Comment by tivert
1 year ago
> This type of close/closed-circle communication didn't really exist back in the 2000-2012 era. Sure chat rooms existed and were popular, but they had a very different flavor from the current social forms of a group chat or a discord server.
Wasn't ICQ/AIM/etc. like that during that time period? I missed that boat, but that was my impression.
> I think this turn towards the "cozy-net" in the last 5-8 years (a term I'm fuzzily borrowing from Venkatesh Rao) means that people are less interested in finding weird niche blogs or internet 'locations', hence their decline.
Does that timeline for that theory make sense? My sense is that "websites" started declining as social media platforms took off. If I understand the concept correctly the "cozynet" is a reaction to and rejection of those platforms.
> Wasn't ICQ/AIM/etc. like that during that time period?
Yes and no. In some ways they were definitely a clear precursor, but I think the major difference is mobile. Back in the day people would login to AIM after school or something, and you'd hang out remotely for some period of time, but then one or more of you would actually log-off and go about your day in meatspace and the chat would be like done for the day. Groupchats and Discord servers are literally nonstop, and this is because nobody ever has to get up from the computer. I think that this really gives them a different character than the old-school chatrooms. AIM was like inviting one or two friends over to hang out in your room and shoot the shit for a few hours, my Signal groupchat is closer to sharing my house with close friends: constant chatter, meme-sharing, planning, etc. AIM chat was one activity that your friend group would do among other things (like going to the bar together), whereas groupchats in some ways can really define the friend group itself. This isn't universal, people were definitely using AIM to define the limits of their friend group or were always online, but I think the experience was far less common than it is today. For most people (that I knew) AIM was closer to a party phone line, rather than the central forum for all communication and interaction.
> Does that timeline for that theory make sense?
That's a good point, and yeah I definitely think you're correct that coziness is a reaction to/recreation of the "old web". However I do think that coziness was present in early social media platforms in a way that like Rao doesn't really acknowledge. My romance with my now spouse kicked off in a large part through FB interaction, and there were plenty of ways that we could create privacy/coziness even on a large platform that didn't explicitly support that. But yeah, maybe it would be more accurate to say that "socialness" killed websites, and that coziness is the currently dominant form of socialness?
edit: on that second point I would also say that "coziness" is maybe a reason that the reaction to big platforms didn't cut back towards websites, and instead has focused on the chatroom/messaging paradigm.