alt Hacker NewsYou have seriously made contacts on Reddit or HN that have led to meeting people IRL when you visit their regions or they visit yours? Even way back when IRL meetups between users of internet forums were common, Reddit was already famous for having a culture where that wasn't at all likely due to the design of the site.
As for HN, there is no DM feature and only a minority of users give any contact info in their profiles. In over a decade here, I have never seen one user passing contact info to another user in public.
Of course I have. I've flown and driven many thousands of miles to hang out with some of these folks. We've even planned and executed public events together. We help eachother out. When the distance is great and we want to borrow, lend, or trade some small stuff, we spend a few dollars and send it in the mail.
It'd be pretty great if we all lived closer, but we do not. We've all got our reasons to live wherever we individually live.
I've also made other, more-temporary friendships online in recent years. When they're nearby it's actually pretty easy, upon recognizing that things click well-enough, to go out for drinks with other friends, or sushi, or whatever. It isn't necessary to commit to keeping a friend forever in order to make these minor moves and put a face with their words and just hang out for a bit.
For HN in particular, there are ways to initiate out-of-band comms. It's not exactly rocket surgery to just drop an email address (a throwaway one? a real one? sure!) here in a comment, or leave a clue in a bio, or even to do both things to validate who's who and connect.
It works for me, and I'm somewhat private about what I share here. Meanwhile, some users here are very public about who they are and don't hide behind a pseudonym at all. It's OK. Both types fit.
There's nothing that would motivate me to lie about this stuff. I do not stand to gain or to lose anything whether you believe me or not. :)