How much do you really like to discuss things on the net?
Me? It's like 50/50, 'cause people can be such a pain to converse with, even in a simple digital environment.
most of my "discussion" is me screaming at everyone to shut the fuck up already
I agree with >>1 but discussing things can be fun sometimes, especially within the context of a RP.
When I was a teenager I really enjoyed discussing on the net. I would spend my nights refreshing threads just to see the next reply and in stay up until 6am on skype calls with strangers I barely knew.
As I got older, I tended to lurk more often than post. My social media accounts went silent (although I do still sign into them to see what acquaintances from the past are up to). I feel less and less inclined to post online and when I do, I just offer my advice and move on. Maybe I've become apathetic to what's out there, but at some point the online userbase ceased to contain the magic it once did.
vc: sigh
(continued from above)
I'm still an Internet Addict - but it feels like the infrastructure has changed too much. Nowadays the net serves the zeitgeist only. There are designated areas for discussing your corner of pop culture: facebook, twitter, reddit, youtube... all of it a far cry from the frontier of forums we had back in the day.
And I guess you still do have forums - and you still have places like here (and IRC!) - but they're so empty and dead, and the few users are focused on trying to perpetuate a culture, something inescapably alien to whatever the actual culture as it existed in the day was.
The closest experience I had lately to some traditional internet discussion was when I was unexpectedly asked to join a small discord server for translators.
This is uncommon for me - I wouldn't ever attempt to join closed communities unless invited personally, and I already hated discord. But I was asked to join for reasons related to a translation of mine and for a few weeks, I actively kept up to date on the most recent posts and threads. It reminded me of how things seemed back in the 2000s. I got nostalgic for chatrooms and forums because I seen some of the same patterns here. But it wasn't quite the same - it felt so much more mundane. Scripted. I grew tired of it - eventually it too became another area to lurk, then to ignore.
I wonder, maybe if it's me that's different, and not the sites themselves? More and more I find myself only communicating online with people I know in real life. Maybe I'm the one who has become mundane, and I'm simply no longer excited by the prospect of talking to internet strangers. But I definitely feel the shape of the net has a lot to do with it. As a younger internet user, it really felt like I was exploring an unknown world, full of people who's experiences I'd never grasp. Web2-3 has contextualised itself within a lens of familiarity and "relatable" culture that has killed this sense of wonder and mystery that made the web an exciting place to surf and its residents an interesting people to converse with.
There's no great unknown out there - the web's become smaller, or at least it's become fully mapped. Or maybe I just don't know where to surf.