The Shit Show
I&#x27;ve been thinking about social media a lot lately and how it has changed my life. I&#x27;m only in my early 30&#x27;s, but I think many others my age grew up online and when the internet felt smaller, but in a different way. I made life long friends through these means. But something I&#x27;ve noticed is that as everyone has come online, I have made fewer friends. What I personally miss is the small niche communities. These don&#x27;t seem to exist anymore. I made several friends on sites like What.cd and found many artists I would have never come into contact otherwise (even speaking with many). Even friends on sites like Imgur when it was smaller, but never once it grew. The global social media is cool and has aspects that are nice to it (e.g. being able to talk to power), but its same power is its greatest downfall (you can&#x27;t speak to your audience when your audience is everyone, filled with different priors (how we interpret words), and different willingness to act in good faith).<p>I see everyone talking about Twitter and how it needs to be replaced. But I want to know how we remake these smaller communities. That&#x27;s what I miss about the internet. There are clearly size thresholds for these. Finding them is often hard and word of mouth. But what I want to know is how we make these flourish and bring personhood back to the internet. We should have both types of communities. But I don&#x27;t think methods like Mastadon or Reddit really facilitate this. I think many even have seen this change as HN has grown. There are several people that I recognize their names but as the community has grown we have too seen a change in content, culture, and how we speak to one another. For good or bad. But I do think it is nice to have small communities as well that do develop their own cultures. Maybe I&#x27;m just old now though.