100% agreed. I had much better real personal conversations on the "old" Internet. Facebook and smartphones killed it. Nowadays a lot of people are only available via SMS, and I don't have the patience to type out long messages there. Calling someone up and chatting is better.

I loved the IM era and it's a huge shame it's over. I don't have as many personal connections with people now as I did then. AIM, ICQ, and later Gtalk were all amazing.

And I don't have the time or inclination to continually be installing an ever growing list of apps to keep in touch with everybody, and with each app installed lessening my privacy even more. I've removed them all. SMS is the primary way to get a hold of me, or you mostly just don't. Emailing works too, but I have the notifications on silent and just check a few times throughout the day when I feel like it. Oh, and I just about always answer if someone calls. I'd much rather actually hear and have a realtime conversation with you instead of days and days of back and forth texts that could have been settled with a simple 5 minute phone call lol. I'm rapidly becoming anti-tech, and I live and breathe tech. People no longer seem to know how to actually talk to each other, unless they already agree 100% with each others positions on any given subject. I don't see all of this heading in a positive direction for humanity, and I think we see that unfolding all around us, every day.

I'm very similar. There's an assumption that because I'm very into technology, that I must have all the latest gadgets. In fact the opposite is true: I see through lots of the hype cycles and avoid fads, wait for things to stabilise and/or standardise before jumping in, and maintain what I have for years.

I tell people that I've 'seen how the sausage gets made' ;)

I subscribe, too.

People are surprised that a techie nerd like me, with a PhD in ML, immersed in the IT world for the past 30 years, has an aversion to tech gadgets. Have I heard of the latest fad X? Do I like the last AI-powered Y?

But the first thing I did when buying an apartment was rip out the silly "smart home" system, installing back mechanical controls everywhere. Much happier.

My take on it is, with experience comes appreciation for simplicity. And respect for "doing things right", which seems a losing battle in a marketing-first world.

> But the first thing I did when buying an apartment was rip out the silly "smart home" system, installing back mechanical controls everywhere. Much happier.

I am afraid the day may come when I can't get audio equipment with a mechanical volume control (without a layer of software in between). Even today, some laptops rely on software to mute their speakers when the headphone jack is connected.

I dread the scenario of being in a public place, like a library or about to give a talk, resuming my laptop from suspend, and loud music (or worse!) blaring out of the speakers, with all audio controls unresponsive as the system churns (or crashes!) under the load of resuming.

> I dread the scenario of being in a public place, like a library or about to give a talk, resuming my laptop from suspend, and loud music (or worse!) blaring out of the speakers, with all audio controls unresponsive as the system churns (or crashes!) under the load of resuming.

It's very much this why I fully prep my laptop before I need to give a talk or go into a meeting where I might need my laptop (as much as I despise laptop-filled meetings). All applications closed except for whatever I need in that setting.

Yeah. On some devices, even the "power-off" button is software (talk about powerlessness!).

I dread the day this growth-at-any-cost marketing machine takes over politically, and these half-assed over-hyped systems (self driving cars come to mind) become mandatory, with no alternative.

Same. I thought about it after a few surprised reactions, and concluded: I got interested in technology when I was a kid because you could take it apart, tinker with it, understand it. That's less true than it used to be - things in general are more complex and opaque and less repairable. A "technology"/"magic" distinction, perhaps.

"Nobody Hates Software More Than Software Developers"

https://blog.codinghorror.com/nobody-hates-software-more-tha...

Unless you actually call me, I do not feel an obligation to respond on any timeline.

Email and IM are great, but I want them to work for me, not against.

My issue with modern "chat apps" is they usually fail to let you know if someone is up for a conversation. Presence is reduced from "I'm available, let's talk!" to "last online".

If I don't know if someone is up for chatting, I'm not going to start a conversation with them, in case I bother them.

Yeah. You just explained why I haven't talked to hardly anyone on Facebook chat anymore. I don't know that they're actively wanting to chat, just that they're on Facebook, possibly just passively browsing things. I still ping people on Facebook chat, but only if I need to ask them something or want to share something I discovered with them specifically. I used to chat with several people every night in my youth. I don't have quite as much time to do that anymore, but I do have some time. I'd love to know who actively wants to talk with people.

