I see this as a manifestation of the loss of teaching effective communication skills. This takes a moment to explain, so please slow down and consider this: before the cultural revolutions of the 1960's, general education included more emphasis on communications conflicts and resolutions of them. For example, every school had a debate team, and the various forms and rules of debate were common knowledge. Yes, this is true. Debate and watching people skilled at argumentative discussion used to be a popular form of entertainment. Then, during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the best or the "stars of debate" all sided with the youth culture and not the establishment. That then triggered the removal of debate from educations, from entertainment, and from public life. Now, decades later we have the situation that groups of adults cannot form without conflicts and arguments that drive the community creation aspects away. We have created a culture that cannot communicate, because we have stopped teaching basic oral conflict negotiation of any form.
I think people also forget (or don’t even know) that before mobile phones you’d often walk over to someone’s house just to knock on the door to find out if they were in or see what they were doing.
So allied to the lack of dinner parties, there’s fewer reasons to even go to someone’s house any more, you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today.
> I think people also forget (or don’t even know) that before mobile phones you’d often walk over to someone’s house just to knock on the door to find out if they were in or see what they were doing.
If you’re the person who is out, then you don’t have a landline to call. Or then have to make the decision while out to go and find a payphone and have change and put in money to make a call to see if the person is in, while the clock is frantically ticking on the call.
Also if you weren’t the person who paid the phone bill, it was often presented to you as a more parsimonious solution to use your feet rather than the telephone.
Another example is if you made a plan to meet somewhere at a specific time and the person didn’t turn up. You would have no clue about where they were or what happened even if you found a payphone and called their house and it rang out. You were still s.o.l. for the rest of the day so dealt with it.
> If you’re the person who is out, then you don’t have a landline to call. Or then have to make the decision while out to go and find a payphone and have correct change and put in money to make a call to see if the person is in, while the clock is frantically ticking on the call.
You seem to be completely changing the situation. In this comment, you're talking about wanting to visit someone at home, whereas in your original comment, you're talking about not wanting to visit someone at home: "there’s fewer reasons to even go to someone’s house any more, you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today."
In other words, the mobile phone is a replacement for a home visit rather than a means for a home visit.
It's true that mobile phones can make it easier than landlines to find out if someone is home, but if that's how people were using mobile phones, then you would expect more home visits.
> Also if you weren’t the person who paid the phone bill, it was often presented to you as a more parsimonious solution to use your feet rather than the telephone.
I don't understand this point. Long-distance calls were frequently billed per call, but of course walking is not a replacement for those. Local calls were typically unlimited for a fixed monthly rate.
You seem to be completely autistic and determined to raise disputes where none exist.
Maybe in your suburban sprawl where multiple telephones and multiple cars per household are essential necessities because it’s a 90 minute walk to a shop or a friend’s then one would have unlimited local calls but in huge parts of the rest of the world unlimited calling simply wasn’t a thing.
I can’t imagine you get invited to many dinner parties.
> I can’t imagine you get invited to many dinner parties.
Please read and respect the HN guidelines: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> You’ve broken and disrespected the HN guidelines towards several people throughout this thread
How so? At worst, I said "Um".
Regardless of what you believe I've done, do you not acknowledge that you ought to follow the guidelines, and that personal insults are unacceptable, blatantly cross the line? The guidelines don't say that you get to violate them if someone else does. It may be hypocritical of me—though I disagree with that here—but in any case it's not nonsensical.
> Today it is more widespread, but it used to be highly unusual.
I can't even speak about today, because I haven't had a landline in years. But at least in the US, unlimited local calls were definitely not unusual in the pre-smartphone era.
So, in other words you're writing off the vast majority of the world and forgetting that we're not by any means all in the US here and by no means are all of us talking only about the US.
> I can't even speak about today, because I haven't had a landline in years. But at least in the US, unlimited local calls were definitely not unusual in the pre-smartphone era.
The context I gave was clear: It followed right after pointing out the US is unusual in this respect - the statement referred to that.
It's not clear to me whether you are intentionally obtuse or if you're genuinely struggling to pick up the context here, but either way you are being incredibly obtuse throughout this conversation. I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but consider that I'm not the only one here who have picked up on this.
> by no means are all of us talking only about the US.
