Posted by dandano 3 days ago
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I do have a mail app on it, and it checks mail only when I tell it to (i.e. not running in the background giving me email notifications).
At home, I keep the phone with the SIM in one room. I can use the SIMless phone around the house and not worry about pings.
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.
The best was when that hi came from the person you had steady started typing to
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System
Impulse: We Resurrected Underground 1990s BBS Software in 2025.. With Docker [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44422006
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.
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.
It's more present but also more invisible now, yeah.
Now, it's all fragmented into 1000 Discord servers, and who has the time to dig through it all?
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.
The most minute of barriers requiring you to deliberately and consciously join and leave...
Not exactly the same as your idea, but definitely in the same vein of "only available under a certain condition"
Yes, we aren't technically near a keyboard most of the time today, but we are never AFK in a conceptual sense. Even when sleeping.
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.
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'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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Social networks make people tired/satisfied/overwhelmed of "interacting online", and in the worst possible way: passively, not producing anything and just consuming it.
It sucks.
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.
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
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.
Spontaneous, innocent chit chat is dead, both online and offline because everyone’s hustling now.
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?"
except for this one
Seeking novelty and fulfillment from scrolling vertically are all individually and collectively patterns, including notifications.
Creating is different than consuming when it comes to screens. Separating consuming onto a separate consuming device physically helps.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Show HN: Coffeehouse, one-on-one voicechat with random HN users
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39067496
Hah, I'm also building something like this for notification purposes. My wife's tablet sometimes doesn't show notifications and she's often not near her phone, so I ordered some ESP32's and LED boards[0]. Going to scatter them around the house and link them to a switch in Home Assistant so I can light them up if I need to get a hold of her. I'm planning a back-and-forth scan effect to make sure they're eye-catching, already named them Cylons.
[0] https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/S9b244caf41934a5eb...
As a result, we were looking into a very similar system where we each have an LED signboard, speaker, and priority lights on the top of a small device that lives on top of our monitors along with an app where she can select "not urgent, but you should know", "when you have a moment", "as soon as you can", and "urgent, right now" in an app, with an optional message, and the device makes a tone and lights the lights associated with the most recent, highest priority message as well as reminding every five minutes.
I'm playing with an ESP32 right now to implement, but it's nice to see that the entire concept isn't entirely unprecidented.
To me, not having any sensory disabilities, that’s a lower cognitive load than banners or other text/icon-based notifications.
While the trackball was understandably nixed in later models (though it was still useful for fine control!), its notification feature is dearly missed.
It's a shame that our phones are becoming more and more voracious surveillance devices without the common courtesy of doing things that are helpful for the user.
I highly recommend it to anyone building little functional prototypes of this sort.
Your current setup is, of course, much more interesting.
No, that was someone else.
/s
Deaf people need this.
I'm going to take this idea for my partner to use to get my attention if needed. Having it tie into Home Assistant is a win for me as well.
# Music Quiz Bot
Existing apps work ok. A lot of paid and don't let you use a specific Spotify playlist.
The only thing annoying about this one is that none of the Discord API wrappers handle audio very well so I've found that this one gets a bit flaky if you're trying to play a lot.
This one is probably like 500 lines of Typescript but a lot of that is for the Spotify API. The game logic is pretty minimal.
# Birthday Bot
This is like 10 lines of Python. It's a cron that reads from a Google Sheet my friends and I keep up to date with personal information. If it's someone's birthday then it'll post a happy birthday message to them.
# Plex Bot
I wrote this before I discovered that Overseerr just has this built-in. My Plex was set up with a webhook to hit whenever new media was downloaded. The bot would post to a specific thread with the metadata about the new media. This included another webserver for serving the cover art from the private Plex metadata server.
# Movie Quiz Bot
Similar to the music bot although I don't think existing apps exist that do this. Essentially it's https://framed.wtf/ except as a game in a Discord channel where random frames are pulled from movies in my media library and everyone competes to name the movie first. This one required some ffmpeg fun to make pulling the stills not take forever. I considered doing static stills or having a cronjob do it, but it's more fun when it's completely random.
But I wasn't able to get on top of its notification system or get past the gamer heavy UI.
Does your friend group consist of mainly techies? If not, I am impressed you were able to get them to use it. Even more so if they were already on it. I tried to get folks to use Signal with me for a bit and it was the most futile endeavor I've ever attempted.
