicated servers (call of duty) also onboarded millions of casual gamers who felt like using gamespy to find "good" servers was too much effort.

Now there are so many casual gamers that you have almost no chance to find someone who deeply appreciates a game enough to join a community you are in. My internet statistics generator says that 1-in-10 is a good ratio for number of conversions 20 years ago. Now it's maybe 1-in-500.

And if the game is popular enough, then everyone's just going to use the subreddit to chat by default, and that's a clusterfuck of a topic all on its own.

I remember playing at a single server on CoD4 online. Because you went to the same server you didn't flame, because you would be playing with the same people the next time...

And lots came from that. I went to two LAN parties eventually with people from that server, after playing together and talking on TS for hours. It was a lot of fun and I miss that sense of community in games.

Now I click a button in League or Fortnite and they throw me in a lobby... Everyone is shit to each other because you never see the others again anyways.

Maybe it's just nostalgia though

It has kinda taken the fun out of video games for me, at least multiplayer. I used to have a few games where there was a server that I could join and find people I know but I don't even know where I'd begin to look these days.

And yeah I've tried games with matchmaking, mostly Dota and CS:GO but they are only good fun if you have friends going into a game, otherwise it feels like 9/10 times you end up with as you said, people that are awful to eachother.

I miss this so much. I used to play TF2 on a server that ran a single, somewhat obscure, map. Lots of randoms would drop by to try the map; some would stay and become regulars, some wouldn't. I did. The same regulars would be there every week, many of them every day. Some players were good, some not so good, nobody took it too seriously - we tried hard, but nobody got salty. There was the odd feud, but no griefing. They had alltalk voice chat on, and there was a constant stream of entertaining chit-chat. One guy would come on half-cut and start lecturing about physics. We had a half-joking clan tag, someone set up a website with a forum, there was a challenge match against an American clan at some point. Good times.

It's been rubbish since matchmaking came in.

I used to run a TF2 server that ran some stupid hack I found that played shitty music nonstop (GBS.fm) through a widget that loaded on the welcome screen. Lots of people hated it, but everyone kept coming back for how fun the vibe was.

So fun. I miss it too.

I feel like the death of dedicated servers has in part led to the rise in toxicity in games. In community servers, if someone was being rude or annoying they would get kicked. Nowadays you just hit the report button and hope eventually they are dealt with. In the meantime you're stuck with them until the next game.

They are not dead, but their numbers certainly diminished. There are still UT99, Jedi Knight II servers out there.

That's good and bad.

Good: You can finally play the game as it was meant to be. You could not find a decent server in CS 1.6 where you could play 5v5. You need additional sites/communities/XYZ (e.g. ESL) to play it. Similar with TF2 in the early days. Also, bad admins can't kick you anymore because you use a weapon they don't like. I could forgive such behaviour, but as games introduced some leveling or other statistic stuff, I can't. Just make your server unranked (nobody playing on these).

Bad: No sense of community. Like you said, you need friends first. Reports for cheating are useless, as you won't see that person again anyway.

The leveling and statistical stuff is so lame anyway. I feel like CS and TF, the point was to dick around and shoot people. It was cool because you bought half-life and could play these two totally different games (we referred to them as “total conversions” at the time).

The ranking stuff is all just trying to capitalize on esports, which is weird because the vast majority will never be that good anyway. It’s a big part of what makes various communities toxic rather than fun. Playing a game where winning doesn’t really matter vs. people dreaming of being paid to play video games. It’s turning something that was a fun sort of power fantasy to kill time in, into something misconstrued as a profession. (In the same way an average guy might believe Himself of the quality to play DB for the colts, without the ability to discern the obvious physical differences between himself and a guy who is 6’5”, can bench 450 pounds and run 30 miles an hour. It actively creates these sort of mean/ delusional types who are harder to laugh off than they would be in another arena.

What was the first thing to be called a "total conversion"? The Aliens: Total Conversion mod of Doom?

Yeah, definitely one of the doom mods.

I'm not familiar enough with the history as I was pretty young when doom came out. Hacking on Doom and Marathon mods was my first experience with programming of any sort.

FYI- MidAir is a new TRIBES like game that is using dedicated servers.