> It's not clear to me whether you are intentionally obtuse or if you're genuinely struggling to pick up the context here
The submitted HN article is about the US:
"We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America."
The charts in the submitted article are also about Americans exclusively.
So yes, we are in fact talking only about the US, and I am not obtuse or missing the context. I've been aware of the context the entire time.
What did you think we were talking about?
I'm not "writing off the vast majority of the world" or "forgetting" anything. The submitted article just happens to be about the US, not the rest of the world, and the patterns of socializing in other countries may be very different.
> So yes, we are in fact talking only about the US
I am not, and others in this thread have also not limited themselves to just the US, so no, we are not.
You're clearly being obtuse when you're failing to notice that and failing to pick that up from the fact that multiple people are pointing this out to you.
Someone suggested elsewhere in the thread that you might be autistic. As someone with autistic traits myself and a family member with autism, I tend to agree - this is the kind of literal treatment and rigidity that gets covered in an autism assessment. There's no judgement in that, but you might benefit from reflecting on it as it might help you relate better to people around you.
> You're clearly being obtuse when you're failing to notice that and failing to pick that up from the fact that multiple people are pointing this out to you.
I haven't failed to notice. The problem is that people are going off on tangents and talking about other countries in replies to me when I was always intending to talk about the submitted HN article and the US. They mention other countries in replies to me as if it contradicts points that I was making, but it doesn't, because I was never talking about a non-US context.
There was not a preeexisting discussion of other countries. You and others started a discussion of other countries in replies to my preexisting comments about the US, and I was never intending to talk about that, nor do I have much insight into non-US socializing, which is why I've been trying to clarify that my comments are about the US only.
> Someone suggested elsewhere in the thread that you might be autistic.
I'm not and don't appreciate the remote diagnosis from someone who has never met me and knows almost nothing about me.
Stop making personal comments about me. If you want to argue about socializing in the US or in other countries, fine, although I'm already tired of the argument. In any case, though, psychoanalyzing other commenters is unwelcome in HN comments and indeed discouraged by the guidelines. It's out of place and offensive.
I went thru the thread and I agree with you. Though I am from very different background your examples feel very familiar to me. Meeting some one after phone call/ text create different level of expectation where both parties are more intentional in meeting. Where as going unannounced create far less expectations on either side. Not meet at all as someone is not home, meet for short time as they are heading out soon, have long afternoon gossiping, chatting as it turns out they also had nothing to do in particular that afternoon.
We did, and yet people did still often just come over unannounced, to the point that it that the unannounced visit - which was common enough to be believable, but not always welcome - was a frequent plot point in various media.
It was common during my childhood for us to always have something in the cupboard - like a cake or biscuits or chocolate - that we could offer in case someone just dropped by.
It's been decades since I've cared about having anything ready for a possible surprise visitor, as while before I'd feel rude if I didn't have anything, now I'd feel they were rude for not checking in advance as now they rarely have an excuse for not doing so.
> We did, and yet people did still often just come over unannounced, to the point that it that the unannounced visit - which was common enough to be believable, but not always welcome
The question is, what exactly is the relevance of mobile vs. non-mobile phones?
I think it really depends on the walking distance. If someone is your neighbor, there's not a lot of effort saved from calling or texting first.
Going back to the OP, these are two very different things: "you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today."
As far as one-to-one communication is concerned, a landland call is just as good as a mobile call or a text. But social media addiction is an entirely different matter. That's not even about announced vs. unannounced visits but rather about living in the real world vs. living in a virtual world.
I explained the relevance of mobile phones to you.
People are not always at home.
Without a mobile phone you had an excuse.
Now you don't really.
It doesn't even matter whether or not you were actually home - there was less of a social expectation to always call because it was a recognised excuse that you "were in the neighborhood" and implicitly had no way to check without dropping by.
I already responded to this point at length here <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49892375">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49892375 but in brief: on this interpretation, mobile phones should actually result in more successful drop-bys, because you can call or text when you're "in the neighborhood". Thus, mobile phones are not an excuse to avoid visits.
You're still missing the point entirely: A lot of those visits are not wanted and weren't wanted to the point that unwanted visits were a trope in media.
Before they would happen because we had no ways to stop them until someone was at the door with a plausible excuse.
