Mildly reminds me how being online on AIM or ICQ was an actual invitation to chat. I had so many interesting conversations with people I barely knew.
There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.
This is something I've always wanted to write about, and I imagine that someday I'll end up with a long article, but basically, it's the idea that the internet used to be offline by default, and now it's online by default.
People used to be offline by default. You had to “connect to the internet.” Open MSN, go into forums and check the latest unread messages, come back from a concert and manually upload the photos to your Fotolog or wherever. Now it's the opposite. We are online by default. The expectation is that we're always connected and respond quickly. Going to a sports event or a concert? You have to post a story to Instagram from that very place, not when you get home. Someone sends you an email or a WhatsApp message? You’re expected to reply as soon as possible.
That’s what I miss most about the internet—the idea and the feeling that I would go online when I wanted to, not that I lived inside the internet 24/7.
Like many who lived through this inversion I can absolutely relate.
I've culled my notifications substantially and my life is better for it. But I miss that feeling of firing up AIM and seeking out someone to chat with. Or someone spotting my arrival and immediately saying hi.
I realized yesterday that I don't use phones like others do. I want to be in airplane mode whenever my phone is locked. Not Do Not Disturb mode. I want my modem off. I don't want any phone calls, ever. I'll get to your messages when my flow state has subsided.
But when I unlock the phone, I want the modem to automatically come back on. I am subliminally tapping into the heyday of AIM. I'm expressing "i'm free. what's up?!".
Problem is, it's not an occasion to anyone else out there. Most people always want to be available and I have a hard time understanding why.
> I realized yesterday that I don't use phones like others do. I want to be in airplane mode whenever my phone is locked. Not Do Not Disturb mode. I want my modem off. I don't want any phone calls, ever. I'll get to your messages when my flow state has subsided.
You're not alone. Here's how I solved it: Last year I really wanted a new smartphone just for the better camera. My existing phone from 2018 was still working fine, but the camera sucked.
So I bought a used, but only few months old, new smartphone.
And I never got it hooked up to the cell network (i.e. no SIM card). I now typically carry two phones on me. The old one is for texts/phones. The new one is for everything else. A clean separation. At times when I do groceries or something, I leave the SIM phone in the car so no one can contact me.
When the old phone finally dies, I'll just find the cheapest smartphone to replace it and maintain the separation.
For app notifications, I use the Buzzkill app to keep them down. For a long time I had it set up such that I would not get any notification for texts - other than a vibration. No sound. No flashing LED. And no notification in the task bar. If I wanted to know if I'd received a text, I'd have to open the app. I strongly encourage this set up.
Before I got a smartphone, I would turn my cell phone on only for emergencies and the occasional coordination (picking someone up - call him and let him know I'm downstairs). I told people they wouldn't be able to reach me on my cell phone, and to call my home phone (landline, and then VoIP) if they needed me.
Then I finally got a smartphone. I still have that home phone. But boy, I often tell people that my life is definitely worse because of that smartphone. I like the portable computing device, camera and GPS. Just not the phone part!
I have been considering this. I even came up with a name: Good Phone, Bad Phone. Your experience is instructive, thank you. Other than the additional cost, I think it has lots of upside.
I daily drive a Pixel on GrapheneOS and most of what I install is from F-Droid repos. I'm wondering if I should just de-SIM that one to make it 'Good Phone' and my 'Bad Phone' should just be a Light Phone or maybe something more featureful.
Definitely of a similar mindset... my text notification chime is about as subdued as I can make it... I mean I don't want to miss a text entirely, but would really rather push it all off. I disabled email notifications and other app notifications entirely. I wouldn't disable my actual phone calls, though I don't like that nearly half the calls I get are either spam, or bots notifying my of dr appts.
