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Has discussion died out in the web at large?
I'm on X, Instagram, Threads, reddit, discord, 4chan, literally anywhere I can go, and people just don't seem to chat much anymore. Or rather, what I mean is that people rarely have long conversations about the things they love. I know that passionate people still exist because they make fascinating Youtube videos, Substack articles, and Twitter threads, and I've had conversations of deep interest with friends in private, but I can't get these to occur in public spaces anymore despite my attempts. Even joining communities for the things I like doesn't work -- all the discords are dead.
It's all so strange, considering the internet I grew up with had a very opposite mindset. If you browsed GameFAQs for example, you'd constantly run into people who had a very deep knowledge of whatever game was being talked about, and they'd casually list off stuff like enemy drops and spawn rates because they had it memorized, to the point it was hard not to passively learn things. You could start a thread with any random question, and it would get at least 2 random nerds together to discuss the game in detail for several posts and deepen your knowledge. This just doesn't seem to happen anymore. Back in the day, even if a person didn't like a game they'd usually give you the reasons WHY they didn't like it, such as "the battle system is too easy to exploit" or the level scaling is bad. Nowadays you rarely get that.
Does anyone know what I mean? Broaching a topic like this is awkward because there's always the sense of, "Nah you're just nostalgic! You're old! You're looking in the wrong places!" But the more I explore, the more it seems things really have changed. Like maybe even the concept of "fanbases" and "fandoms" is actually outdated, as the number of people who care enough to talk about a piece of art once they've finished it is a tiny minority. Like we're all familiar with how bored adults binge watch Netflix shows while zoned out, and forget all about them soon after, but is this actually happening with games, movies, anime, etc. now too? Could this be why nobody's eager to talk about things? I really struggle to make sense of all this.
I think it’s two things: school and work eat up more time for young people, and algorithms have gotten too brain-frying and addictive. So those ages 13-25 are more stressed than even a decade ago, and at an early age they’ve been driven into low-intellectual low-discussion online spaces. There was once a time you could have long discussions on even YouTube, like over weeks continuing the same conversation, but they changed the design to make it impossible long ago. The design on Instagram also actively prevents discussion. The new Reddit design has also heavily discouraged discussion. For addiction, think about how different the YouTube experience was in 2010 compared to today, not just shorts vs video, but the flashy thumbnails and formulas every large channel uses to maximize engagement. All those techniques increase the sense of novelty and reduce attention span, which winds up making reading and discussion laborious for zoomers.
There aren’t actually any private alternatives to the “old internet”. The closest are group chats and discords, which are qualitatively different and possess other challenges to maintaining discussion. Most of the internet that would have entered discussion in the past (to discuss news / social issues / politics / whatever) engage with the more surface-level apps like Instagram and tiktok and parts of x, usually for being performative and social and “engaging” and curating a vibe to reap social rewards — not really focused on discussion. And then there are the smaller users who just hang around these accounts. Even for film — why discuss film when you could post your lettrbox and put it in your social media profile to get laid? This appears to be the prevailing trend.
Also, I think a lot of boys who would be involved in online discussion are addicted to video games, which have gotten more addicting over the years, and are also probably making memes instead of discussing — at one point, memes and discussion were interlinked in image boards, but now you can post these in apps and gain a small following.
tl;dr cultural decline
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There is a lot more incentive to produce now. Back in the day, high effort video essay style content was not a good idea because your odds of being rewarded were essentially nothing. It made more sense to post it on a forum. Now it's the opposite. The only way to have people engage with your ideas is by content-ifying it. And you can get money out of it now, too, as with algorithms that improve discovery of small creators, everyone has reason to follow this path
Lots of confounding issues - forums have died, CONTENT has risen, people hate interacting with strangers without derailing everything over Palestine or whatever.
The current ecosystem means the same thoughts will be rewarded better if packaged as CONTENT.
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Anything like this that still exists on the internet has to be protected from "the web at large". These sorts of things worked in the past due to the filtering of all internet users for for smarter, more tech savvy, PC owners. Anything today that gains a reputation as someplace quality discussions might be taking place will be face a number of dangers from people and groups who would have been filtered out in the old system: bots, paid shills, culture war crusaders, and people who interact with the internet entirely through their smart phone. This has forced the older, higher quality users onto largely private Discord servers, Onion sites, or fora that otherwise apply a filtering mechanism locally, either through vigorous manual enforcement, like this place, invitation only membership, paid accounts, or other equally effective systems. While I don't think its been explicitly investigated or analyzed, I think its largely the case now that the dangers that the new cohorts of internet users present to thoughtful discussion spaces significantly outweigh the potential losses of smaller numbers of new quality contributors.
You may have had a point if @roche were talking about the internet as it existed in 1993 or so, but somehow I doubt that is the case. In the early days, there were hippies who thought that the ease of communication with like-minded strangers would usher in a new era of peace and understanding, as traditional barriers would come down. The nerds who ran the thing and comprised the bulk of the user base nodded along in agreement. A few years later the internet reached 20% of households and any ideas that this would be the case had vanished almost completely. The early adopters were all hippies and nerds and were basing their predictions on the idea that the general public was largely similar to them. As soon as the internet was being used by 14-year-olds to start flame wars on why Nailz sucked, the idea that the internet was an unalloyed positive force in social interaction went out the window. The "web at large" has been around for 25 years now.
This is why I guard against the idea that things have purely gotten worse over time, because from another standpoint 2009 or thereabouts was already well after the death of the 'net. So it helps a lot to define in clear terms what exactly you think the modern net is lacking, and in my case I'd say it's "learning and discovery". As a disclaimer, a young person is naturally going to have way more to absorb from their surroundings than an adult, so the kind of knowledge that impressed 15 year old me is now totally rote and mundane, and any space with that stuff will also seem really banal and empty. /caveats
What feels most different now is the lack of paths towards "secondary" or deeper knowledge. Once you discover something exists, that's usually it. The internet really used to be designed like a rabbit hole, where if anything caught your eye you could just go on a deep dive and find out progressively more about it until you exhausted the subject. Nowadays you can definitely still go down rabbit holes on Twitter, Insta, and Tiktok, but it's harder to learn things this way. I wonder if anyone gets exactly what I mean.
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