> You're still missing the point entirely: A lot of those visits are not wanted
> Before they would happen because we had no ways to stop them
Yes, in a sense, I'm missing that point, because I began with the assumption that more socializing was good, and the dramatic reduction of socializing is to be mourned. If your point is "good riddance to dinner parties", I personally wouldn't agree with that.
Of course individual people differ in their preferences for socialization. However, I don't think it's justified to project personal anti-social feelings onto the majority. You might be annoyed by unexpected visitors, but to others it may be a delightful surprise. When you refer to "A lot of those visits", that's your own personal view and doesn't necessarily represent the views of others.
No, my point was not "good riddance to dinner parties". I was explaining to you why the advent of the mobile phone has at least a role in the reduction of socialising by making it easier for people to shut down visits.
It doesn't require people to not want to socialise for it to have that effect. It merely requires a proportion of visits to be unwanted or inconvenient then and there.
> You might be annoyed by unexpected visitors, but to others it may be a delightful surprise.
It might be to some. Even to me sometimes. But it was enough of a nuisance that the unwanted visit - as I've pointed out already - became a significant a trope in fiction, and a part of our cultural fabric. The "we were in the neighbourhood" was e.g. a regular vehicle for visits in TV series that has now largely disappeared except when it is used to highlight someone intentionally sidestepping social norms to impose an unwanted visit.
You dismissed fiction earlier, for no good reason: A widespread trope doesn't arise in a vacuum. It worked as a trope in fiction because it was a real and significant thing.
You've had this explained to you at length now. I struggle to see why you find it hard to understand, so I'm leaning towards thinking you're being intentionally obtuse about it at this point.
> I was explaining to you why the advent of the mobile phone has at least a role in the reduction of socialising by making it easier for people to shut down visits.
I agree that mobile phones have a role in the reduction of socializing.
However, I don't agree with the reason you've given, and I have at least two objections:
1. Mobile phones don't actually shut down unplanned socializing. On the contrary, they make it easier to have unplanned socializing, because they allow you to contact another person no matter when or where either of you happen to be.
2. There's no empirical evidence that a significant number of unexpected visits in the past were unwanted. Surely some were, but not nearly enough IMO to explain the dramatic reduction of in-person socializing.
My theory, in contrast, is that the ubiqiutious internet access of smartphones has addicted people to the practically limitless forms of entertainment and attention-grabbing online, and this internet browsing has usurped in-personal socializing as a pastime. This change has nothing to do with how easy or hard it is to arrange visits. People have stopped dropping by because they don't want to drop by, not because they can't conveniently drop by.
> You dismissed fiction earlier, for no good reason: A widespread trope doesn't arise in a vacuum.
I dismissed fiction because it deliberately exaggerates for effect, e.g., comedic effect. There may be a grain of truth to it, but fiction by definition is not an accurate reflection of reality.
> I struggle to see why you find it hard to understand,
I'm not struggling to understand. I simply disagree with your analysis.
> so I'm leaning towards thinking you're being intentionally obtuse about it at this point.
You can lean whatever way you want, but you're wrong, and you're also wrong about me "forgetting" the rest of the world when the submitted article is explicitly about the United States: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894515">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894515
> 1. Mobile phones don't actually shut down unplanned socializing. On the contrary, they make it easier to have unplanned socializing, because they allow you to contact another person no matter when or where either of you happen to be.
If you contact someone ahead of time, it is no longer unplanned. This is meaningless twaddle.
> I dismissed fiction because it deliberately exaggerates for effect, e.g., comedic effect. There may be a grain of truth to it, but fiction by definition is not an accurate reflection of reality.
So you concede that there is a grain of truth to it. That was point. Thanks for conceding
> You can lean whatever way you want, but you're wrong, and you're also wrong about me "forgetting" the rest of the world when the submitted article is explicitly about the United States: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894515">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894515
The article does not dictate what we discuss, and as you can see from the thread a lot of us are not confining ourselves to discussing the US, including the person you replied to that kicked this off.
So, yes, you are at the very least being obtuse, whether or not it is intentional.
> If you contact someone ahead of time, it is no longer unplanned. This is meaningless twaddle.
This reponse is hypocritical and contradicts your previous comments, talking about the "we were in the neighbourhood" situation, which you repeatedly emphasized was a TV trope.