It's all gotten so dysfunctional as a whole. My SO gets on Tiktok live chats (whatever they're called) and I'll get into an X space now and then. Once in a great while, I'll pull up IRC. I really do miss the days of AIM an Yahoo Messenger chat groups though. It was fun. I also miss the locality of BBSing back when. With the internet, we tend to segregate based on interest, and you lose the local aspects and actual interaction, get togethers, etc.
This. I don't even want my computer to send data / check email unless I tell it to. And I ESPECIALLY don't want it sending telemetry / receiving ads asynchronously.
> This. I don't even want my computer to send data / check email unless I tell it to. And I ESPECIALLY don't want it sending telemetry / receiving ads asynchronously.
This should be the job of the OS, but ironically the OS is the biggest offender.
Should be solvable by a strong firewall/local proxy that blocks everything by default, only allows browser, and has an easy and convenient way to allow some outgoing traffic temporarily.
This is basically how computers in the 80s and part of the 90s worked.
I wonder if we could really bring back modems and BBS. How could we make that happen again? I feel like with modern internet, we’re stuck in this streaming TV, social media daze.
Phone makers keep touting AI features in their phones, but I haven't seen anyone applying it to notifications.
Here's my holy grail: the phone should, using on-device processing determine whether I want to be disturbed with a given notification now, when I'm not busy, at a specified time of day, or never.
Here reveals the crux of the engagement economy. You want to use your phone less and more meaningfully. EVERY SINGLE COMPANY wants the exact opposite for their bottom line.
I wrote that I want it to use on-device processing. I probably should have added that I don't want it to subsequently send the data used for that to the vendor or a third party, but I thought it was implied.
Their request could be handled by a slightly complex ML model, usage over time by dumb if else statements in an on device program, or trivially by Ollama on a mid computer hosted on a home server.
The default doesn't have to be that all the data must be fed up to a company, computers can actually do a lot without it coming from someone else's server.
Privacy is long dead and you are not getting it back. If someone wants to buy comprehensive data about your personal life there is literally nothing you can do about it. The data broker economy is absolutely booming and no one is even making a token effort to curtail it. The government that is supposed to stop it wants it for themselves so they won't ever do anything.
The Internet used to be semi literally a place you went - a desktop in the corner of some room, not central on a desk, not in your pocket. And with a ritual to access it on top of that and the dial up sounds and all.
It's more present but also more invisible now, yeah.
It's funny -- before social media, I was more likely able to go find someone to chat with on IRC, a Usenet group, or some purpose-built forum. I knew where my friends were (ICQ, then AIM, then Skype, then GChat), and it worked.
Now, it's all fragmented into 1000 Discord servers, and who has the time to dig through it all?
I agree, I feel similarly. There are now 25+ car groups on fbook that I have to subscribe to, because the main web-board / usenet group for that car doesn't get anywhere near as much traffic as it used to. Major vendors are providing support on fbook - which sucks.
See, I'm the opposite. I've got a Discord server, which are very much "where my friends are": If I make an acquaintance (or any of my friends do), they get added to the server. Some stick around, and get woven into the social fiber. Some never come back, and eventually get removed from the server during our annual purge. There's maybe 10-20 active people (i.e., people we see at least a couple times a month), a handful of regulars that are that multiple times a week, and then maybe twice all that again of people we hear from once in a blue moon. If I want to chat, I'll hop in voice. If I want to share something I found, I'll stick it in a text channel.
There's still plenty of communities on the internet. It's just that the communities worth belonging to are not wide open to the public. Community building does not scale.
honestly ive been thinking about this stuff too. a hypothetical forum you could only log on to read if you idled on a certain page for 15 mins or something would probably have a lot higher standard of discussion and be a lot better for peoples lives, for example.
The most minute of barriers requiring you to deliberately and consciously join and leave...
This is most definitely an invitation to abuse your phone’s battery, but at the same time I absolutely love this idea. It’s hilarious to imagine someone eagerly awaiting the chance to log onto the site as the battery dips from 8, to 7, to 6. “Just a couple more minutes…”
The SomethingAwful forums have been $10 to join since 2001. If you get banned, that's another $10 needed for a new account. Has worked pretty well for 24 years.