Signal has stuck for a couple of friends, but has decidedly not stuck for anyone else - and the ones it stuck for were either already on it or have a privacy bent.
Signal, back then at least, didn't do group chats, or nowhere near as conveniently as Discord. So much so that I don't even know if Signal does group chats now as I only ever use it for one-on-one.
I set up a Matrix server back then too, didn't take. Discord won.
I guess my friend group is somewhat techy - but they aren't on HN. We've been on discord since its inception. We moved to Signal as we wanted to get off Meta products.
Sometimes I get notifications about some things, and sometimes I don't. I think it's actually a bit (lot?) broken.
1) Reminder bot for scheduled events.
We're all working adults who all played games as teens together . To actually get us together, we schedule our favorite games for once a month to play for a few hours. We all often forget when they start, so my bot posts a 2 week, 1 week 3 days, and 2 hour notice.
2) RCON bot I run a TF2 server and a Minecraft server. You can manage both via RCON commands via slash commands in Discord. Also the tf2 one monitors player activity and alerts if players are in the server
3. Private server API bot
I founded a private game server for a game that ended service in 2023. The bot reads from our API to make a central list of lobbies and status. It also creates voice channels for each public lobby.
It's also used to help grant items and other admin commands.
4. For April Fools, I made a snarky bot that responded to random messages. It was backed by Gemini.
These have all been fun and novel to make but I've never found a great way to productize them and make money from any of them. Wonder if you've found any avenues there.
Nothing that builds up an ever-growing surveillance database on private conversations between friends can be in the running for “best”.
Signal really should support bots.
> can't be made public then it doesn't go in Discord. This covers about 99.9%
Sometimes I forget that my friend groups are nothing like most peoples’ friend groups.
This is just part of life of having a clearance. If it's not Discord, then it's the happy hour where you have to worry about people getting a few too many beers deep and saying something stupid, and then others have an obligation to report it.
Have some prudence about what to say in what settings is a life skill in general.
I feel the same way. If Signal supported bots/an API and “Communities” (in the WhatsApp sense) I’d finally be able to cutover all my use-cases from Discord. I get that the E2EE is a bit tricky for an API, and that you can kind of hack together Communities by just having a couple group chats, but the UX gap is just a little too big
Shame on discord for having a lousy privacy stance, but most people aren't on signal for the privacy, most people are on signal because that's where their friends are (and one or two of those friends is there for the privacy).
Until you find that you expected security and privacy and the developer/corporation/investors say, "too bad for you".
This is the warning of Niemöller's famous paraprosdokian.
It's interesting how opensource Zulip[1] hasn't been able to garner as much of a following or usage amongst the gamer crowd compared to Discord.
Zulip does not have first-party voice chat. You would be more likely to get gamers to switch to a Teamspeak server.
Not everything is a web app, and it's trivial these days to obtain certificates, even without a proxy (certbot, etc.).
Of course I understand that if you host a lot of web apps, having all web requests routed through a universal proxy is nice for various reasons. But platforms like Discord and such are complex beasts and use more technologies than HTTP(S).
Personally, in my circle of friends, we use slack (at first the free plan and now a payed plan).
During the pandemic we moved to the payed plan, because of the restriction on members in huddles/calls (and also because we want endless history and our own encryption keys).
Currently we have Game (D&D e.g.), PP and Small-talk channels that we use to have huddles that everyone can join.
Mostly we create other channels on demand to organise things. Or share knowledge, music and so on.
One nice feature with slack is, that you can receive notification if a huddle starts in a channel, also on mobile, if you have the app. I don't know how often we use this notifications to join the small-talk channel. Personally, i join them every other week because i get notified.
PS: If someone from slack reads this, please do a friends plan, something between the free and pro plan :)
About 2 years later Twitter came out and I was like "oh, I guess I was on to something." :)
One big noisy chat for everything is an antipattern, as any group of sufficient size eventually learns.
Organized channels is the way to go and spending time thinking about setup is worth it. Otherwise they develop naturally and haphazardly.
It's nice to hear that this group found a way to maintain the spontaneity.
There's plenty to doom and gloom about with the state of tech right now, but this is a good reminder that sometimes even Big Internet tools, with a little ingenuity, can sometimes be repurposed to serve the users and not some corporation's bottom line.
It's kind of a throwback to the olden days where you might stand up an IRC server or something similar just for your friend group. I like seeing people returning to the small internet where it serves as a substrate for real people doing real things.