You call my comment "meaningless" but I would call yours meaingless because you seemingly make it impossible by defintition to have an unplanned meeting if there's a phone involved. If I'm in my car parked in front of your house and call to ask "are you home?" does that magically become a planned rather than unplanned visit?
True, but back in the day one had to pay for every call, sometimes at per-minute rates: always so for long distance, and in some areas even for local calls. Quite a contrast to today's unlimited-minutes cellular plans (which likely get used little enough that the providers have no trouble offering them).
A key factor in the development of dialup BBS systems in the US was that local calls were usually at least flat-rate, with unlimited service available here and there.
Bringing it back to the topic at hand, back then I recall a number of social events revolving around local BBSes in Champaign-Urbana, and Fidonet's Net 115 in the Chicago area. All that sort of thing vaporized pretty quickly once the internet opened up.
> back in the day one had to pay for every call, sometimes at per-minute rates: always so for long distance, and in some areas even for local calls.
Where and when did you pay per-minute for local calls? Everywhere I lived and traveled within the US back in the day, so to speak, local calls were always unlimited, even in rural areas.
In the Chicago area you had options ranging from fully-metered to unlimited throughout the metro area. In the 1990s, as more people got online, the unlimited plans went away, and the best you got was that calls within eight miles were flat-rate but pay-per-call.
bsenftner · · focus · HN ↗
gizajob · · focus · HN ↗
So allied to the lack of dinner parties, there’s fewer reasons to even go to someone’s house any more, you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today.
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
Um, we had phones before mobile phones.
gizajob · · focus · HN ↗
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
Where I lived, suburban United States, landlines were ubiquitous, and we used them all the time.
gizajob · · focus · HN ↗
If you’re the person who is out, then you don’t have a landline to call. Or then have to make the decision while out to go and find a payphone and have change and put in money to make a call to see if the person is in, while the clock is frantically ticking on the call.
Also if you weren’t the person who paid the phone bill, it was often presented to you as a more parsimonious solution to use your feet rather than the telephone.
Another example is if you made a plan to meet somewhere at a specific time and the person didn’t turn up. You would have no clue about where they were or what happened even if you found a payphone and called their house and it rang out. You were still s.o.l. for the rest of the day so dealt with it.
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
You seem to be completely changing the situation. In this comment, you're talking about wanting to visit someone at home, whereas in your original comment, you're talking about not wanting to visit someone at home: "there’s fewer reasons to even go to someone’s house any more, you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today."
In other words, the mobile phone is a replacement for a home visit rather than a means for a home visit.
It's true that mobile phones can make it easier than landlines to find out if someone is home, but if that's how people were using mobile phones, then you would expect more home visits.
> Also if you weren’t the person who paid the phone bill, it was often presented to you as a more parsimonious solution to use your feet rather than the telephone.
I don't understand this point. Long-distance calls were frequently billed per call, but of course walking is not a replacement for those. Local calls were typically unlimited for a fixed monthly rate.
gizajob · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe in your suburban sprawl where multiple telephones and multiple cars per household are essential necessities because it’s a 90 minute walk to a shop or a friend’s then one would have unlimited local calls but in huge parts of the rest of the world unlimited calling simply wasn’t a thing.
I can’t imagine you get invited to many dinner parties.
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
> I can’t imagine you get invited to many dinner parties.
Please read and respect the HN guidelines: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
gizajob · · focus · HN ↗
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
How so? At worst, I said "Um".
Regardless of what you believe I've done, do you not acknowledge that you ought to follow the guidelines, and that personal insults are unacceptable, blatantly cross the line? The guidelines don't say that you get to violate them if someone else does. It may be hypocritical of me—though I disagree with that here—but in any case it's not nonsensical.
gravatron · · focus · HN ↗
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
Mostly in the US. Today it is more widespread, but it used to be highly unusual.
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
Yes, I'm referring to the US.
> Today it is more widespread, but it used to be highly unusual.
I can't even speak about today, because I haven't had a landline in years. But at least in the US, unlimited local calls were definitely not unusual in the pre-smartphone era.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
So, in other words you're writing off the vast majority of the world and forgetting that we're not by any means all in the US here and by no means are all of us talking only about the US.
> I can't even speak about today, because I haven't had a landline in years. But at least in the US, unlimited local calls were definitely not unusual in the pre-smartphone era.