I play badminton, which has games that are about ten minutes long. I've noticed an uptick in the number of times I've had to stop and wait for someone I'm playing with to read a message on their smartwatch. I'm terminally online, but I can disconnect long enough for a game or a film - I seem to be increasingly in the minority.
Honestly I don't hang out with people like that. If you can't put down your Distractify 9000 to play a game with me, then clearly I am not very interesting to you and it's better for both of us to do more engaging activities with more engaging people.
People bristle at this sometimes- they'll ask why we don't hang out as much and I'll explain- and like, I get it, nobody likes feeling called out or criticized, and I don't even mean it as criticism, not really. Your behavior in reaching for your phone tells me that you have more important things to do, and I don't want to obstruct you from them. If those things aren't actually more important, well, then your priorities are clearly out of wack and you should sort that out for yourself.
Like just... stop responding to stimuli. Put things in the order in which they are meaningful to you, and then keep that. You're a conscious being, act like one.
I think there's a mismatch of expectations which is a solid reason to pursue friendships elsewhere. I think the other party in scenarios like this probably assumes (incorrectly of course) that youappreciate the break so you can check your phone too.
There's definitely something borked with our brains though. I have had multiple people express surprise when I tell them that I will not check any notifications when I'm driving even if I'm stopped at a traffic light for a minute or more. I just don't want to be distracted, and yeah it takes conscious effort sometimes, but it does get easier once you learn from experience that the world will not fall apart if you check your messages later.
I even internally reframe it as future candy, which makes me engage more positively with async interactions. But practicing delayed gratification is hard.
I think it's a similar thing in Ontario, Canada (where I live), you can be fined for checking on your phone even at red lights, though there are some caveats for "operating the car" related things (for example if you're using nav on your phone).
I will let android auto read text messages and/or dictate to me and do phone calls at times - but it has to be hands-free and traffic not too bad. I almost never do anything with my phone at a red light.
> Now it's the opposite. We are online by default. The expectation is that we're always connected and respond quickly.
I've been reading this on HN for years but I've always been puzzled by it because it's both so different from my personal experiences and seems so divergent from the types who hang out on HN.
From around my mid-20s the expectation to be always on in any of my friend groups just evaporated. Until we hit our 30s there was still a general expectation to read socials after work hours but even then as we got older many of us were too drained after work to do much. Then once we hit our 30s the expectation was that our partners, homes, and often kids took precedence. None of my friends are posting Stories on Instagram with their newborns.
Now some of my friends do still love being always on their socials but a lot of these friends of mine when not on socials are constantly hanging out at social events or on calls with each other. They'd probably be the neighborhood gossips in an era before telephony.
So I'm curious: is this a real problem or is this a bit of a strawman? What sort of social pressure do you actually receive to be always on your socials? Is this related to going on dates?
Back then Broadcast/Multicast (1 to all/1 to many) was expensive. It quite often resulted in routers and switches catching fire. The chips were too slow.
A side effect was we didn't have to deal with what Claude Shannon told us happens if everyone is broadcasting - noise increases - no one is really heard - people speak louder - people repeat messages - everyone is getting their energy drained.
Today Broadcast is free. And thats what we see happening.
We used to relay messages in a mailbox once per day and got all new ones (called "Maustausch" https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MausNet). It was pretty cheap because all group and personal messages came in one compressed batch and you had stuff to read and respond for a day. The BBSes exchanged all messages in a tree call hierarchy, you could reach everybody within that one day hop.
I am happy to disappoint these expectations. I feel no pressure from it whatsoever. Of course, I'm of the age of default offline, so that has a lot to do with it. Remember coming home to a "machine" to check messages? That was glorious even if it too had a glowing red dot that wanted your attention.
