During the early days of the internet, there was this bit of excitement about making the world a smaller place by offering a new channel for communication. Looking back, it feels a little weird how excited a lot of folks got over message boards, electronic pen pal services and all these little messaging efforts all geared towards driving conversations. And these weren't even real-time chat solutions since there was this whole assumption that it would be rather rare for everyone to be online at the same time and so we relied on asynchronous messaging methods.
In my over 20 years of being online it feels like the efforts to interact with like-minded strangers seems to happen with less frequency and it seems even miraculous to engage in regular conversations with people you actually know. I concede that it's not the "fault" of any of the platforms out there, assuming that this is even a prevalent problem that people are dealing with. This boils down to me and my limited interactions with the world as being the more significant driver here or something like that.
From time to time I still feel like it would be nice to talk to more people or find people with similar interests but for some reason current platforms don't seem to meet that requirement well. I definitely don't like adding strangers on Facebook given the wealth of information that's available on my profile. Twitter has a bit more potential but you don't always get a lot of actual conversations since people can follow so many accounts and drown in the deluge of notifications. Google+ tried to address this to some degree but that clearly bombed and now it's on it's way to the graveyard.
People don't really talk anymore. And maybe even if I feel like it would be fun to talk or even just get into more discussions in the comments sections of my blog posts (which don't happen anymore), it's hard to say if I'll ever actually follow through and just talk.
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