This explains why I rarely PM someone directly. With group chats you can just jump in and if someone wants to talk they will just join in but not feel pressured to join if they don't feel like it.

That's because you are assumed to be always online, always available, you being busy implies doing something else, which isn't in their model.

I'm finding that Discord is bringing it back. I'm finding small communities again, and starting to recognize individuals and building some friendships that way.

It’s just another walled garden. It just has a low price point.

Ok? Kind of a non-sequitur there. Unsure how that's related to this conversation:

>> I loved the IM era and it's a huge shame it's over.

> I find that Discord is bringing it back.

The article talks about how chat used to be a protocol, so you could talk between chat clients.

As though you could log into discord and start a conversation with someone who was only using facebook messenger, or snapchat, or twitter, or whatsapp or instagram or any other service where messaging was possible.

Discord in reality represents a different way of doing things. You can chat with other discord users. That's it.

It's a decent system when the userbase is big and the company is benevolent, but it's a different thing than everyone who does "messaging" agreeing to let messages from any service go to any other service.

> everyone who does "messaging" agreeing to let messages from any service go to any other service.

But this never existed, nor is the author claiming that. AIM, ICQ, etc required you to create an account on their own service. XMPP might be used, but I don't think any major service besides Google Talk supported federation. What the author had was a single client that happened to connect to multiple services, but you can do the same nowadays (e.g. using Pidgin and its plugins).

(As an aside, it's refreshing to see how BS-free the announcement that GTalk supported federation was: http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html)

Proprietary chat servers were only "protocolized" after reverse engineering. I don't think any were ever openly soliciting other clients to connect to their network. There were also occasions when third party clients got locked out after a protocol change.

AIM was a walled garden too wasn't it?

Fairly, but the OSCAR protocol was reverse engineered pretty well, and so you could get on AIM through Pidgin, or Adium, or Meebo, etc etc etc

discord's success just reminds people how fun it can be. unfortunately it is a corporate yard that is already taking steps to "monetization"

> unfortunately it is a corporate yard that is already taking steps to "monetization"

For me, this is a real shame and a bit of motivation. In 2015 my friends and I were using teamspeak very heavily and essentially became power users. Everything setting or personality feature you could mess with we did and it was a ton of fun. We started a list of features we really wanted to add or tweak, mainly around text chat and email messaging within the program. There was also a ton of UI changes I wanted to make, don't get me wrong I love the program but it's hard on the eyes sometimes. Anyway, around this time I was really wanting to dig my teeth into a big project. I thought it would be super useful to remake teamspeak as an opensource webapp. I even went as far as creating some UI mocks but then Discord blew up and I gave up that idea.

I don't know, maybe I'll set aside some time to try this project again. I really wanted to create an open and free program that allowed anyone to hack on it or setup private services without needing to pay hefty licensing fees or go through untrusted networks. The Web 3.0 version of vent/ts with some Stallman ideals.

I want that to exist, too. Skype gets crappier with every release, and there's nothing out there like a modern-day ICQ/AIM.

I worry about how hard it would be to do these days, though-- in addition to the Windows/Mac/Linux clients that you've always needed, your app has to work on iPhone and Android (including their many variations), and don't forget the web app! Plus audio/video chat.

Image/file uploading is pretty tricky, too. If you dragged an image into an IRC channel, nothing would happen and that was normal. But now people except it to be automatically uploaded to cloud storage, resized, stripped of metadata, and shown in the chat view for all to see. Features like this are deceptively hard, and there are many of them.

All of that is just to be feature-competitive with the stuff people are already using, before you get to the absurd difficulty of getting people to switch away from Discord.

there s also rocket chat

The macOS messages app fills a lot of this void for me, if you have an iPhone.

The macOS Messages app has killed off support for Jabber and the IMServicePlugin framework (which allows for extending the protocols it supports), which means going forward it's iMessage/SMS only :(

>Nowadays a lot of people are only available via SMS, and I don't have the patience to type out long messages there.