The always on mentality is not worth it and quite tiresome, figuratively and literally. I know it's different for women, but I've met a few that are really into the always on concept where they never leave the house without full war paint because "you never know who you might meet". I'm exhausted just thinking about it.
> The expectation is that we're always connected and respond quickly
As someone who twenty years ago published his XMPP presence to his web page (http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2006/02/27/jabber...) among other oversharing excesses, I have now swung opposite: online presence indicator is the first functionality I disable when I join any sort of forum and my tablet is almost always silent... Asynchronous interrupts least and unbroken concentration is most valuable, so asynchronous mostly - with exceptions for eligible professional contacts and sentimentally close people.
Usable mobile data that was fast enough was one of the tipping points, meeting with the first smartphone that was for the many, the iPhone around the same time.
I have a theory: what was scarce once, is not anymore.
Social networks make people tired/satisfied/overwhelmed of "interacting online", and in the worst possible way: passively, not producing anything and just consuming it.
The “satisfied” part is the most harmful imo. This is what causes lack of actual social interaction and real friendships. Loneliness is on the rise as friendships are on a decline, this is a byproduct of social media gratification
The other more obviously negative components tired/overwhelmed are more of a hangover effect people have after over indulgence. But they’re addicted so ultimately always go back for more (most people).
It’s weird for me to witness as I never indulged in social media and could always see it for what it is. I watched my wife use and just classified it as a huge waste of time (and had some not so fun, “get off your phone” conversations along the way). Some people are finally coming around to it but a lot of damage has been done and a lot of social fabric has eroded.
I'm not sure the tired/overwhelmed hangover effect is necessarily from social media. I like to think most of my time spent on the internet is productive,reading documentation and cs articles/papers for the most part and i still get that hangover feeling.
That’s mental fatigue from learning and being engaged on a topic for a duration. Maybe some additional from screen time/blue light fatigue. But it used to happen after studying for hours pre-internet.
Just my hunch, but post student life, I think many people are not actually using the internet regularly the way you describe. Only a small percentage of people are doing productive tasks, it’s mostly leisurely consumption
There's a noticeable difference to me between exercising my thinking skills and feeling mentally exhausted versus consuming lots of media and feeling "hungover".
I get that exhausted feeling after any hard day at work. On the other hand, scrolling through reels for about 30 minutes gives me a headache. If I spend over an hour on YouTube, I also get a similar feeling, but only if that time was spent watching many different videos. If I watched one 2 hour video, I feel fine.
True in real life, too. Whenever someone random comes up to me and tries to engage in a conversation, my guard goes up because 9 times out of 10, they are trying to sell me something or scam me. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a woman, where your “safety” alarms are also sounding.
Spontaneous, innocent chit chat is dead, both online and offline because everyone’s hustling now.
Counter example: yesterday I took the train and ferry from london to dublin. Trains are a great way to meet new people, especially if you're sitting facing each other. Person opposite me was interested in the maths book my son was reading. Turns out he's an interrailing applied maths student from Scandinavia. We had a great chat for hours and exchanged numbers. My faith in humanity is not dead yet.
Counter-counter example. When my wife was new to the city she took a bus ride and a girl randomly made contact with her. They hit it off and talked for the whole ride. My wife thought this girl sounds really nice, they actually got into deep conversations, and wanted to exchange numbers so they could hang out some time. Then she asked if she had heard about the book of mormons…
Sorry to hear that. But I was responding to the comment that "Spontaneous, innocent chit chat is dead, both online and offline because everyone’s hustling now". Just one counter example is needed to prove that statement false. Of course, maybe my new contact will betray me and turn out to be a proselytising fundamentalist, but not yet...
It sucks because the social aspect of social media has been bent and twisted into squeezing every bit of money out of it. In some regards, people are being forced to consume. Companies do anything they can to manipulate users into continual consumption because it generates money for them.
Even worse now? Companies are rewarding people when users interact with their content. Now people are enticed to create content that purposely angers people so they comment on their content.
