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Isn't a place like this (or reddit or any of the many special-interest forums out there) an equivalent replacement for the BBS era? Are the available platforms
by Splines 16y ago
Isn't a place like this (or reddit or any of the many special-interest forums out there) an equivalent replacement for the BBS era? Are the available platforms just not productive for "long form" writing?
- tptacek 16y agoI like places like this, but Reddit isn't the answer; it needs to be populated by and welcoming to "tween-age" kids while not being entirely restricted to them. It's a tough mix to get right.
- euroclydon 16y agoTrajectory - I feel that's the only hope for what you desire for your kids -- that you put them on a trajectory to become the kinds of adults who will write essay quality posts on forums one day. Try to visualize an online forum with fifteen year olds writing well thought out posts to each other. Try to visualize those kids. I can't. Not enough of them exist. It seems the closest you could get would be a Doogie-Howser-esque kid conversing with adults, or the opposite, one who's mastered short, slang, text-message type communications with his peers.
- tptacek 16y agoYeah I think you missed the sentence in my original comment about how I found the environment we're talking to on dial-up BBS's --- if you could get that back when you had to tie up the phone line for your family to type a comment, it has to be possible today. ;)
- euroclydon 16y agoThese dial-up BBS's were populated by tween-aged kids? If so, I'll change my tune and become encouraged. I wasn't engaged in anything similar at that age.
- chc 16y agoI was involved in a few of AOL's teen (which is what we called 13-year-olds back then) message boards in the mid-'90s, and the level of discourse on some of those was excellent. The Teen Religion & Faith board remains to this day my mental model of an ideal online community. The conversation was great and the community was adept at either reforming or spitting out bad users (and that was despite the fact that we tried as hard as we could to keep the forum under the radar of the AOL moderators).
- tptacek 16y agoYep. Ostensibly, the topics we were there to talk about were things like "how to get free phone calls from pay phones with Radio Shack DTMF pads" or "is the sequel to Monkey Island better than the original" or "what ANSI group had the best pack this quarter" or "should we tell everyone that In Utero is the worst album ever so it doesn't become popular and get ruined by jocks" but, just like on HN, conversations ranged wildly and hit politics, religion, and pop culture. You can imagine the age range of people participating in conversations like this.
- michaelchisari 16y agoI was heavily involved in the Chicagoland BBS scene in the 90's (disallusioned society, damage inc, whammy bar), and my recollection was that the age group was much more teenager (and even early twenties) than pre-teens. I was 15-17 when I was most involved, and I remember a lot of us being really weirded out when we found out the admin of disallusioned society was only 13.
- tptacek 16y agoI was an op on Whammy Bar and NBFC (Mike works with me, Ken is an old friend of mine). You're right, it's teenaged. I'd like something that would scale down to 10+, but 13+ is just peachy.
- michaelchisari 16y agoWhammy Bar was one of my fav's. Small world. :)
- andresmh 16y agoThe discussion forums of the Scratch online community (http://scratch.mit.edu/forums http://scratch.mit.edu/forums) have turned, unintentionally, into some kind of a tween Reddit. Example: http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewforum.php?id=46 http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewforum.php?id=46 We're still trying to figure out how to balance between this interest to engage in interesting discussions while still trying to maintain a focus on the core of community which is learning programming. We've spun off some other discussion forums in the past such as those involving role-playing games (http://scratch.mit.edu/tbgforums/viewforum.php?id=49 http://scratch.mit.edu/tbgforums/viewforum.php?id=49)