3 ms·

I used to visit a BBS semi-regularly during middle school, I had always enjoyed the simplicity of the basic text interface. Not that there was much going on, th

by glazer 10y ago

I used to visit a BBS semi-regularly during middle school, I had always enjoyed the simplicity of the basic text interface. Not that there was much going on, this was around 2008, so everything was long-dead by then. Reddit (and HN) has its voting system and 4chan has the bump system, but there's something about newsgroups with the long-lived threads with email-length replies that really appeals to me. Will there ever be something as popular and "open" as newsgroups, where each user judges a post on its own merits instead of by what the rest of the community thinks? Or am I merely pining for a past that never really existed?

optionalparens 10y ago
Newsgroups were a bit different I always thought than BBSs, but were still much closer in feel to various message bases. The problem even from pretty early on was spam and moderation. When you did have any ad-hoc or defacto moderation, it was usually divisive and heavy handed in a way that didn't have the same vibe as a BBS. On a BBS, a sysop would disconnect you mid session if you were being an idiot. You'd be warned, banned for some amount of time or forever. On newsgroups, it just got much more out of control with bad actors because the scale was so much larger and the authority was so much less in terms of credibility, fear, and activity. In defense of Reddit and HN, it's just hard to scale things up with more people and deal with the related concerns of post visibility, spam, moderation, and more. I know you're not saying this, but sometimes people point that 4chan is more like BBS messages, but it's not true because most BBSs were heavily moderated, complete with co-sysop users who would log on just to do this or moderator users with escalated privileges. If anything, BBSs were the most moderated of all, it's just that some people didn't mind if you talked about certain things or used certain language because it's their BBS and they just did what they wanted. Regarding email-length replies, I obviously love them. I generally don't agree with short = powerful in most cases except in code sometimes. Of course short replies can be focused and have a lot of value and I certainly appreciate the people that do that well. Unfortunately, short for many people means <drop 1 sentence random mental garbage> thought and leave or <me too thought>. Finally, regarding text, I couldn't agree more. I sometimes wish all websites just gave me a command line as a second interface. I know I can use curl and APIs for a lot of similar stuff, but yeah, no, that is not the same as hitting "f" for files or even just simpler unix commands. Lobste.rs kind of did this as a joke if you want to check it out, but it's not quite right IMO but good for fun.
- VLM 10y ago
  "On a BBS, a sysop would disconnect you mid session if you were being an idiot. You'd be warned, banned for some amount of time or forever." Yes, a funny anecdote, obviously there was no central registry of names so sometimes there would be multiple BBS of the same cool name in the same LATA, so when I was about 12, operating on a tip from a schoolmate at 1200 baud I log into one of the several pirates cove bbs, or whatever the name was, and try to send the sysop a mail asking for private access to the files because I know XYZ from school and sysops cousin is XYZ (XYZ and I are still IT-type people 30 years later) and the sysop breaks into the session (which they could do in those days) and reads me the riot act about how he has no warez and he works real hard and spends a lot of money to make a BBS and what would decades later boil down to darn kids get off my lawn type lecture and never set foot here again and I'm deleting your brand new account and at 1200 baud it took awhile. And being a little kid I'm like "ok sorry about that" because what else am I supposed to say to mr angry wall of text? Then I go to school the next day and talk to my friend and "you idiot, call the pirates cove in suburb ABC not the one in suburb XYZ" or whatever. So that's what passed for a good time in the 80s. Sysops would sit there and spy on you, while you tried to work the social game to get access to the good stuff. Several of the boards I was on with access to the special stuff were basically BBS embedded secretly inside a normal looking BBS so that made it fun. One of the special boards as a requirement to make it look good, required us to participate in the political debate forum if we wanted to keep access. Oh that board, thats just teens trying to debate federal tax policy. When actually it was full of software trading, hiding under dumb debates. On the modern internet of course instead of trading software we just skip right to the dumb debates, LOL. Another "only 12 year old boy in the 80s could believe it" is back then we were pretty paranoid with people getting busted left and right and stories on TV so before XYZ gives me his tip he asks me between classes if I'm a fed and I told him no and I asked him if he was a fed and he said no, and that was it, we believed each other as if that proved anything (and neither of us were a fed, but I've known this kid since we went to kindergarten together and we're asking each other if we're a fed... well its just what you did in those paranoid days). I do not think modern stuff like GPG key signatures are quite as paranoid on a personal level as we used to be back in the old days.
  - 10y ago
hluska 10y ago
I got rather obsessed with BBS in the early-mid 1990s. That quickly turned into an obsession with Usenet. Looking back, those were amazing times. By day, I was an awkward teenager who was still battling a pesky speech impediment. But, by night, I was part of communities where I was judged by the quality of my writing! All that said, while I see what you're saying, BBS and Usenet both had their problems. With Usenet, the biggest problem was discoverability. There were amazing, inspiring threads, but it took work to find them. When you would find an amazing thread, you had to parse through (often hundreds) of meaningless replies to find the few gems. Then, there was the sheer hostility of some of the communities. While much of that was reserved for newbies who violated the oft incomprehensible etiquette, some of it was just insane. For example, massive flame wars would erupt over the slightest provocation. This sounds silly in retrospect, but there was a point where typing 'Reconstruction of the Fables' in rec.music.rem would provoke serious hate. With BBS, particularly when they were popular enough to be busy, the biggest issue was that people are really fucked up when they think they're anonymous.

