It started out harmlessly, a comment on hacker news roughly 16 years ago.
From there it expanded to reddit, substack, twitter. And it increased in frequency, from every few months to every week, peaking at several times a day. It became an addictive, productive habit—I would scan the headlines for a catchy title, quickly skim the piece, and then race to the comment section and type one out.
Sometimes the comments were insightful or funny. At other times, curt or nitpicky. It was an exercise of logic, of ideation, of debate. It was a mix of disdain, delight and discourse. But mostly it was just a fun time.
Being an active commenter felt like being an internet socialite, part of an elite society of people who put their voice out there instead of lurked. And my fellow internet socialites responded in turn. Some upvoted, responded, debated. Some liked what I said, some hated it. A few of my comments made it to the top and became a fountain of dopamine. A few comments made it to the very bottom too.
That can happen with 16 years of commenting history.
I’ve benefited incredibly from commenting. It has sharpened both my writing and logic. It has developed my voice. It has trained me in debate. It has unleashed personas that I would otherwise never become—teacher, supporter, economist, historian, debater, and of course, troll.
It has made me a (mostly) better person. But I cannot shake the conviction that I need to leave commenting for good.
Why? Well, I’ve been reflecting on what I want out of the internet (as part of a larger reflection of what I want out of life). I’ve always enjoyed the internet as the frontier of “new”—its where I find novel ideas, content, thoughts, personalities, achievements and craft. But with the rise of doom scrolling, media echo chambers, AI, and my age, “new” is no longer that exciting. I find myself less satisfied browsing the internet, hoping the next thing I consume to be actually high quality, and I’m realizing that I’d rather just spend my time with a good set of quality friends.
Unfortunately, this is where comment culture comes in. 16 years of commenting has made me zero friends.
That scares me. All of that social activity with zero ROI. At first, I thought that I needed to change my commenting habits, and, you know, try to make connections. But the more I considered how to make friends in comment culture, the more I realized that it wasn’t just my own social ineptitude. Comment culture has a problem. Systemically, it produces an internet of strangers.
Now, making friends in real life is not easy and it doesn’t get easier over time. The social steps of growing your friend pool involve 1) meeting new people, 2) turning strangers into acquantainces, and 3) turning acquantainces into friends. This takes a surprising amount of volume and time.
Various estimates of lifetime human acquantainces range from 10,000 to 80,000 people, but actual friendships number only in the hundreds, and that’s being generous. And the number of close friends is on average, only 3-5. So, meeting strangers and turning them into close friends is a rather rare occurence that involves a serious investment of focused social energy, something that is harder to do the older you get. One study showed that in order to form a close friendship, you need to spend 200 hours of interaction time with one person. So, making 5 close friends is a 1000 hour investment, equal to a full time job for half a year.
Comment culture requires your social energy. It’s an interaction with another human being, but one that doesn’t head towards building relationships. Instead, the end result is gaining reputation, fame, and of course, internet points.
This isn’t a bad thing; besides close friends, the other spend of social energy is towards reputation and influence, especially in small communities. But in comment culture, each post is its own communal space of random strangers. It is the illusion of small community, but really the community appears and dissappears with every new post. Outside of a handful of celebrities or moderators, I rarely find myself spotting someone I know in the comments.
The end result is that comment culture is a series of one-offs with anonymous strangers upvoting you or responding to you, but never befriending you. In comment culture, you are talking to a random sampling of everybody, which is in itself a collective nobody.
Broadly speaking, the online platforms we use are not built for connection; they are built for engagement. This is universally true for all internet spaces, from stories to newsfeeds, for the intellectual and the plebian alike. And in the relentless optimization of user engagement, our social engagement is captured and rerouted from its original purpose. Instead of making friends, we are all performing for one collective internet stranger—a being that is sometimes brilliant, sometimes cruel, but always waiting to be impressed.
It somehow feels like interactions that might have grown a friendship have instead ended up growing ad impressions. This is not strictly true, but I can’t shake the feeling that it isn’t wrong either.
So this is where I say goodbye to my fellow comment writing socialites. I might miss you a bit, but you will not miss me, because you don’t even know me. I'm a stranger, and you, dear reader, are likely a stranger too.
Where do I go instead? Well, as long as engagement makes money, the pressure will always be there, from forces far bigger than us, to pull our social instincts out into the open forum where they can be measured, tracked, and sold. This isn’t a problem with comments or our internet spaces. Its a problem of market forces.
But as long as we want to make and keep good friends, that itself is its own driving force. It’s what drives us to gather a group of people around a campfire. It revives LAN parties from the childhood days. It creates those long chains of memes sent to the few that truly appreciate them. It builds its own spaces not bound to one platform or another, but bound to the people know, care for, and love.
But… knowing me, I’ll probably be on Discord.