Same experience with TF2 and older games of course. You would get to know the regulars to particular servers. Internode #14 was my TF2 haunt, and it was always fun to have friends popping in and out.

Some of my favourite moments in Star Wars Galaxies were waiting for shuttles and just chatting with whoever was around.

That spontaneity with strangers is gone, but also the places you go regulalrly to just "be there" and enjoy others company seem to be gone too. Even going to a pub you find people are specifically with a small friendship circle and when they aren't they are on their phones trying to avoid the pang of solitude until their friends come back.

I think the contrast is most striking when you come from really community focused areas like university or even school, to realise that those kinds of communal situations are actually quite uncommon in an ordinary life.

To borrow a gaming term, I sometimes wonder if people haven't become too preoccupied min-maxing their social metrics and as such feel they don't have time for strangers. Everyone is content with having one or two okay friends and a few dozen more acquaintances they never speak to as a substitute for community.

TL;DR strong communities are hard to foster and hard to find, perhaps thanks to isolating technologies that undermine some of the common ground, such as matchmaking and groupless/roomless social tools.

I think the key distinction is the concept of "place".

TF2 has (or had) a concept of "place" in the form of named servers. That made it possible to encounter the same stranger repeatedly over time.

In contrast, Overwatch wants you to already know and specify your friends into their social-media graph and group up before going to a random/anonymous/ephemeral location. So you seldom knowingly encounter the same stranger twice.

> FFXIV

Thinking about an MMO, a "placeless" MMO would randomly assign you to a one of a great many small instances every time you log in. Eugh.

That's what I was imagining as well. There is no spatial link to see as common ground, and because you can't count on seeing them again you can't get to know them organically over time.

I notice it with stores I go to, I am horribly predictable with food places but because of that I can form good relationships with the people working there. They know I will be in again so they can afford to care more and get to know me.

Even here, I notice familiar name tags and I get to look forward to people's responses on certain topics I can guess they will be interested in.

Those experiences are harder to find online now and especially in games.

Fun annecdote, I found my first software job through Counter Strike Source, I played the same server for months and one guy would knofe me in th same spot at least once a session. He ended up having a software company and gave me an opportunity.

With games like Destiny, "placeless" MMOs are already starting to become a thing.

Same with GTA Online.

“Places” is exactly how I think of making new friends in adulthood irl.

Meatspace, the new spatially aware social networking site. No installation required. Make friends where your feet are!

I'd like to make a complaint that Meatspace is inaccessible for n00bs and amputee character classes. Also, higher level characters seem to be stopping new players from leveling up.

Once again, Reddit has beat us to the punch:

https://www.reddit.com/r/outside/

The smallness and novelty of the internet made it more of a community. If you played TF2 in 2008, I would say the interests of each player is more homogenous and compatible compared to Overwatch in 2018.

I think this is one factor at play. The other is the shift from desktop to mobile, from community participation to content creation or consumption - almost mutually exclusive.

Finally, deprioritization of the identity (Reddit, Hacker News, many forums, even Medium to some extent) doesn't help either.

In terms of gaming, it's also the result of a shift from dedicated servers to matchmaking algorithms.

On dedicated servers, a community of 'regulars' forms through repeated interactions.

Modern matchmaking is a more disposable approach - here's a set of players that you'll be up against for 10 minutes, and then you'll never see them again.

And leads to "toxic" behavior. If you behaved poorly in a dedicated server environment you could be banned from multiple servers in one go as each clan might host multiple servers. Eventually all that would be left for those people would be a handful of lawless servers, enough threat of punishment to deter shitty behavior, not enough of an impetus to buy a new cd key and reimpose yourself on others. In practice, most people just behaved better.

It is bizarre to see riot and blizzard run around in circles trying to combat their toxicity problem... its your meat grinder matchmaking system.

As it turns out, matching people against those who are exactly their skill level isn't what you want to do.

Going down the rabbit hole a bit further, I was always a bit pissed off with the 'match at exact skill level' method.

The best thing I ever did to progress in skill in a game was to play with/against people far better than me. I don't want to learn how to beat people who are only as good as I am; I want to learn the techniques and skills to beat the people who are at the top of the game.

