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The sense of community was very real with BBS's. Real friendships developed with people you would likely never meet. SYSOPs cared about the people who dialled i
by anexprogrammer 10y ago
The sense of community was very real with BBS's. Real friendships developed with people you would likely never meet. SYSOPs cared about the people who dialled in to their little hobby project. Many organised meet-ups and BBQs. Memories for some of the phone bills are less warm though!
It all disappeared incredibly fast in the mid 90s as ISPs and the net grew.
Social is, ironically, far less personal with none of that sense of community.
- ghaff 10y ago>Social is, ironically, far less personal with none of that sense of community. I think that's overstating things. I can certainly think of a fair number of exceptions in my case. One thing that could be different in the BBS world, however, was that there often were organized meetups and BBQs because the BBS users tended to be clustered locally because of phone costs.
- anexprogrammer 10y agoWhere I've encountered community since it's been for the activity (eg regional scuba forum - natural to organise meets, etc). I've never encountered any arising from the medium since. OK I'm from a smaller country (UK), many BBS's were national, but still organised BBQs. The differentiation was usually for the platform rather than geography.