The context I gave was clear: It followed right after pointing out the US is unusual in this respect - the statement referred to that.
It's not clear to me whether you are intentionally obtuse or if you're genuinely struggling to pick up the context here, but either way you are being incredibly obtuse throughout this conversation. I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but consider that I'm not the only one here who have picked up on this.
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
> It's not clear to me whether you are intentionally obtuse or if you're genuinely struggling to pick up the context here
The submitted HN article is about the US:
"We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America."
The charts in the submitted article are also about Americans exclusively.
So yes, we are in fact talking only about the US, and I am not obtuse or missing the context. I've been aware of the context the entire time.
What did you think we were talking about?
I'm not "writing off the vast majority of the world" or "forgetting" anything. The submitted article just happens to be about the US, not the rest of the world, and the patterns of socializing in other countries may be very different.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
And a lot of the conversation is not.
> So yes, we are in fact talking only about the US
I am not, and others in this thread have also not limited themselves to just the US, so no, we are not.
You're clearly being obtuse when you're failing to notice that and failing to pick that up from the fact that multiple people are pointing this out to you.
Someone suggested elsewhere in the thread that you might be autistic. As someone with autistic traits myself and a family member with autism, I tend to agree - this is the kind of literal treatment and rigidity that gets covered in an autism assessment. There's no judgement in that, but you might benefit from reflecting on it as it might help you relate better to people around you.
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
I haven't failed to notice. The problem is that people are going off on tangents and talking about other countries in replies to me when I was always intending to talk about the submitted HN article and the US. They mention other countries in replies to me as if it contradicts points that I was making, but it doesn't, because I was never talking about a non-US context.
There was not a preeexisting discussion of other countries. You and others started a discussion of other countries in replies to my preexisting comments about the US, and I was never intending to talk about that, nor do I have much insight into non-US socializing, which is why I've been trying to clarify that my comments are about the US only.
> Someone suggested elsewhere in the thread that you might be autistic.
I'm not and don't appreciate the remote diagnosis from someone who has never met me and knows almost nothing about me.
Stop making personal comments about me. If you want to argue about socializing in the US or in other countries, fine, although I'm already tired of the argument. In any case, though, psychoanalyzing other commenters is unwelcome in HN comments and indeed discouraged by the guidelines. It's out of place and offensive.
geodel · · focus · HN ↗
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
It was common during my childhood for us to always have something in the cupboard - like a cake or biscuits or chocolate - that we could offer in case someone just dropped by.
It's been decades since I've cared about having anything ready for a possible surprise visitor, as while before I'd feel rude if I didn't have anything, now I'd feel they were rude for not checking in advance as now they rarely have an excuse for not doing so.
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
The question is, what exactly is the relevance of mobile vs. non-mobile phones?
I think it really depends on the walking distance. If someone is your neighbor, there's not a lot of effort saved from calling or texting first.
Going back to the OP, these are two very different things: "you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today."
As far as one-to-one communication is concerned, a landland call is just as good as a mobile call or a text. But social media addiction is an entirely different matter. That's not even about announced vs. unannounced visits but rather about living in the real world vs. living in a virtual world.
> was a frequent plot point in various media.
I'm not sure that citing fiction is useful.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
People are not always at home.
Without a mobile phone you had an excuse.
Now you don't really.
It doesn't even matter whether or not you were actually home - there was less of a social expectation to always call because it was a recognised excuse that you "were in the neighborhood" and implicitly had no way to check without dropping by.
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
Before they would happen because we had no ways to stop them until someone was at the door with a plausible excuse.
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
> Before they would happen because we had no ways to stop them
Yes, in a sense, I'm missing that point, because I began with the assumption that more socializing was good, and the dramatic reduction of socializing is to be mourned. If your point is "good riddance to dinner parties", I personally wouldn't agree with that.
Of course individual people differ in their preferences for socialization. However, I don't think it's justified to project personal anti-social feelings onto the majority. You might be annoyed by unexpected visitors, but to others it may be a delightful surprise. When you refer to "A lot of those visits", that's your own personal view and doesn't necessarily represent the views of others.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
It doesn't require people to not want to socialise for it to have that effect. It merely requires a proportion of visits to be unwanted or inconvenient then and there.