Whether its from school or work, everyone has an email address that they must check regularly. Anything longer than a three sentence text I'll just email.

Available for instant messages, that is. A lot of people treat email like it has a several day SLA. Many others just simply never check it.

Well yeah. Non work email is like a letter, I fell no pressure to answer quickly but answer I will.

Agreed, except I don't always answer.

Heck if work hadn't moved to slack I probably wouldn't answer most emails there either.

How is the IM era over? I exclusively use IM as my social media and its bigger than ever. Telegram, Discord and IRC are massive.

To each their own. There are people like me who prefer text communication and the affordability to answer them when convenient, instead of being pressured to leave everything you're doing to attend a real-time call.

I don't think the IM era is over. Now, there is Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Google Hangouts. These have some very cool features and you can easily set up a chat with all your friends.

I think it's better to say, the desktop era has ended and the mobile era has begun. A lot of people don't sit in front of a computer popping online and offline anymore. Everyone is always online and I feel like that has fatigued people.

Yes, in the old days you might have been lucky enough to be post-dialup, but being AROUND meant you were actually interested in being somewhere, rather than being nowhere online and instead only brushing up against that.

Very much this. With always online mobile instant messaging I always feel like I'm bothering someone when writing them. For me I've solved it by treating it as an asynchronous chat and won't always reply immediately.

On desktop chat you would know that people would only be online if they made the conscious decision that they are up to chatting.

Slack is so bloated and annoying to use, unlike IM services back in the heyday.

So true. I used to have Trillian running on 3 or 4 networks, hardly taxing my late 90s computer. Every time I see Slack I get an urge to close the tab because I can almost feel the browser engine groaning in agony.

There's a Slack protocol plugin for Pidgin (and other libpurple clients).

The problem is that modern social media is more about bragging about how awesome you are.

My GFs Instagram account is literally professional photos of her... I mean she's a model but it's basically her portfolio.

Now EVERYONE does it though... girls go out specifically to build up their instagram...we're not ourselves anymore.

Your comment could be interpreted as a rather ironic humblebrag.

The ability to send SMS messages on MacOS via your iPhone is a very unrated killer app IMHO.

Thats true.

One benefit of the old days is you knew all other participants were sitting in front of a desktop, with a full keyboard. You knew they weren't say: driving, or boarding onto a flight, or paying a restaurant bill.

A problem with features like "Apple allows you to SMS from Desktop" is you still must use lowest-common denominator conversational approach.

All these modern apps have greatly increased the frequency of our conversations, but overall lowered their quality.

I still use IRC. It's not as big as it used to be, sure, but there are still several thousand people who actively use it.

I also still get a lot of mileage out of IRC, especially the #web channel on Freenode.

I think anonymity was a big plus, including getting to know them part. It took work, but it was a lot of fun. Just like making friends in real life.

Yes, totally agree, but you have also to consider that 25+ years ago we were the only like-minded people that enjoyed to explore the possibilities of the then brand new world changing technical service called gopher... sorry I meant “internet”. Now it’s kind of extremely inflationated.. everyone has access to it for no reason at all apart, in most of the cases, to increase its own ego. Something that for us was just short of magic, now it’s as easy and natural as breathing. I’m still happy about the result because now it’s trivial to learn something that you care about if you’re passionate enough. But interacting with people driven from the same passions that we experienced in the past is something that it’s very difficult to find today. Maybe HN it’s one of the few places where sometimes you can breath a similar atmosphere.

I am glad I got to experience the "old" internet. I miss it deeply though.

Was it the old internet or the younger you?

I used ICQ and whatever else at the time. These days I chat with a few people via Hangouts and enjoy it, though the discussions have changed because I'm ~20 years older.

I think it is a combination of both. The younger internet was more open and free because there were less people using it, and by extension, less people actively trying to break it.

Now stuff has to be locked down, because otherwise bad shit happens.

It really was. ICQ, MSN, and even Skype had this feature of finding people by their profiles (country, age, interests, etc.). What’s more important, people were open to talking to complete strangers back then, and it felt like magic to talk to someone from the other end of the world. And it was nice to be contacted randomly by new people.