And lets be honest — thinking back to how a typical game in Team Fortress 2 went — sometimes just the complete and utter satisfaction of having an awesome killing streak at the expense of a bunch of n00bs (and after such a round the server would automatically rebalance the teams, so everyone gets a chance to meet their match).

I agree with this idea. The problem, I think, is that you can't choose what kind of game you get. Lots of times I want to have a reasonable chance at winning, but now and then I want to play really good people and see how they play. You can't ever choose to do this in current matchmaking schemes, and there should be a way to do that.

I agree with you for the most part about the matchmaking stuff, but one lucky thing I've found while playing Heroes of the Storm is that if you play consistently at a certain time of day that isn't common like 7am-noon EST you can start to see a number of names over and over more frequently both on your team and opposing team. Eventually you start adding people as friends who did awesome and then they invite their friends and you add them if they were good and now I've got a slew of people who are as serious and/or as skilled about the game as I am, whereas for the longest time I played solo.

It's still not the same, but it's cool when you start to see the same names over and over, it makes you feel like the world went from an endless mass to something with size boundaries and you can tell who some of the other hardcore players are. You can hate them for always being too good or playing the same character and know what to expect, and then eventually they are a friend of a friend and then a friend.

In a similar vein, now that voice chat is there by default it can be easier to get to know people and connect or be repelled. People you respected as good players turned out to be super annoying weiners on mic, while others just regular dudes or gals talking about their life. It definitely feels like it brought a new angle to things.

I’ve also felt this experience when it comes to content creation for games.

I missed the modding communities in the late 90s/early 00s that had a sense of place and community. Things tended to gravitate around their IRC channels and those of the actual game. Was great to develop relationships online with not only the modders but the people developing the games.

As an example, Epic Games were super-accessible back in the Unreal Tournament 99/2003/2004 days to chat with on IRC and not just about modding or stuff related to their products. There were also some game servers where you know certain employees made it their haunt.

But now everything is hyper-optimized so both Epic and customers waste the least amount of time talking to each other to solve a problem. It definitely feels more like you’re talking to a corporation than engaging with a community of creators now.

You mention UT99/2003/2004, did you play competitively by chance? I miss the good old days of gaming, clans, ladders, forums & IRC.

If it weren't for UT's modding & hacking community I wouldn't have got in to this industry. A lot of people I know have similar stories.

Nope I wasn’t part of the competitive scene. I was just an active participant in some of the fansite communities (BeyondUnreal, Planet Unreal) and the various mods like The Third Reich and Red Orchestra.

The only artifact of that era I still carry is still hanging around the neotokyo IRC channel after 15 years.

Like you said, the modding community helped a lot of people get in this industry. I wonder if it’s still the same now that it’s less about modding/hacking a game with a group of people and more about contributing content piecemeal (Elder Scrolls/Fallout) or working on an actual game from nearly scratch.

TF2 was my world back in early college. I ran a number of online communities, and a number of modded servers. I also think back to enemy territory wolfenstein as well. Back then you joined a server and played on a community. I really miss the derth of dedicated servers now a days.

I agree with the sentiment but the servers I played on are either gone, or drastically changed.

Join a discord channel for whatever game you're playing. You can voice chat with people and make new friends that way.

I'm in the League of Legends discord and party up with strangers all the time. If the game goes well or people are just particularly friendly we usually play a few rounds and sometimes friend requests are sent and we end up playing more often. I've met a fair amount of people this way.

I do agree though, love MMOs for community. Some of my oldest friends are from my MMO days, but those games often get grindy and take up too much time.

I never got into TF2 because I was all into TFC and found the lack of accompanying grenades in TF2 a kind of dumbing down of the game. Nades and concs were crucial to use along side your main weapon and it was no fun without them. Sadly there are only 2-3 active TFC servers left :'(

Internet's been all downhill since Westwood Chat got shutdown.

It's all relative. There are some that think the Internet has been all downhill since September of 1993 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Or April 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

Join a discord server for a relatively niche interest that you have and not only will you meet many others with similarly deep interest in a water cooler format but you will be able to work on your hobby much more effectively with a close community of like minded people. Discord is a place that still has conversations and communities, not broadcasts and celebrities.