by glazer 10y ago

optionalparens 10y ago

Newsgroups were a bit different I always thought than BBSs, but were still much closer in feel to various message bases. The problem even from pretty early on was spam and moderation. When you did have any ad-hoc or defacto moderation, it was usually divisive and heavy handed in a way that didn't have the same vibe as a BBS. On a BBS, a sysop would disconnect you mid session if you were being an idiot. You'd be warned, banned for some amount of time or forever. On newsgroups, it just got much more out of control with bad actors because the scale was so much larger and the authority was so much less in terms of credibility, fear, and activity. In defense of Reddit and HN, it's just hard to scale things up with more people and deal with the related concerns of post visibility, spam, moderation, and more. I know you're not saying this, but sometimes people point that 4chan is more like BBS messages, but it's not true because most BBSs were heavily moderated, complete with co-sysop users who would log on just to do this or moderator users with escalated privileges. If anything, BBSs were the most moderated of all, it's just that some people didn't mind if you talked about certain things or used certain language because it's their BBS and they just did what they wanted. Regarding email-length replies, I obviously love them. I generally don't agree with short = powerful in most cases except in code sometimes. Of course short replies can be focused and have a lot of value and I certainly appreciate the people that do that well. Unfortunately, short for many people means <drop 1 sentence random mental garbage> thought and leave or <me too thought>. Finally, regarding text, I couldn't agree more. I sometimes wish all websites just gave me a command line as a second interface. I know I can use curl and APIs for a lot of similar stuff, but yeah, no, that is not the same as hitting "f" for files or even just simpler unix commands. Lobste.rs kind of did this as a joke if you want to check it out, but it's not quite right IMO but good for fun.

VLM 10y ago
"On a BBS, a sysop would disconnect you mid session if you were being an idiot. You'd be warned, banned for some amount of time or forever." Yes, a funny anecdote, obviously there was no central registry of names so sometimes there would be multiple BBS of the same cool name in the same LATA, so when I was about 12, operating on a tip from a schoolmate at 1200 baud I log into one of the several pirates cove bbs, or whatever the name was, and try to send the sysop a mail asking for private access to the files because I know XYZ from school and sysops cousin is XYZ (XYZ and I are still IT-type people 30 years later) and the sysop breaks into the session (which they could do in those days) and reads me the riot act about how he has no warez and he works real hard and spends a lot of money to make a BBS and what would decades later boil down to darn kids get off my lawn type lecture and never set foot here again and I'm deleting your brand new account and at 1200 baud it took awhile. And being a little kid I'm like "ok sorry about that" because what else am I supposed to say to mr angry wall of text? Then I go to school the next day and talk to my friend and "you idiot, call the pirates cove in suburb ABC not the one in suburb XYZ" or whatever. So that's what passed for a good time in the 80s. Sysops would sit there and spy on you, while you tried to work the social game to get access to the good stuff. Several of the boards I was on with access to the special stuff were basically BBS embedded secretly inside a normal looking BBS so that made it fun. One of the special boards as a requirement to make it look good, required us to participate in the political debate forum if we wanted to keep access. Oh that board, thats just teens trying to debate federal tax policy. When actually it was full of software trading, hiding under dumb debates. On the modern internet of course instead of trading software we just skip right to the dumb debates, LOL. Another "only 12 year old boy in the 80s could believe it" is back then we were pretty paranoid with people getting busted left and right and stories on TV so before XYZ gives me his tip he asks me between classes if I'm a fed and I told him no and I asked him if he was a fed and he said no, and that was it, we believed each other as if that proved anything (and neither of us were a fed, but I've known this kid since we went to kindergarten together and we're asking each other if we're a fed... well its just what you did in those paranoid days). I do not think modern stuff like GPG key signatures are quite as paranoid on a personal level as we used to be back in the old days.
- 10y ago

hluska 10y ago

I got rather obsessed with BBS in the early-mid 1990s. That quickly turned into an obsession with Usenet. Looking back, those were amazing times. By day, I was an awkward teenager who was still battling a pesky speech impediment. But, by night, I was part of communities where I was judged by the quality of my writing! All that said, while I see what you're saying, BBS and Usenet both had their problems. With Usenet, the biggest problem was discoverability. There were amazing, inspiring threads, but it took work to find them. When you would find an amazing thread, you had to parse through (often hundreds) of meaningless replies to find the few gems. Then, there was the sheer hostility of some of the communities. While much of that was reserved for newbies who violated the oft incomprehensible etiquette, some of it was just insane. For example, massive flame wars would erupt over the slightest provocation. This sounds silly in retrospect, but there was a point where typing 'Reconstruction of the Fables' in rec.music.rem would provoke serious hate. With BBS, particularly when they were popular enough to be busy, the biggest issue was that people are really fucked up when they think they're anonymous.