Some modern social networks have similar features, but I can’t imagine doing this in this age. And in the last 5 years I’ve never been contacted randomly by anyone either.

Well, in those days IRL, everyone's name, address and phone number were publicly available in the phone book, you would answer all phone calls without knowing who was calling, and it wasn't a problem is it was someone you didn't know; same for visits.

Nowadays, each of those is seen and felt as a terrible violation of your privacy, your intimacy, your property even... and people often rather play possum than take the 'risk' of picking up the phone or opening the door when the phone or the door bell rings.

When you call someone who hasn't got your number already, you are initially met with hostility (in the lucky case the person even picks up the phone) and have to justify "how the hell did you get my number?"

I literally got laid after being contacted out of the blue by a semi-random stranger on ICQ back in the day. We had met once when we were twelve or so. She was actually looking for a friend of mine, but we decided to meet up. Being college kids, stuff happened.

Nowadays I would just have dismissed and blocked her as yet another spambot.

Aren't you talking to complete strangers right now? I can't say I remember meeting you :)

Well, isn't HN an oasis of the good old Web? ;)

You're right though, but these connections are rarely long-lasting.

I agree. That being said, and all caveats about Apple software, privacy, etc aside, using iMessages to text people from my laptop feels a little like the old AIM days.

I use Hangouts to chat with people via my desktop over SMS. Only with my core group of friends though. I used to chat with all sorts of people. There's this one random guy that pings me whenever I pop on Steam and if I'm not busy I'll chat with him for awhile.

Errant Signal has done some good videos on this in the context of video games- both online video games and video games set in the era before social media.

"Social Spaces and Payload Races" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hj1haLcdI0

"Secret Little Haven" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzHFRfOVOuQ

Depends. It had smaller communities, so it felt more personal and closely knit. Nowadays it's much more of a soapbox platform, especially Twitter which is shouting into the void. Facebook felt like a more closed community - I checked it out at some point and felt like hey, this doesn't feel like there's billions of people on here. Low on ads too at the time. Since then though the noise has drowned out whatever signal was there, and adding more people only increases said noise. I had a realization the other day that two thirds of the posts my friends on there make are also ads - posts about movies they watched, shared trailers, games they played, etc. Intersperse that with the regular ads and it's an ad stream. I glaze over every time I try and visit it now.

I'm struggling to wrap my head around the shift between those two eras. The more the ~new web tried to be .. the worse it got.

AIM/MSN days were so stupidly simple. Forced integration with real life made everything into pain and didn't improve relationships.

That depends. Blogs and Twitter were great until they became marketing tools.

Otherwise known as "unblock lists"

I don't understand what you mean and can't find the term literally on Google. Do you have a link to something explaining it?

I assume the commenter means that, with modern social networks, you specify a list of people with whom you socialize, instead of previous networks (perhaps like IRC) where you stopped by and could socialize with whoever happened to be there. Of course, this is not really the case. Twitter is a great example where the default is that anyone can stumble upon your profile and tweets.

yep , this. and even twitter is somewhere-in-between

The idea is that you didn't hear everyone, or even a significant amount of people, by default. You effectively had to find what you wanted and make efforts (joining chats, RSS feeds, etc) to tune-in. Or... make lists of things to... unblock.

Otherwise known as "white lists"

I can't help think that the people who say that were younger and more social then.

First half is definitely true :)

I'd never thought about it before but you're absolutely right

Sure, if you happened to be privileged enough to have the internet then.

By the time Facebook and Twitter were founded, about 2/3rds of the US was online: http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/us/

So a) one didn't have to be hugely privileged to be online before social media took over, and b) I don't think the level of privilege of participants has much to do with the change that this article is talking about.

1. There are countries outside the US (and Europe)

2. Most of these countries came online only in the mobile era

3. Many of these countries have Facebook and broadly, Internet usage that eclipses US and Europe.

I don’t think they’ve been online long enough to have much relevance to the point of this article though.

I agree all those things are true, but I don't see how they are relevant to the point. Are you perhaps claiming that social media evolved differently in some of those countries and so one of them serves as some sort of contrasting example to the article?