Comment by climb_stealth
Comment by climb_stealth 6 days ago
I think the scale has changed. Hanging out in forums back in the day I used to know everyone. Not personally, but I'd have an association of who a given user is. You'd have your regular posters and new people join, but it was all fairly manageable. This is still the case in smaller forums.
But for things like youtube, reddit and even hn, I don't even read the usernames anymore. There are just too many. It's all just completely unconnected comments. It really takes away from it feeling personal in any way.
I still keep in touch with a bunch of people from an assembly game hacking forum from when I was like 10. They're responsible for my entire career and how I got into programming! It was great. I'm still a part of a bunch of hobby specific forums and they are all going strong.
Once you start noticing HN usernames you won't stop. It's big, but it's small. Certain users gravitate to certain topics and you'll see them pop up. I think the problem is you have no style associations to usernames, like colors and icons and fonts and whatnot like you had on old forums making it super easy to visually identify people.