> You might be annoyed by unexpected visitors, but to others it may be a delightful surprise.
It might be to some. Even to me sometimes. But it was enough of a nuisance that the unwanted visit - as I've pointed out already - became a significant a trope in fiction, and a part of our cultural fabric. The "we were in the neighbourhood" was e.g. a regular vehicle for visits in TV series that has now largely disappeared except when it is used to highlight someone intentionally sidestepping social norms to impose an unwanted visit.
You dismissed fiction earlier, for no good reason: A widespread trope doesn't arise in a vacuum. It worked as a trope in fiction because it was a real and significant thing.
You've had this explained to you at length now. I struggle to see why you find it hard to understand, so I'm leaning towards thinking you're being intentionally obtuse about it at this point.
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
I agree that mobile phones have a role in the reduction of socializing.
However, I don't agree with the reason you've given, and I have at least two objections:
1. Mobile phones don't actually shut down unplanned socializing. On the contrary, they make it easier to have unplanned socializing, because they allow you to contact another person no matter when or where either of you happen to be.
2. There's no empirical evidence that a significant number of unexpected visits in the past were unwanted. Surely some were, but not nearly enough IMO to explain the dramatic reduction of in-person socializing.
My theory, in contrast, is that the ubiqiutious internet access of smartphones has addicted people to the practically limitless forms of entertainment and attention-grabbing online, and this internet browsing has usurped in-personal socializing as a pastime. This change has nothing to do with how easy or hard it is to arrange visits. People have stopped dropping by because they don't want to drop by, not because they can't conveniently drop by.
> You dismissed fiction earlier, for no good reason: A widespread trope doesn't arise in a vacuum.
I dismissed fiction because it deliberately exaggerates for effect, e.g., comedic effect. There may be a grain of truth to it, but fiction by definition is not an accurate reflection of reality.
> I struggle to see why you find it hard to understand,
I'm not struggling to understand. I simply disagree with your analysis.
> so I'm leaning towards thinking you're being intentionally obtuse about it at this point.
You can lean whatever way you want, but you're wrong, and you're also wrong about me "forgetting" the rest of the world when the submitted article is explicitly about the United States: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894515">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894515
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
If you contact someone ahead of time, it is no longer unplanned. This is meaningless twaddle.
> I dismissed fiction because it deliberately exaggerates for effect, e.g., comedic effect. There may be a grain of truth to it, but fiction by definition is not an accurate reflection of reality.
So you concede that there is a grain of truth to it. That was point. Thanks for conceding
> You can lean whatever way you want, but you're wrong, and you're also wrong about me "forgetting" the rest of the world when the submitted article is explicitly about the United States: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894515">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894515
The article does not dictate what we discuss, and as you can see from the thread a lot of us are not confining ourselves to discussing the US, including the person you replied to that kicked this off.
So, yes, you are at the very least being obtuse, whether or not it is intentional.
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
This reponse is hypocritical and contradicts your previous comments, talking about the "we were in the neighbourhood" situation, which you repeatedly emphasized was a TV trope.
You call my comment "meaningless" but I would call yours meaingless because you seemingly make it impossible by defintition to have an unplanned meeting if there's a phone involved. If I'm in my car parked in front of your house and call to ask "are you home?" does that magically become a planned rather than unplanned visit?
flyinghamster · · focus · HN ↗
True, but back in the day one had to pay for every call, sometimes at per-minute rates: always so for long distance, and in some areas even for local calls. Quite a contrast to today's unlimited-minutes cellular plans (which likely get used little enough that the providers have no trouble offering them).
A key factor in the development of dialup BBS systems in the US was that local calls were usually at least flat-rate, with unlimited service available here and there.
Bringing it back to the topic at hand, back then I recall a number of social events revolving around local BBSes in Champaign-Urbana, and Fidonet's Net 115 in the Chicago area. All that sort of thing vaporized pretty quickly once the internet opened up.
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
Where and when did you pay per-minute for local calls? Everywhere I lived and traveled within the US back in the day, so to speak, local calls were always unlimited, even in rural areas.
flyinghamster · · focus · HN ↗
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
Interesting. This may be due to the size of Chicago.
I didn't see such varied options, not even in Minneapolis.
jlokier · · focus · HN ↗
Almost everywhere outside the US, Canada and New Zealand.
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