On Saturday, the Washington Nationals baseball team played their first spring training game of the season. I was listening to the radio call in the background as I went about my day. I also, however, kept an eye on a community blog called Talk Nats.
The site moderators had posted an article about today’s game. As play unfolded, a group of Nationals fans gathered in the comment threads to discuss the unfolding action.
Much of the discussion focused on specific plays.
“Nasty from Ferrer,” noted a commenter, soon after one of the team’s best relief pitchers, Jose Ferrer, struck out two batters.
“Looks like we took the Ferreri [sic] out of the garage,” someone else replied.
There were also jokes, such as when, early in the game, someone deadpanned: “Anyone who K’s [strikes out] is cut.” As well as more general discussion of the season ahead.
If you followed the thread long enough, it became clear that many of the commenters know each other, while others were meeting for the first time. As the game wrapped up, someone mentions that they’re listening from a part of Canada that recently received three feet of snow. Another commentator replied by recalling a trip they took to that same area: “It was amazing.”
Ultimately, over 540 comments were left over the duration of an otherwise uneventful, early season exhibition match.
I first wrote about Talk Nats in a 2023 article for The New Yorker, titled “We Don’t Need Another Twitter.” In that piece, I was responding specifically to the launch of Meta’s Threads platform, but I had a more general point as well: perhaps it had been a mistake to try to organize the internet’s activity around a small number of massive, privately-controlled platforms, used by hundreds of millions of users all at once.
“Forcing millions of people into the same shared conversation is unnatural, requiring aggressive curation that in turn leads to the type of supercharged engagement that seems to leave everyone upset and exhausted,” I wrote. “Aggregation as a goal in this context survives…for the simple reason that it’s lucrative.”
Boutique sites like Talk Nats, by contrast, offer something closer to the original vision for the internet, which was more focused on connection and discovery; a place where a baseball fan from Canada could spend an afternoon delighting with a few dozen of his likeminded brethren about a lazy afternoon baseball game in Florida.
This is the internet as a source of joy. And it’s the opposite of the giddy paranoia or coldly-optimized numbness delivered on massive platforms like X or TikTok.
I was thinking about that New Yorker piece today as I was following the game on Talk Nats. Those ideas, it occurred to me, are even more true right now than they were when I first published them.
“I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us,” wrote John Perry Barlow in his seminal 1996 document, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.”
In the thirty years that passed, we have allowed exactly this type of soul-deadening tyranny to take hold of cyberspace — an unavoidable consequence of consolidating this once distributed and quirky medium into a small number of massive platforms.
I really enjoyed my time today on Talk Nats. I didn’t come away angry or depressed, and was more uplifted than brought down. Maybe it’s time to declare independence once again.
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In other news…
–> For another take on this same topic, see River Page’s recent Free Press essay, “The Online Right is Building a Monster,” which does a good job of detailing the unsavory dynamics that can arise on massive internet platforms. (His critiques of both the online right and online left hit home in this one.) The solution to the woes Page documents? Stop using these services!
–> In the audio world, on Episode 341 of my podcast, released earlier this morning, I extract a lesson about the importance (and difficulty) of fighting overload in our digital world.
–> Meanwhile, as long as we’re discussing meaningful online spaces, I’ll point your attention over to The Growth Equation, where my friends Steve and Brad have posted another one of their (rightfully) famed manifestos: “How to Save Youth Sports.” [ read | subscribe ]
I can really relate to this. I used to be a huge fan of IMDB’s message boards, which were (mainly) a wonderful place to meet like-minded movie fans and a lot of friendships and relationships were built there. And there were thousands of different boards! Each film, tv show, actor and crew member had their own board, as well as there being 100s of themed boards. But that all disappeared eventually, I think due to Facebook and platforms like it when they tried to take all the conversations on to them. But due to the vast amount of boards, it couldn’t be recreated in the same way. It’s such a shame. Even though, by the time they disappeared I wasn’t really using them as much, I still miss them. The same types of conversations just can’t be had on these mega social platforms.
This week’s episode sounds interesting. Unfortunately, the file (both on Apple Podcasts and Spotify) contains the audio from last week’s show. Hoping there is a fix soon.
Around 2010, I spent a lot of time on a site called CubsBrewers.com, which was a place very similar to TalkNats. Fans of the two teams would gather to discuss the Cubs and Brewers and whatever other topics might come up. It was a small, tightly-knit group of people, and I loved it. I’ve since met a few of them in person. The site doesn’t operate anymore, but I miss that internet experience.
Thanks, Cal! Great post.
I can definitely relate to this. In my opinion, “old school” message boards and forums are making a comeback.
Platforms like Facebook Groups and Reddit offer a terrible user experience. Between constant ads, comment threads that rarely load properly (requiring multiple refreshes), and no clear post or comment order due to opaque algorithms, it’s frustrating. Facebook’s lack of anonymity – why should I be forced to post under my real name – is another issue.
I’m part of a Juventus football forum where people from around the world engage. There’s no doom scrolling, no endless feed, and no manipulative design patterns – just real, unfiltered discussion. It’s so refreshing to actually form real human connections and have nuanced conversations.
Juventus? That’s doom scrolling in itself! 😀
AC Milan forever 🙂
(I agree with you, forums are much better)
Hey Cal,
I’m a professional novelist and I’ve found a lot of your work really helpful for my craft. But one of the things I picked up over Covid was chess – online. Lately I’ve been using chess as a kind of cross-training for my focus, particular re: playing longer games (over an hour) and particularly playing offline, over the board. This video from Grandmaster Jesse Kraai does a great job of reviewing DEEP WORK in the context of chess (and beyond).
Might be worth an investigation 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XArnAVy36xw
My hobby is storm chasing. We have an online forum called Stormtrack that began as a print magazine literally 50 years ago. In addition to discussion of various topics related to severe weather, storm chasing, forecasting, radar technology, public watches/warnings, etc., there is a ton of valuable content around specific severe weather events – forecasts, field reports from chasers, etc.
Unfortunately, over the years most chasers have moved to social media, and our Stormtrack community is now quite small. I could never understand the appeal of social media for this particular type of content, because it is not curated like Stormtrack is; good luck finding content about a specific historical event in one easy-to-navigate place. Why would someone really interested in storm chasing rely on an algorithmically generated feed, with weather-related posts randomly interspersed with completely unrelated content?
Those of us on Stormtrack lament this, and wish we could find a way to make Stormtrack the “one-stop shop” for all storm chasers. There have been numerous discussion threads on Stormtrack about the ills of social media, and how it has also resulted in the demise of individual storm chaser websites, which used to be rich with long-form storm chase reports.
I keep telling my fellow forum members that the tide is hopefully turning, and have shared a link to this article to help support my point.