I've deleted all of my accounts now - it was just too fatiguing to try and weed your way through the constant pushing of content to get you to watch or interact with instead of what YOU want to see or watch. YouTube is notorious for that. How many times have you gone to the site and instead of searching for something you went there for, you get completely sidelined into something because they present you with a ton of videos that fit what you're interested in?
In the immortal words of Joshua: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
Yeah, and the channels that are available... well, here's an example. I'm a member of a couple of professional WhatsApp groups... both of which are so notification heavy that I've permanently muted them, and therefore never visit and as a result derive no benefit from. And, at least for me, there's something about WhatsApp that makes it unamenable to the kind of dip in and out interaction you used to get with IM services. I want to be there when I'm there and not disturbed when I'm not.
That's the problem with phone apps. They either spam you with notifications or you forget to open them. Desktop IRC clients were more available for passive checking whenever you glanced at the window, but out of the way otherwise.
You can treat whatsapp as an irc client, it's all in your head :)
I have multiple friend groups on whatsapp - i just check them once in a while to see if anything interesting was posted. All the chat apps I'm on are muted and the mute is muted again to make sure.
Yes, If you purposely turn off all notifications on your phone, and/or live on DND mode 24/7, you quickly learn to adapt to this world where using the internet is a deliberate action. Sanity sets in: you are deciding when to use your phone or computer, not an algorithm, or other people. You’re back in the driver’s seat, like it’s 2002 again! It’s very freeing.
I remember the early days of Skype and Google talk, calling random strangers and… actually having a conversation with them. I remember they were always confused and surprised to get a random call from a stranger, but were almost always happy to chat anyway!
Heh, I came here to say this when I saw the top level thread that started this comment. As far as GP is concerned:
> I remember they were always confused and surprised to get a random call from a stranger
That's probably the only thing different about Ham radio. Random calls are kinda the norm :-)
I got my license less than a year ago, and in some ways, it reminds me of the "old internet"
* Way fewer ads. In fact, in ham radio, you aren't allowed to advertise. Maybe the absolute best thing about it. Without a legislative change, there will never be (legal) ads.
* Trolls haven't taken over. If you're an ass, you could lose your license. No ham wants to lose their license.
* It's as technical as you want to make it. You can go DEEP into technical things (I haven't even scratched the surface there). You can also just get a hotspot and a handheld for a few hundred bucks and be talking to people across the world after an evenings work of configuring it all.
If you want to talk to strangers who want to talk back... and who, for the most part, aren't jerks -- get your ham radio license.
Bonuses (above and beyond the old internet):
Amateur radio clubs are everywhere. They are filled with nerds who love the hobby. They can be _very_ social -- so there is opportunity for plenty of In Real Life (IRL) interaction.
Yes, it's mostly guys, mostly over 50, and (in my experience) mostly caucasian. If you are intimidated by that, that's totally fair. But, give them a chance -- check out your local club. Most I've visited are _very_ welcoming... and they want nothing more than to get more people interested in the hobby.
I've used the username "donatj" basically everywhere since the late 1990s with just a couple exceptions.
Dude beat me to it on Skype, I called him just out of the blue and had a nice conversation with him, lived in Denmark as I recall. Really friendly guy. I can't imagine doing that now though, let alone the person on the other end actually picking up.
Huh, coming from an IRC and email background I have the opposite reaction. Rather than having to wait until someone is online it is much nicer to just type to them and they'll respond once they can. Everyone is open all the time!
Some people used AIM like this as well, at least I did. I left my computer on all the time, so I was always online.
I was in college during the peak of AIM and it was useful to know who was at their computer or not, which I believe was still viable. Around meal times, we could quickly scan for who was around to see if they wanted to head down to the cafeteria. If they weren’t around, there was no point it asking. For time sensitive messages, online status matters.