Yes, I consider Discord to be the best place to meet people. When I start a multiplayer game, I always try to find a channel where people meet to find others to play. People usually talk about others subjects at the same time and you will speak with the same persons, so it's easier to have friendly relationships.

How would you find these communities?

This is particularly hard if you're not interested in gaming (beyond the N64 level).

Just google "yourInterest discord reddit" and someone is usually talking about it. I'm in a keto diet discord & joined a programming channel recently.

I see N64 discord servers. I don't know if they're busy, but I see 'em.

Or go with good old IRC.

In my experience on Discord you only find absolutely toxic communities, which is not very surprising, considering it's the casual equivalent of IRC.

Try joining smaller communities. Being in a server with 10-20 regulars is very different from being in one with 200, forget 2000.

What's 'toxic'?

Toxic usually means full of assholes. People will get super mad at you and swear at you and say very bad things in general if you make one little mistake or don't know something. If you are a noob, prepared to get treated like shit and told you should die violently in real life.

Much like you'd hear about a toxic environment at home or in a poisonous mine, it's a very dangerous and bad place to be.

In some games, where the only way to have fun is if everyone knows all the rules and has skill and is playing seriously, one person who falls out of that spectrum can ruin it for the other(s) and thus people start to get angry very quickly and don't hold it inside. Games like League of Legends is 5v5 and highly skilled. One poor player can result in a 20-30 minute game with a guaranteed loss and no fun along the way, so it becomes very easy for people to spit vitriol at them. You get punished for leaving as well, so you are locked in for a certain amount of time, held prisoner if you will, by someone who doesn't meet your standards and whose weaknesses you can't overcome yourself no matter how good you are. Yes, this sounds like a horrible system and an easy recipe for disaster. On the flip side, if both teams are good, it can be very rewarding.

One thing I like about Heroes of the Storm, which is very similar to League, is that they solved a number of issues that results in less toxicity. It's still there, but it's taken much longer to grow and is still at such a lower level then what I remember League being years ago. I even got an email from Blizzard saying they banned someone I reported, so that makes me feel like at least something happens when I report bad behaviour. Since the game was designed to allow for comebacks and a single player's contributions can't hurt you as hard as in League, a strong team can still have a chance with one weak player. You still have assholes though and you still have rough games.

Ok, so normal gaming experience in those kind of games. Take Dota, which wastes the time (40+ mins, compared to the 20-30) of 4 players if one is an idiot. Of course you'll get flamed for it.

Sure, but it leads to a community that gets very quickly very angry at tiny things (because of the expectation that the person will ruin their day), and as a result those who don’t want to deal with that leave the community.

Left is a group of people that react very angry very quickly, even out of the game.

I don't think that the majority of those players get angry outside the game.

Just the new thought-terminating cliché for "things I disagree with".

No, it's more an alternative term for "being an asshole", or maybe a "shit stirrer".

I've got friends who say things I disagree with, they're not assholes. They're nice people with different views. Some people say things I agree with, but at the end of the day, they're still assholes, even though we share some opinions.

Any group large enough is going to have some assholes.

If you get called toxic a lot, it's not just because people disagree with what you say, it's probably how you're saying it.

Further, maybe you're not an asshole in every group, maybe your (and I'm using the word "your" here in a general term, I'm not talking about anyone specifically) personality just doesn't jive with the rest of the group, making you the asshole when you just have a personality which doesn't fit with the group which makes you toxic.

Take for example a subreddit like /r/aww which is just idk, cute photos. Someone who comes to that community and points out flaws, or seems to need to point out problems with the posts, content of posts, etc, well maybe they're toxic to that community, since it's just one of feelgood-ness. It's not that they're a bad person, or have bad opinions, they're just not behaving in a way which seems appropriate for the group.

So there's no such thing as toxic behaviour in your mind?

How could you possibly get that impression from what was written?

The claim was the complete opposite that almost any objectionable behavior is labelled as "toxic".

It is hence about as undescriptive as "liberal" is in American politics. That term many years ago had a well-defined narrow meaning but is now far removed from that (or like "literally" often meaning "figuratively" in common use ).

I got the impression when OP immediately dismissed anything called "toxic" as a "thought-terminating cliché".