AIM also had useful states. If you were away for a decent chunk of time (And you could configure what that amount of time was!) it would mark you as idle, and you could set custom away messages (That were actually visible) so folks could know why you were away, or more realistically, what song was on your mind.
Nowadays the status is completely meaningless. It's a small dot that doesn't accurately reflect your status, and if you choose to set a message, most of the apps hide it anyway.
Disagree. There are people open to chitchat right now. They are just young. We just grew old, most of us are having families, and it would be weird to idly chitchat instead of playing your family role.
Discord indicates who's online with the green dot.
It can be modified to never show you're online, or show 'away' or something, but it's similar. It also displays how many are online in a channel on a server, and then you can open the list.
Despite that, however, it still feels 'different' to how it was, but I think we're also 'different'. Being (significantly) older now I have more responsibilities and pressures for my time so I'm less likely (like zero chance) to be sitting idle waiting for random chats.
We'd have to ask those who are, now, the age we were then - but then they also have no frame of reference. My son is often chatting to his friends online, but I think they're exclusively friends from meatspace rather than electronic strangers.
Would anyone still use a desktop-only (no mobile) messenger where you have to run/turn on intentionally (not always-on like most mobile-first messengers nowadays), lists online/offline friends the way AIM/ICQ did, and you can only send messages with online friends?
I get that most leisure computing has moved off of desktop to mobile in modern days, but there's definitely enough of us nerds who're on a computer a lot (even if just for work, if nothing else). It can't be any less than in the late 1990s when ICQ was popular.
I think it probably is less. I’d hang out on my laptop in the evenings and mornings (like, while watching TV or reading news when eating breakfast) in a way I don’t now. I use my iPad or phone now.
I do wonder, though, if there’s a gap for a messenger app that runs only while in the foreground in your phone [edit: or tablet or computer!] - or maybe until you next lock the screen, so you can ‘be online’ only while reading, playing a game, or doomscrolling.
Now that I think about it, that's true. The same of IRC and MSN Messenger. Since being online all the time was not the default state of things, people only turned those applications (or even their computers) on when they actually wanted to chat to other people. When you saw your friend online on one of those, you immediately wrote something to them, even if you didn't really have anything to say, because what was the point of having the application on otherwise?
Inreally enjoyed that, especially on ICQ. My first real job was a night operations role at a reservation services company, managing incidents and doing database maintenance work.
There was alot of waiting involved, and I would chat on icq with a lot of random people in Europe. I ended up meeting one person!
The problem is… people are people and do nasty things. I have a good friend who is a few years younger. She found herself on the “information superhighway” at 13-14, blue collar parents who had no idea what she was doing alone on AIM or what that was. She find herself meeting this charming guy… who happened to be in his 30’s.
Learning about how common that was was very sobering… as this thing that represented fun and friends to me ended up being malevolent to many.
Yeah, I've thought this for a while now. It's like it used to be you either were available to chat or you weren't, but now it's like everyone is half-available at all times. I agree with other commenters that the fact that you had to be sitting at a desktop was also a factor. Finishing what you were doing and logging into AIM (or taking down your away message) was the equivalent of opening your door, going into the lounge/breakroom, etc. --- a signal of openness to interaction.
I might relate to this, but I also spent more time talking to friends on the phone 20 years ago. The perception of this greatness can't be disentangled from the experience of youth.
My group of friends gets something really close to OP, because of our music bot (Which only pings everyone on specific events, like the music queue running out, uncommon enough that it doesn't get annoying, and never more than once a session)
There are a billion communities using discord and telegram to do basically what you’re describing - topic rooms, hangout rooms, you can change your online status to signal your willingness to ge sociable.
Our friend group's social contract is to sit in a discord channel (even if empty) if you're open to chatting. Unfortunately we have no real equivalent for text.
well part of it was there wasnt ^{10}10 = 10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10}}}}}}}}} more interesting things than chatting with your friends to do online
There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.