Thought so too.

The nodes on our existing social graphs are too large. I'll define a node in this case as a user's potential social graph over time. A naive social network that mitigates this is nextdoor. I say naive because the concept of a "neighborhood" on nextdoor results in a lot of bigotry and noisy neighbor effects. Kind of literally in this case.

But the idea of breaking down large nodes in favor of smaller nodes tied to the community in which a user resides is a decent idea. I speculate we'd see greater efficiency in self-regulation, too. It's not a silver bullet, of course. At least globalization tends to decrease cultural ignorance.

I'd wager global social networks are here to stay, but I think a powerful network could arise that focuses on more refined slices of the social graph.

I think size explains some of it, but I think the way we view the internet is the real issue. Upvotes and karma systems have trained us into seeing the internet as a popularity contest even when we’re posting useless nonesense.

Even on small subreddits, you’re still entering a staged debate which gets judged by its audience, and nobody wants to take an unpopular position, and if they do so by mistake they certainly won’t do it twice.

Hacker news is similar. I’m sure there is a lot of people who hold back because they don’t want downvotes or maybe even because they don’t want no votes, and you simply can’t have any meaningful conversation when everyone is self-censoring.

Forums are still a thing. Maybe not as much as they used to be, but the communities are out there. I've met several people from IGN's forum. And I've heard of many meetups in subreddits.

I agree with you though. The Internet is not "special" like it used to be when it was new. Now it's just another normal everyday thing, like the radio and TV... And full of ads.

Better than forums for real-life socializing are mailing lists..

Not really. They either tend to overflow and turn into a mess or stay very topical.

this absolutely still exists, it's just different than it used to be. go find a twitch streamer that averages 10-300 viewers and you'll find a community. join a slack/discord organization for some niche hobby and you'll find a community. start an instagram account chronicling your trips to craft breweries and you'll find a community

There are a lot of friends to be made on IM groups. I have found the best way to create a good community is to have it be invite only so you don't get random people joining and leaving constantly and the people who are there tend to stick around for a long time.

> And now, real identities are involved, so they have to be professional.

My Twitter profile is linked to my real name, but on Mastodon I'm trying to stay anonymous.

It's amazing how much more stuff I'm willing to post on Mastodon than on Twitter.

I suggest reddit, there are enough weird ones hiding here or there

I feel like the time when online connections (ie, over long distances) ended in real-life encounters was good throughout the decade of the 2000s. After that, people became too flakey due to social becoming too important (the type that click "I'm going" to an event, but only do so as a means of saying they like the idea of going to said event).

A lot of message boards are still going strong 15~20 years later though.

I’m still an active part of one after 12 years. Meeting a German friend from there tomorrow irl for the first time in 10 years.

Depends when you came, some folk are only just discovering online discourse.

I'm a member of 'a' forum, and it still fosters conversation. To me it feels similar to an old usenet 'channel'.

I'll admit it's not as zany and anonymous as it perhaps once felt. Back then we rather foolishly thought it was more ephemeral. I blush when glancing old posts. Such is - I guess.

I do feel the same. Back then i have published several blog of what i was learning, and interacting with visitor. I also met one of the friend i made online, guess what all that is past... Or May be i have become boring.

That's why I have private Tweets now and still use a pseudonym.

> I don't think relationships like that are really formed anymore.

nah they are. you have to get into really specialized discussion groups.

You got old.

"Sure, maybe it is just an age thing, and nothing has really changed. But I don't know... I feel like the Internet used to be something special, and now it feels like flipping through TV channels in your office break room."

At one time, I could get any book, journal, or work of art off the Internet for free.

Yes--it was wrong, but it was also magical. Those days are gone, unless you live in a country that allows it?

Today, I seem to go to the same monopolized websites. Websites that seem to control me? I never felt that in 2007.

Hackernews is my one of my three sites I go to.

And yes--it was so nice when celebrities didn't know how to use the internet. So--so nice.

I wonder if artists/authors/creators are better off with today's internet?

(Yes, downloading was against the law. I don't need a lecture. That period of history was exciting though.)

I miss those early days too. And I fear the internet will turn into another source of media channels where people are just consumers.